POINTS OF VIEW

I married a man who had a secret fantasy. He hoped to live in a place with a view. Being a patient man, not to mention thrifty, he moved into the basement suite I was renting. Its large windows looked into the basement windows of other apartments on both sides. The living room commanded a foundational view of the back yard double garage. He did not fret. He knew we would move on.
From our second basement suite—basement suites were cheaper than loftier places—he had a grass roots view of the front lawn and any feet that happened to be passing along the sidewalk. He did not fret about this one either. There was nowhere to go but up.
Our first home with a mortgage stood on a busy Calgary street. Across the wide expanse of service road, median and traffic artery lay the vista from the rear end of a Zeller’s store.
Shopping was oh-so-convenient. Our second house looked across at other houses. I never cared for that house, so moving out of it took little negotiation.
In front of our third house stood three trees on a tiny island that a street architect had inexplicably created. Cars liked to go around it. Friends would stand at the window and say how nice it was not to have to look directly into other houses. That view lasted us for 23 years.
Twenty-three years is a long time—long enough to raise a family of babies, long enough to contemplate the next move, time enough to search for just the right place. This was the point where my husband began to come to terms with the unintended consequences of marrying a blind person. In order to win her heart, a prospective house has to offer more than a view.
If you have a lot of money, the world is your oyster. You can contemplate luxurious castles and executive penthouses overlooking breath-taking panoramic vistas that stretch across the river and the urban skyline all the way to the wheat fields beyond the outer suburban reaches. Less money gives you fewer choices. Guided by his quest for beauty, we journeyed to a house advertised as “stainless industrial non-allergenic interior.” But even as we clattered up the open-backed metal stairs leading from the front door to the living room, with my promises to be openminded still ringing in my ears, I began to pine for “homey, warm and intimate.” He chanced upon a dwelling with its panoramic kitchen so far above the garage that a dumbwaiter had been installed to lift the groceries. But the dumbwaiter was smart enough to make the people walk the stairs. The trip was an exercise in—well—exercise. I thought of all the furniture the dumbwaiter would be smart enough not to carry and persuaded him to keep on looking. He admired the valley from a tall narrow house where the master bedroom closet and most of the living room had been replaced by an elevator. Though I had to admit that the trip to the view in this one was a little less exhausting, I found I had been hoping for a closet and a living room.
On and on went the search until finally, we found a place with carpeted stairs, large closets and a living room thrown in with the bargain. It has what I call a diagonal view. It stands at the bottom of a bank looking up in a westward direction across the slope and the trees to the buildings on the cliff high above. And if the sun sets at our house two hours earlier than it does in other neighbourhoods, which is definitely the case at this time of year, well, even the luckiest people can’t have everything. Some sacrifices have to be made in order to get a view.
And what lies in the future? Well, we might move to a hilltop, or it is just possible that we will some day give up our garden and retire to the 20th floor of a high rise. Perhaps it will be a large, homey, intimate apartment with windows on three or four sides. Possibly it will have several elevators as well as a living room. Or maybe, like our present place, it will be something we cannot yet imagine.
One lesson life has taught us. At the start of any process there are usually more options than we can name.

8 IDEAS FOR IDLE INVENTORS

These may not be the sexiest things to invent, but I’ll be grateful to the one who invents any of them.

Mammograms so gentle they make you smile and beg for another.
A way to clean your teeth perfectly the day before you visit the dental hygienist, even if you haven’t flossed since two days after the last time you saw her.
A DVD player a blind person can operate.
Clog-free toilets.
Dog poop that picks itself up.
Motorcycles that automatically hush themselves when they irritate somebody.
Something to neutralize salt or chilli powder after you add too much.
Flies that are willing to be swatted.

THE HOPEFUL STORY

Once upon a time there was a hopeful story. It was only a little story, a tale from past experience. But its theme was so compelling, its content so alluring, its timing so profoundly, precisely perfect that the little hopeful story became very powerful. How powerful was it? It was so powerful that when it fell upon ears fitted with filters that were open only to hopeless stories, it slipped through. It was so powerful that when it reached the dense layer of hopelessness that filled the space just inside the eardrums, it slipped right through. It was so powerful that when it shouted, “Hey, is there a hoping self in there?” the tiny little hoping self, the eeny-weeny battered, baffled, curled-up hoping self that everybody thought was dead, opened its eyes and yawned. It blinked a few times, flexed its cramped muscles, and struggled to its feet. Then it followed the hopeful story out through the thick layers of hopelessness, on through the ears that had been previously closed to hopeful stories, and into the world. The eeny-weeny hoping self licked its lips and said, “Maybe this time things will turn out better than I expect.” And the ears could hear it.

ADDRESS TO THE DANDELIONS

According to today’s edition of the Edmonton Journal, Raymond Loo, a farmer in Hunter River, in central P.E.I., has a contract with a Japanese company to produce 1,400 kg of dried dandelion root, used as a diuretic
and coffee substitute in Japan. He can’t take the dandelions from our lawn because his have to be certified organic and pesticide free.

