Rebecca Solnit writes that hope is not grounded in certainty. Hope is founded in the spaciousness of uncertainty and the unknown. In our fast breaking world of news, we are lulled into believing that events, ideas, and even choice is instantaneous. Boom! Breaking news! Happening now! What is lost is the awareness of the seeds planted long ago waiting for germination. The seeds birth new seeds.  What we see explode into fruition today will continue to yield new “Boom! Breaking news! Happening now!” long after we are gone. What we do, think, feel, don’t do, don’t think, and don’t feel today had their origins in the past and will continue to create new origins in the future. THAT is why hope is hope. Insignificant efforts today may germinate into greatness later. We are not bound – we can plant new seeds.  The infinite power of uncertainty… we can embrace its certainty and hope. To embrace hope is the ultimate and purest form of defiance. We defy the certainty the world offers and move freely in the midst of uncertainty. There are no odds to beat when hope is embraced. There are only seeds we cannot see waiting to blossom.

A day of shoveling out of a spring Colorado snow. My heart sighed to see the daffodil leaves weighted beneath the snow. Last year’s sunflower looked like an aged ancient sun long past its prime. I did not plant them. Every year they appear. Even when spring coats the moving and awakening earth with snow they appear. Defiance.

Today is the eve of Easter’s resurrection for the Christian faith.  Today is the eve of more violence, suffering, and extinction all over the world.  I need to shovel one more time in the waning light of the day. So many seeds converging and diverse in their softness, beauty, strength, prickliness and even poison. And the whisper, from seeds I learned long ago, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?  Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!  Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7). In truth, we know not what the true eve of this moment, right now, holds in its womb. Unknowing. Unimaginable. Uncertainty. Improbable. Inconceivable. Paradoxical. The defiant free flowing movement of hope.