Hope

There have been very few moments in my life when words have failed me. This is not one of them.

I am desperately in need of words to express myself in such a fashion as to convey the incredible dawning -and loathing- of understanding about the world in which I live. The people who have come and gone from my life and those who have left indelible (sometimes unfortunate) impressions upon my soul.

Before I moved from Kansas City to New York, or maybe after I moved back to KC, I lived in a rental house on Rockhurst Road (located directly across from the men's dorm. A true tragedy.) where my closest friends at the time resided. There was my best friend, her husband, their two children, the husband's best friend in the basement and I in the 'attic' which really wasn't. We were our own commune. All of us lost. All of us thinking, in our extremely arrogant 20's, that our slightly skewed and somewhat backward searching for an alternative reality allowed us the true answers to life, God, spirituality, talent and love. Man, were we stupid. Some of us more than others. For some of them still adamantly believe in a world that was never ours. Those philosophies did not serve us well in the world we lived in and they do us even less justice in our not quite so tender years. Don't get me wrong...they were a hell of a lot of fun. But karma does catch up and not in the ways one thinks the tarot cards fall.

But there were moments. Most of them filled with music, art, poetry, drama, deep thoughts (yeah, there might have been a little enhancement or two back in them thar days), marathon games of Risk, more music....and thunderstorms. Oh you know how I love thunderstorms.

There was a spring...I don't remember a great deal of it. Not because of the partying, that didn't happen until I moved to Block Island, actually, but because several years passed in that home where time was marked by which show we were doing not by the calendar or school year. It was springtime, because it was thunderstorm season. One of the better ones, if I recall correctly. As I've remarked before, I do so miss the thunderstorms of Missouri. Not that we don't get them here in Minnesota, just that...well, so far we don't actually get them in Minnesota. I'm sure that'll change someday.

There was a period of a few weeks when late night thunderstorms gave us the most beautiful displays of lightning I've ever seen. I remember one particular night, being woken at around midnight or so by voices on the screened in porch under my room: soft, merry, warm. I wrapped myself in a well worn quilt and joined my three other adult roommates. We shared mugs of hot cocoa as we watched nature's fierce beauty, knowing that very few people were witnessing the splendor of God's hand. Almost a private showing, if you will. Each time a particularly well done fork of lightning would streak across the sky, the air would shake with the thunder, the downpour increasing with a steady, crackling rhythem and we could only 'ooo' or 'ahhhh' in soft, hushed tones for fear of waking the neighbors where the storm wouldn't.

I think of that time of quiet camaraderie and a mutual bonding through the appreciation of this world's natural beauty when the air fills with electricity and dark clouds crackle with the promise of Zeus' arsenal.

There was terrible news from Kansas City today. Someone I once knew and trusted committed a heinous crime. My day has been full of shock, pain, shame and unabashed melancholy. I have not communicated with this person or that particular circle of friends in many years, but the bonds were there and still carry across the decade. But as I begin to feel myself despair over the state of the world as we know it, the uncontrolled chaos of a society beginning to spin beyond enforceable limits, the approach of anarchy where the safety of my children are concerned, my mind goes back to that springtime of fleeting contentment and I refuse to lose hope. I refuse to close my eyes to the beauty of my lifetime, no matter how painful that beauty may be at times.

I pray for all the families and friends, strangers and officials whose lives have been destroyed by senseless acts of unchecked insanity. Most of all, I think that I pray today for the usual, regular, everyday people who learn that sometimes there is ugliness beyond comprehension and yet still manage to see so much beauty.