To my lawn I go to practice my motivational speaking. "Dandelions unite! Leave this wicked place of persecution and harassment. Move to a land where your children and grandchildren will be free to grow! Cling not to your troubled past. Flee from your abusers! Don’t look back! Leave not a trace. Peace and freedom await you. Go now! Go swiftly! Good-bye!"

And the dandelions ask, "Who are you kidding?"

It's not easy to fool dandelions.

WHAT IS HOPE, ANYWAY?

“This may be the million dollar question you are trying to answer, says the newspaper reporter. ”But can you define what you mean by hope?”
The implication of his question is clear. He’s not going to be able to take the topic of hope research seriously unless I can clearly define what we are talking about. His approach sets my memory into overdrive, recalling all the conversations I’ve had with reporters over the years, conversations that started just the way this one has. It’s a slow but worthwhile process, educating one reporter at a time.
As we start down the path toward shared understanding, I am aware that there is an obstacle to overcome. It is, to be sure, a paradoxical obstacle. He believes that he has asked the million dollar question. His words suggest that the question has no answer. He is reflecting a very common belief that hope cannot be defined and therefore cannot be studied.
Though he may think there is no definition, the million dollar question has many answers, and all of them are correct. There are a number of well-respected definitions. Like excellent dinners, they have a lot in common when you look at the basics. Most of the differences lie in the final touches. Hope experts choose one that works for the job they need it to do. Some definitions focus more on the cognitive end of things. Others focus more on the emotional.
Since my own work is largely in the counselling area, often with people who still have hope, even though they are not totally in control of things that are causing them grief, I need a comprehensive definition with a good deal of flexibility. My preferred definition comes from Charlotte Stephenson in the nursing literature. It has grown from the body of research that developed a definition by asking people questions about hope.
Hope is: A process of anticipation that involves the interaction of
thinking, acting, feeling and relating, and is directed toward a future
Fulfillment that is personally meaningful" (Charlotte Stephenson, 1991, p.
1459). Thinking, feeling, acting, relating, future fulfillment, personally meaningful, in the context of counselling, there's a lot you can do with that. It means something to people who are suicidal, or grieving the loss of several loved-ones, or facing the prospect of imminent death, or fighting gang violence. When you have a conversation about hope, you sort out the tangle of thoughts, feelings, actions and relationships. As you untangle, you begin to see possibilities for a future fulfillment that is personally meaningful.
Different people use hope for different purposes. Newspaper reporters write about hope all the time. They use the word in articles that cover just about everything. They use it with confidence, certain that their readers will understand their meaning. As far as I can tell, they have few worries about hope’s definition until they find themselves interviewing hope researchers. This, I think, is because they already know what they need to know in order to make use of hope.
Our human understanding of any topic or thing is a layered phenomenon. Take water for example. All of us know that water is wet, something we drink, and something we use to clean. When we take a chemistry class we learn its chemical formula. Geologists know about the relationship between water and soil. Bridge designers understand how it impacts building materials. Health experts explore the relationship between water and digestion. We all know what water is. We observe that hot water is different from cold water. We are taught that tap water is different from distilled water. But in our complex world, where many things impact water, there is so much we don’t know about water that we will likely be studying it for thousands of years.
So it is with hope. We all know something’s about it. It is a feeling we have about the future, a good feeling. Some people have more of it than others. Most of us go looking for it when disaster strikes.
Like the geologists and bridge builders who study the behaviors and impacts of water, those who want to know more than the basics about hope have their own reasons for being interested. Some believe that more knowledge can improve the medical system, others the educational system. I study it because I believe that knowledge about hope can improve the practice of counselling. And every once in a while, a newspaper reporter gets interested because he wants to write an informed article about hope. Some of the people who read that article will get interested for their own reasons. For us hope enthusiasts, that is cause for celebration.

FEAR AND HOPE

Our Deepest Fear
by Marianne Williamson from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles (INCORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED TO
Nelson Mandela)

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens
us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small
does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine,
as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own
light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates
others.”

And so, if this is indeed our greatest fear, and if fear, as some people say, is the greatest enemy of hope, then it leaves us no choice but to wonder: What would a powerful person do?

