Dear Biddy,

Hope springs eternal apparently.  While reading Albino Luciani’s  (aka Pope John Paul I) letters to famous and fictional figures, he referred to Dante’s definition of hope as waiting in certainty.  I wondered how you might have defined hope? Perhaps your little blue bottle was a vessel of hope, a container of predictions and prophecies of better times ahead.

Maybe each hope is like a trinket on a charm bracelet, a trace to re-member a connection or a moment?

I am drawn to the idea of hope this week in part because of Lara‘s dream of collecting 1000 stories of hope. In the certainty that there is abundance of stories of hope to be told and are lying in waiting to be shared with the world is an act of hope all of it’s own in the week Australian’s head off to war on the other side of the world, yet again.  In grief, I went looking for a blue bottle of my own to compensate – but it was the little blue bird of twitter that filled up my hope bank with messages of peace and alternative futures to war.

Pain and paralysis come before hope. When anticipation sets in and longing takes hold, hope begins to find a home.

Hope is born when we can see something that is not yet there and when we can see what is there with new eyes – it is the old butterfly in the caterpillar tale – and that great parable Hope for the Flowers.

So while we head into war and I am at the pain and paralysis stage, I know hope will follow and that there are more than 1000 stories to be shared.