Wishin' and hopin'

Hope.  It's a weird word.  Hope. Hope. Hopehopehope.  Yep.  Still weird.

The world does not seem to be a particularly hopeful place.  I'm not sure it ever has been, but lately it strikes me to be even less so.  There's the shit Harper does.  There's the shit Redford does.  There's pandas and Stubenville and a general pervading conservatism reigning gross fucking ickiness all over us.  Everywhere, the ickiness. Wrongness everywhere. Fear... yep, everywhere.  And though social media can be a really wonderful thing, it is also a source of the constant sharing of the constant ickiness.  I'm not saying this is a bad thing.  We need to be informed.  We do.  But sometimes it feels like the rain is a downpour that never ends, and the downpour becomes a deluge, and our psyches are saturated and we can't find our umbrellas and even if we could their skinny little spines would just crumple under the weight of it.

All. That. Ick.  It's some heavy-assed shit, friends.  

So how, I've been wondering, do we find some kind of hopefulness to hold onto?

Because it seems to me that the more we feel bogged down by the ick, the less able we are (psychically speaking) to do anything about it.  The bad news upon the bad news upon the bad news... it has an impact.  And I'd wager that more often than not, it is this (and not apathy, though there is certainly plenty of that in the world as well) that makes us feel like we can't do anything to stop it.

I know there are places, little wondrous milli-seconds of loveliness, in my own life that can make me feel more hopeful.  Kidlet snuggles, love from good people and loving good people, finding ways (here and there) to talk back, to fight back, to rally.  But these are glimmers. They come and they go.

Is it possible to find a more enduring place of hopeful?  I'm not sure.

But I'm open to suggestions...'cause from where I'm sitting, hope still sounds like a pretty strange and distant word.