FROGS

We were down in the Peace River valley, just at the Dunvegan Bridge when I heard them—frogs chanting—a mantra for rest, and country and peace.
“I haven’t heard enough frogs in my life,” I said to David. I was thinking nostalgically about the farm, about long childhood evenings on the east porch listening to the frogs in the slough half a mile away. The memory was fragrant, idyllic, completely devoid of mosquitoes, which means it probably was not an accurate memory.
“We’ll have to move to the country then,” said David. He said it with a smile. He said it with the confidence of one who knows he is on safe ground. There are no city buses in the country, no taxis you can afford. My love affair with the frogs would last only until the first time I wanted to go out and had nobody to drive me. They say you can’t take the country out of a country girl, but in my case, they are wrong. We went back to the city.
At home the next evening I opened our north bedroom window. I listened. I listened again. There it was, the chant of frogs, loud enough to be heard over the din of traffic on Jasper Avenue just above us, loud enough to be heard over the hum of the cars and buses crossing Dawson Bridge. I listened in wonder. Is it possible to wish frogs into existence? It is our sixth summer in this house, six open-windowed summers. We are near the river, but not the marsh. We hear gulls, ducks, geese and boats but never once in six years had I heard any frogs.
I mentioned the frogs to David. I could see he had his doubts. But the next night, when they were there again, I made him come to listen. “Frogs,” he affirmed.
“There,” I said. “Now we don’t have to move.”
It’s a good thing I made him listen, because that was the last night they chanted. I didn’t want to mention them again. I went back to Turner Classic Movie Channel, where they play a lot of old movies with frog soundtracks.
This has been a hectic spring. Three weekends in a row I travelled to Calgary. It rained. The first weekend’s rain didn’t bother me much because I was working. The second weekend’s rain didn’t bother me too much after the bride moved the wedding indoors, abandoning her plans for an outdoor wedding at Heritage Park with prenuptial champagne on the midway. The third weekend’s rain wasn’t so bad given that its bride’s family had procured tents for her outdoor wedding. Yes, they’ve had a lot of rain in Calgary.
Because of the rain, the vacant industrial land outside the Sandman Airport Hotel where we stayed last weekend was drenched and waterlogged. Oblivious to the cool wet weather, our room was airless and hot. So we were please to find that, unlike most hotels, its windows could be opened. No sooner was the window open than I heard them—a chorus of frogs, sounded like dozens of them. All night long they sang and most of the next day. When the sky cleared after the wedding they sang beneath the round full moon—a song of rest, peace and celebration. The music went on all night. I had to go home just to get some rest.
I still haven’t heard enough frogs in my life. But we’re getting there.

BELIEVING IS SEEING

Dewitt Jones says, “I won’t see it til I believe it.“ What an extraordinary thing to say! He’s a photographer from National Geographic. If you want to see his video—Celebrate What’s Right With The world—go to http://www.celebratetraining.com/?x=19&y=20
I love how it turns our rational notion of discovery on its head. It’s the sort of thinking that makes sense to a hope specialist.
It is summer time and I have a few spare moments to do some serious hope reading. For the millionth time I am struck by the ever-present paradox of hope science. Scholars outdo themselves trying to make their hope research look scientific. They develop measuring instruments. They make graphs and correlations. They present at conferences. When you meet these scholars you can’t help but notice that they are studying hope because they believe it is important.
When I ask them why they go to the trouble to make the measures and do the graphs, they tell me they have to do it to convince the scientists. They don’t need to convince themselves, they tell me, because they already believe it. But, they say, the scientists need proof. They have to see it before they’ll believe it.
I myself am not skeptical about hope. I wasn’t skeptical when I started working with it. So it may not be too surprising that I could keep on experimenting with hope strategies, over and over again, until I could get them to work so reliably that I could demonstrate them in impromptu interviews in classroom situations.
But I do notice that people who are skeptical about the importance of hope aren’t much interested in studying it. Perhaps this is why I am now testing the theory that you have to inspire them before you will get the chance to convince them. It is just possible that after you’ve inspired them, you won’t have to convince them at all. They’ll talk themselves into it and produce the evidence they need.

ZINNIAS

And this year’s new veranda flower is …………Zinnia!
“You’ll like zinnias,” Sandra said when she heard the announcement. “They are big bright flowers. Mom used to grow them.”
I’m not sure why we haven’t grown zinnias before. Probably it’s because the greenhouse flowers tend to be laid out in alphabetical order and our trays are usually overflowing by the time we get to the petunias. In the flower world, as in the people world, there are advantages to having a name that’s closer to A. Still it is surprising that we never got zinnias. They were already in flower when we brought them home, and even when our trays are full, we can often find a finger to balance one extra blooming carton And now they flourish in the #2 long cedar planter, their multi-coloured splendour growing bigger and brighter every day. “They’re so perfect,” says Amy giving them the practiced planter’s eye. “You’d almost think they were plastic.”
Meanwhile, in planters #4 and #5, last year’s new flowers—asters and amaranthus--are making a comeback. Amaranthus seeded a few of her own babies, just in case we decided not to replant. But she needn’t have worried. We couldn’t forget those long dangly flowers. We made an extra greenhouse visit for amaranthus.
“I don’t see any sign of flowers on the asters,” says David.
I remind him that we got the asters last year knowing full well we would have to wait for August blooms. I assure him that we thought they were worth the wait. I know this because I wrote it down. Experience has taught me to write everything down about flowers, especially the things I feel certain I cannot forget. We are expecting amaranthus flowers in July. And if only I had written about the purple bearded iris, I would know who gave it to us. I must have thought I would never forget. Maybe it was one of the few original flowers that greeted us from their mint-infested beds when we bought the house.
But the award for big flower surprise of this year will have to be given to the sweet peas that self-seeded from last year’s crop. Some of them will be in flower by the end of the week. A June flowering? Whoever heard of such a thing? We have not known sweet peas to self-seed in thirty-two summers of sweet pea growing in three different yards why this year? And why did they take root four feet from the original location, several inches below the ground? Why were there so many—maybe thirty?
Could have been something quirky in the weather. Could have been some special variety. We never kept records of sweet pea seeds. The truth is, we don’t know. Maybe we will never know. Just as we cannot now anticipate next year’s new flower. Will its name start with E, or even U? It’s this evidence in support of the unexpected that keeps us interested, keeps us hoping.

