Hope; it’s a nebulous thing. Here one moment, gone the next. That is, if hope is a feeling - that fizz of the heart, dreaming of what could be.
Daring to believe in the dream.
The nose of a creature, sniffing the wind. The scent of change on the horizon.
We are cyclical creatures, letting hope be a cyclical thing. Lying in winter, waiting for spring. Always dreaming of a new dawn.
Yet what does that mean for us, as we shift through our cycles? If hope is a springtime feast, lived out through summer, shaken loose in the fall of the year and lying dead in its ashes…. we live in an ever stagnant spring. Spend our lives waiting for something that’s not here, desperate for change.
I think hope must be lived in the darkest of places. Always now, never waiting. Hope must be more than a feeling.
It costs something; and that something is a reckoning with pain. Because hope-in-the-moment requires me to live in the bones of the world, outside and in, and be real with myself about what I find within.
Any journey with hope is also a journey with pain.
And so, Hope Song.
I promised you, when I left you in May, that I would be back with something new. I placed my Substack, Falling Free, on pause. I entered an empty space.
I stopped writing for anybody else and took many new breaths in that void.
Quiet and untethered, it felt like floating. I was the still point I’d been searching for.
New words came. An out pouring, every day.
I came to realise I was writing something big. I called it, Hope Song.
It’s a sequence, a daily wondering on hope and love and meeting our pain…. raw, imperfect, unedited poetry, for the most part. I open the space and something pours out and bit by bit, day by day, I feel it as an ever-growing, shape shifting, nebulous creative thing.
In this unselfconscious space, the act of writing is growing me.
I want to offer you some of this work, as it grows. I want my Substack to serve a deeper creative vision, a longer-term purpose, than merely putting out newsletters because, well, I hope to be seen. I want to keep writing boldly into the void and bring you into something that to me feels so alive.
So, welcome to Hope Song. With each season, you’ll receive a series of poems and the occasional prose piece, extracts from this wider body of work I’m building. Wonderings on love and hope and how-the-hell-do-I-meet-this-world-in-which-I-find-myself?...
Then I’ll go quiet, sink back down into the void, until the next cycle.
I hope it calls to you in whatever way it needs to. I hope it speaks to something inside you, too.
I know that the words are calling to be heard.
Don’t expect answers, or neat endings as we journey on. Whatever I’m creating is a living, breathing thing all of its very own. It wants the freedom to shift and change and take up space, just as I do. It’s as nebulous as hope itself.
I’m so excited to share it with you.
i find no answers,
but perhaps i become them.
Hope Song; Summer
Love this. Thank you Miranda 💐
"The nose of a creature, sniffing the wind. The scent of change on the horizon." <3