CROSS-POLINATION

Rachel says she notices that when you give a self-care workshop
People at the workshop tend to ask, “How can I care for others?’

And Wendy says she notices that when you give a caring-for-others workshop
People at the workshop tend to say, I really need to use this for myself.

Compelled by an irresistible urge we take an idea that works in one place
Then carry it off like a seed on the wind and entice it to grow in another.

SEARCHING FOR HOPE

Today I am reading about childhood sexual abuse and thinking about hope. Rachel and I are preparing to offer a hope series for parents of sexually abused children. We will need to be compassionate. We will need to know where our own hope can be found. So far the hunt for hope resources is still on. The question I would like to be addressing is this: How can I care about a child who has been sexually abused and be hopeful at the same time?

So far I have found some things. I’ve found stories written by survivors. Several of them mention hope. But of course, they talk a lot about the trauma and how hard they had to work to get past it. That’s what makes their stories notable. But I don’t feel very hopeful saying: it can be overcome but the child will have to work really, really hard. So I continue the search.

There are statistics. On the most thorough pages there are a lot of disqualifiers. Childhood sexual abuse is not measured by consistent standards. Different studies get different numbers. The thorough pages list all the numbers. Then I notice that the less thorough websites tend to quote the highest numbers, without quoting the smaller numbers. And I wonder why anyone would choose to discredit the smaller numbers by not mentioning them.

I go to the website of the American Psychological association. It carries a long list of bad effects childhood sexual abuse has on children. Then it says: In short, the ill effects of child sexual abuse are wide ranging. There is no one set of symptoms or outcomes that victims experience. Some children even
report little or no psychological distress from the abuse, but these children may be either afraid to express their true emotions or may be denying their
feelings as a coping mechanism. Other children may have what is called "sleeper effects." They may experience no harm in the short run, but suffer serious
problems later in life.”” (http://www.apa.org/releases/sexabuse/effects.html).

This is where I lose my temper. What I read here is that if a child reports no ill effects, we psychologists don’t believe him or her. We say the child is probably in denial, and will likely experience bad effects later.

What I see here is a media approach that has failed to attend to any evidence that would give us hope. If I am to run a hope group for parents of children who have been sexually abused I will need to believe that their children will likely be okay. It would be nice to have the evidence, but we don’t hear much from people who experienced sexual abuse and then moved on. Why would they tell us they are okay? They have, after all, moved on. I will also need to believe that even if they told us they were okay, we professionals may choose to disbelieve them, expecting them to fall apart later. It sounds a little like the olden days, where it is said that children who told stories of sexual abuse were not believed.

If I am to run a hope group, then I will need to believe that children of this generation are better off than those in the past, because our society has made a commitment to hearing their stories and setting up systems to protect them. Hopefully, in the next generation of adults, today’s children will be less traumatized than their predecessors. Hopefully they will tell the stories of how our openness helped them get past their trauma. May we be open to hope. That’s my hope.

LEARNING ABOUT HOPE IN MANAGEMENT TRAINING

Recently I have begun to wonder how my enormous experience with hope in conversation might be useful to managers. When I posed the question to my husband, he responded that my experience in hope has been incredibly useful in his management role. He said he has learned to think about the need to be positive before he speaks, and to govern his language according to that need.

The credit for making these linkages goes entirely to him. He has gained his knowledge through a process of seepage over the years—sitting in on my Saturday morning hope presentations to foster parents and cancer patients; manning the book table during my hope workshops at conferences on elder care and clinical hypnosis. He’s taken the inspiration from my stories about impossible things becoming possible, and things turning out better than expected. He has noticed how language changes perspective. But the day is rapidly approaching when managers will not have to learn these things through seepage. Hope will be a popular topic in management training.

There’s a new trend in hope studies these days. People are beginning to ask how hope strategies could help managers do their work more effectively.
Though much attention continues to focus on strategies for sustaining hope when people are ill or otherwise challenged, and hope continues to be a topic of great interest to doctors nurses and social workers, hope is finding its way into management theory. Books and articles that take hope seriously are beginning to appear.

If there’s one excellent reason why managers ought to be interested in hope it is this: Hope and hopelessness are silent factors in most work environments, active yet unacknowledged. Research in the counselling world has shown that new opportunities for growth are created when the influence of hope and hopelessness is brought out into the open. Many of the strategies we use for making hope explicit in counselling can be applied in other types of conversations as well. They can be used in one-on-one encounters and also in group settings. Hope and hopelessness shape individual and group behavior. So it is not surprising that management theorists are beginning to pay attention to hope.

Hope is a motivator that keeps people moving forward. It is the underlying emotion that makes us want to pursue goals. Not only do we hope to achieve goals, but goals often make up part of a large picture with hope at its centre. Our underlying hopes give goals their importance and personal meaning. Hope is a complex, yet simple concept. It is a feeling that changes the nature of thoughts, actions and relationships. High levels of hope, according to the research, can be linked with success at just about everything. People with high hope scores do better at athletics and academics. They cope better with illness and pain. Hopeful people direct attention toward a future that seems important to them.

Hopelessness, in contrast, is a de-motivator. It is the absence of purpose that keeps people plodding forward without inspiration, confines them in the old ruts, limits them to sticking with what is familiar. Without stepping out to take either credit or blame, hopelessness gets in the way of many things that could be happening.

People in general are interested in talking about hope, reducing hopelessness and rallying around hope symbols. This interest can create opportunities. Managers could now be using knowledge about hope and hopelessness to make things better in the workplace. Ultimately there will be management training in the area of hope. You can see it coming.

Hope theory and management theory have begun reaching out to one another. Patricia Bruininks and Bertram Malle have conducted conversational research to identify perceived differences between hopes and goals.
Longtime hope scholar Kay Herth has emerged from a nursing context to write about the role of a hope leader. Management consultants Harry Hudson and Barbara Perry have built a management book around five principles for promoting and sustaining hope in organizations.

As hope theory and management theory converge, managers will find themselves learning how to talk about hope. Like other management training, the hope training will start with big ideas and move toward practical strategies that make sense to the trainees. The gap between the big ideas and the small contextual strategies is still relatively unexplored. Most of the knowledge about how to inspire hope through guided conversation still rests in the counselling and nursing literature. It hovers expectantly at the brink of the gap, searching for bridges, waiting for invitations, preparing to cross over.

References
Bruininks, P. & Malle, B., (2005). Distinguishing hope from optimism and related affective states. Motivation And Behavior 29(4)
Herth, K. A. (2007). Hope-centered leadership in practice. Academic Leader, 23(8), 4-5.
Hudson H. & Perry, B., (2006). Putting hope to work: Five principles to activate your organization’s most powerful resource. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

MEAT ON THE BONES OF HOPE

Every so often you meet somebody who says something that resonates. This happened to me last weekend. A stranger came to shake my hand following a hope presentation. She said, “You really put the meat on the bones of hope for me.”
She is the first person ever to say that to me. And so, even though I knew there was a risk of scattering my vegetarian followers, I began to wonder about the bones of hope. What are the bones of hope, anyway?

Main bone: HOPE MATTERS TO PEOPLE. They like it. They want it. Some say they need it. Some say they fear it. Some say they have lost it. But this is the thing that binds all these people together. Hope matters to them.

Second bone: HOPE RELATES TO OTHER THINGS! For whatever reason, be it psychological or physiological, people who have HOPE do better than people who don’t. There’s a ton of research that shows this. You can spend a whole day on that.

Third bone: HOPE SCARES PEOPLE!!!! Professionals are particularly susceptible to fearing it. They fear that if other people hope, they’ll be the ones left to mop up the tears after the big disappointment occurs. But professionals aren’t the only ones who fear hope. Most of us have small attacks from time to time.

Fourth bone: HOPE IS CONTAGEOUS!!! If you hang around people who have it, it’s hard to keep from catching some.

Fifth bone: HOPE CAN BE DEFINED!!! It is not, as many believe, an intangible idea. Hundreds of researchers have defined it and their definitions are quite similar. In my favourite definitions, hope is described as the involvement of thinking, feeling, acting and relating toward a future fulfillment that is personally meaningful. Now that is definitely not intangible.

Sixth bone: HOPE CAN BE MEASURED!!! Not everyone is interested in measuring hope, but those who wish to can use any one of a number of standardized, validated instruments. Some focus more attention on the emotional aspects, others on the cognitive. But a good selection is out there for anybody who wants to use them.

Seventh bone: HOPE CAN BE EVOKED!!! (or inspired, or activated, or nurtured, or fostered, or instilled). Say it any way you like. Hope can be evoked. This bone is my particular favourite. My work has focused almost entirely on the language, symbols, strategies and methods available to enhance the work of serious hope evokers.

There they are, seven of the larger bones that comprise the skeleton of hope. Most researchers find smaller bones and work away on them. They study hope in the context of cancer, or academic success, or business management, or childhood, or seniorhood. In any given presentation we can choose which bones to put the meat on.

My thanks go out to the stranger who enjoyed the meat of a hope presentation , and then, through the gift of thanks, brought my attention back to the bones.

STUDYING HOPE

And the doctor who had just shown his PowerPoint
Saw the hope presentation that followed his,
The presentation about how to evoke the hope experience
And asked, “Is there any hard research to prove it?”
The medical system is committed to evidence.

So I felt a little foolish, defending myself
In the shadow of such a learned man.
And I felt that anything I could say about the mountains of hope research
Could not be enough to gain his respect.

But then I remembered seeing many doctors
For many things across the years
And coming away without a cure
Or researching the cure before I went
And asking for what had not been suggested.

So I figured I’d keep on talking about hope,
Even if they schedule the doctors first on the program
And give them more respect because they’re doctors
Remembering how often they schedule me at the end
Saying they have chosen me especially
Because, after hearing the doctors,
The audience will need some hope.

If you get a reputation for giving hope
Just by making a presentation
Then doesn’t that prove that hope can be evoked?
What more research do we need?

THE SYNAGOGUE

I was on my way to a synagogue to make a hope presentation on Sunday evening when I realized a surprising thing. Until that evening I had never been through the door of a Synagogue.
How peculiar, I thought. Have I not been to church most Sundays for the past fifty years or so? Have I not heard stories about the Jewish people every week? How curious that the worlds of Christians and Jews should overlap so much and yet touch each other so little!
I was one of four presenters. Two were from Calgary, two were from Edmonton. Two were Jewish. Two were not. I basked in the warm hospitality offered to me that evening, and again the next morning when I took my hope tools to Calgary Jewish Family Services. That little introduction got me interested. My first visit had its limits. I did not enter the sanctuary, only the church hall, to attend a panel presentation to which the general public had been invited. But alongside my amazement that my first visit should have come so far along in my life, I felt a surge of hope, aware that many new experiences are still waiting for me, not very far from home.

COVER-UP

Something delightful happened yesterday. I loved it! My eyes began to twinkle. My fingers began to itch for a keyboard. My mind composed the first sentence! And then it happened. The person beside me said, “And don’t put this on your blog!”
So I didn’t. But I sure wanted to.
In a way I did. It’s the story under this story. If you can lift this one up and peek under the corner, you might see a bit of it. Cover-ups are seldom as complete as we’d like them to be.

BEING OPTIMISTIC

There once was a woman who had only three hairs. “I think I’ll braid my hair today,” she said, and off to work she went.
The next day she had only two hairs. “I think I’ll part it down the middle today,” she said, and off to work she went.
The next day she awoke to find herself with only one hair. “I think I’ll make a pony tail today,” she said, and off she went to work.
On the fourth day the woman woke to find that she was now completely bald. “Oh joy,” said she. “Now I won’t have to spend so much time doing my hair!”
Barb sent me this little story. She wrote that it made her think of me because I am always so optimistic. Now that remark definitely made me laugh.
I guess I don’t see that much of Barb. We only get together on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. And when we talk we’re usually doing a bad thing because we’re either supposed to be singing, or being quiet so other people can learn their choir parts, or paying attention to whatever is going on in church. When I think of it that way, I suppose I can understand why she seems to think I am more optimistic than I sometimes feel.
My buddy Lenora sees me from a different angle. We attend the same meetings—staff meetings, planning meetings, organizational meetings, etc. She sees the experienced me, the me who has been around long enough to have seen a lot of things tried before. She sees the cautious me, the me who wants to be careful not to repeat past mistakes. She sees the reluctant me, the me who doesn’t want to volunteer too much too soon. She says that sometimes, when I get going, throwing water on a promising fire with my practical, businesslike, hope-sucking talk, she feels like she’ll just have to kill me. This would scare me, except for the fact that killing me would simply heap a lot more work on her. So I know I’m safe, even as I’m being warned.
Lenora has taught me something I should have already known, since I so often try to teach it to others. She has taught me that hope is an emotional thing that can easily be wounded by a pessimist hiding behind the mask of practicality and experience. She has taught me to think carefully before I step forward to crush hope.
And Barb? Well, Barb has reminded me that when it comes to the fun stuff, for it is the fun stuff that she and I usually do together, when it comes to the fun stuff it isn’t hard to be optimistic.

HERITAGE TOMATO

Mike and Anne came to dinner. They brought with them a tomato plant grown from a heritage seed. As soon as I held it I forgot that I’d said we were absolutely not planting any more tomato plants this year. And even though I have always declared it inefficient to start tomato plants from seed, I could feel myself sliding into the future, slicing gently into ripe juicy tomatoes to extract the finest seeds for next year’s planting. This, I suppose, is the magical influence of a heritage seed.
In some respects our entire yard is a heritage site, a treasure chest of memories and gifts. Right now the Athabasca Lily is in full flower. This is a child of the plant John and Grace gave me for my fortieth birthday. They knew how much I admired the plant that grew in profusion in front of Athabasca Hall. And so, on a Saturday night, when nobody was around, they took a shovel and removed one of a hundred plants overcrowding themselves. When my new Athabasca Lily doubled in size I split it with them. Then, when they moved I split mine again. Finally, we moved and brought some with us. Other people see these plants and call them Solomon’s seal. But we have officially declared that all offspring of the one procured on John and Grace’s Saturday night raid should be known as Athabasca Lily.
Then there’s the periwinkle we got from Linda Borty. David noticed it when he delivered me to my piano lesson one bright spring Saturday morning. “Take some of it,” Linda cried. “There’s more than enough to spare!” We miss Linda now, and that prodigious periwinkle brings us such happy memories of her.
A careful observer of our street might notice that some of the plants in our rock garden are closely related to the plants in Susan’s yard. “Take some of my plants,” Susan said, when we stopped to admire her blossoms. The rock garden was much emptier in those days.
The anemones came from Marnie and Don, the peonies from John and Marie, Marilyn and Peter. There are irises from Gianna. Primroses, lilacs and little yellow lilies came from Grace. The goat’s beard came from Mark and it was Mark who bought the first patio rose for the veranda. The blue pots came from Ruth. Anne and Mike gave the herb pot as a thank-you gift. Dad made the pansy wagons. Ginger taught me about Acidanthra and told me where to get them. The birds and the wind brought the sunflowers from their home across the back alley.
Gladioli and begonias remind us of David’s dad. Sweet peas and dahlias remind us of my mom.
And now we have a heritage tomato plant—and the first line of a new story.

BLIND PERSON, OR PERSON WHO IS BLIND?

I’ve been thinking about language, not unusual for me, the one who speaks so often about hope language. But the language on my mind is the language of disability.
I am a blind person. I was born blind, and have been a blind person ever since, though I did start out as a blind kid. Soon I’ll be a blind senior. But some time during my adulthood people started saying I was a person who was blind. They said that made me more of a person, when we said it that way. I have never felt this change in language made me more of a person. I have never doubted that I am a person. I have been called visually challenged, unsighted, without sight, without vision. It seems there is no end to the things people want to call me, as long as they don’t have to say “blind person.”
And I wonder, just what is wrong with being a blind person anyway? I am a psychologist. Nobody thinks I ought to be a person who does psychology, I am a gardener. Nobody is suggesting it would be more respectful to call me a person who gardens. I am allowed to be a storyteller—not a person who tells stories, a mother—not forced to be a person with children. That would never work. We’d have to change Mother’s Day to Person’s With Children’s Day.
As I find myself arguing this point today, with somebody who I know respects me, yet still insists that I will be less respected if I am called a blind person, I find myself asking: Is there something shameful about blindness that we don’t want to face?
I am not ashamed to be a blind person, nor do I think others should be ashamed to be one. I admit it, I am on a rant, I am in a radical mood. I am going against respected professional opinion. If this keeps up, I’ll be saying “I’m blind,” and not mentioning that I’m a person. Who knows what could come of that? People might think I’m an elephant, or a robin!
And why am I writing this on THE HOPE LADY Blog? Well, I get this feeling of hopelessness thinking I will have to change my name every few years so people will respect me. I hope to be allowed to be called what I am. I hope others respect that.

AUDACIOUS HOPERS

Audacious hopers hope for things
No practical person would dream of hoping for,
Things we are certain can never happen
Given the current circumstances.

Audacious hopers drive us crazy
Because they simply will not listen
To our predictions about the future.
Audacious hopers are in denial!

There’s nothing quite so irritating
As trying to protect audacious hopers
From the disappointment we’re afraid they will face.
Audacious hopers test our courage!

Audacious hopers change the world
And when they do we call them heroes.
We buy magazines with articles about them
And hire them to make motivational speeches.

When audacious hopers tell their stories
About the people they met on the journey,
I’d rather be named as the one who supported
Than mentioned as the barrier who had to be thwarted.

HOLLY AND THE FLOWERS

Holly dropped buy with plants today
And filled our flower box with blooming profusion.

How lucky are we to work in a place
So friendly, so homey, so utterly approachable
That people will come by without an appointment
To plant the flowers they brought.

WHO SAYS MEN DON'T WANT SUPPORT GROUPS?

I had a date last night—with some guys in Red Deer who have prostate cancer—and their wives who have a standing invitation to their meetings—and the breast cancer ladies to whom they graciously extended a welcome. They had gathered, as you might have already guessed—to think and talk about hope. We got to talking about men as private people, not so much given to gathering in groups to discuss troubling attacks on their private parts. But surely this was a group of men meeting for precisely that purpose.
The Red deer Prostate Cancer Support Group has been meeting for more than ten years. It truly is a support group—not a group of fund-raisers. In fact, it rarely even has a guest speaker. Guys and their families get together to talk. They don’t take summers off. After all, cancer doesn’t take summers off. This is a group that debunks the myth that men won’t go to support groups.
Being with them brings to mind some other evidence from my past that also debunks that myth. In 1995 I was invited to help design a hope project for teachers on disability. The work generated a hope support group that became known as the Teacher Hope Initiative. One of the interesting things about this group was that half the members were men. This was particularly striking, because most teachers are women. Then, as time passed, and recruitment strategies changed, almost all the new members were women. Curious about this changing phenomenon, we observed that the original members were all recruited one on one. Somebody they trusted--some knowledgeable person with a sense of what the group could achieve—had asked them to join. Later recruitment was done by letter and general advertisement. Few men responded to that.
The old myth about men not wanting support groups is a dangerous myth. Following its lead we are tempted to accept our current practices as adequate. If men don’t participate, we say, then that’s their fault. They need to become more sensitive, more open. But may we need to make some changes too. Indeed, most of the social services are populated by women, and most of the programs offered are woman-generated. I hope that in future we’ll spend less effort keeping this myth alive and more effort articulating the value that men derive from belonging to support groups. I also hope we will make a solid effort to develop recruiting strategies that work for men, acknowledging without blame that different strategies might work for women.

BARRIERS

So often, when you want something, you just have to take the initiative. You have to be bold. You see examples of it everywhere.
Recently I met the founder of the Royal Calahoo Garden Society. Any of you who know the size of Calahoo may well be surprised that such a tiny community could have a royal society. That designation is usually reserved for the bigger projects, like major provincial museums, or the highway between Edmonton and Calgary.
In fact, there were some cautious souls who suggested to the founder that it might be more legal to call it the Calahoo Garden Society, given that the Queen was not the one who bestowed its title. Now here was an unexpected barrier.
To a casual observer it might have seemed a small matter to change the name, but she had a vision, a hope for her new venture. She wanted it to be more than a garden society. She wanted it to be special, to be classy, more like a royal garden society than a plain old garden society. In defense of her position, searching for precedents, she aptly observed that the Queen probably didn’t eat at Royal Pizza, and may not have insured Buckingham Palace at Royal Insurance LTD.
If there ever was a danger, it has surely passed. I can safely publish this information now. Even if the Queen reads THE HOPE LADY Blog it will be too late for any meaningful punishment. The Royal Calahoo Garden Society stopped meeting a few years back and it never opened a bank account. In its wake it left its members with some great memories, some lasting friendships, the echoes of laughter and that special satisfaction known only to those who got away with something.
And to me—who was never a member—it has given a story, one more piece of conclusive evidence that the barriers we think we face are not always as real as they seem.

HOPE-OPOTAMUS ON THE MOVE

There’s excitement brewing in the hope-opotamus herd this morning. Rumor has it that some of them—nobody knows exactly which ones--are about to be adopted. The first indication that it was about to happen came last week in the email. Of course they all want to go, even though Hope House is a great place for a hope-opotamus to be. Nothing makes them happier than to receive a really gracious invitation like this one.

Hello Wendy!
Just your friendly neighbourhood brain injury awareness week coordinator here. I am so looking forward to meeting you and hearing your talk on the 6th of June. My co-worker, Louise Jensen, pulled your article "Hope-opotamus Hits the Big Time!" from the Fall 2007 issue of the Hope News. She had saved this in the hopes of someday
getting a hope-opotamus for our group room, and now that she knows you
are coming, she passed on the article to me.
I found the whole thing absolutely delightful. I spent last summer in Kenya and South Africa and I went around the whole time saying that in my next life I wanted to be a hippopotamus. Did you know that hippos make a noise that sounds like one of those cartoon evil laughs? They seriously go "mwah-ha-ha-ha!" It made me laugh
everytime I heard it. That was the first reason I wish I was a hippo.
The others were that in the heat of the day, when everything else is boiling hot, the hippo gets to hang out in the nice cool water! The other was that nothing was big enough to eat a hippo! Sorry, this is neither here nor there, but I know you like stories. I've been
reading your hopelady blog since I saw it in your email signature. I
think I've read most of it now, and I have really been enjoying it. I
must say, I particularly liked the story of little Frances Ann.
Anyway, back on topic. Our group room is used a lot, but it is a
fairly boring room. It has tables and chairs and a white board.
There is some artwork from brain injury survivors, but on the whole,
it is a pretty dreary room. I think a hope-opotamus would really liven
things up and give people something to hold on to in difficult sessions. I don't know what your stock of hope-opotamuses is like, but if the Edmonton Brain Injury Relearning Society, and the Networks
Activity centre, our sister organizations, could have one for their
offices, I'm sure they would be very happy too. We would be glad to
make a donation for the hope-opotamuses, and we would love it if you
could give it to NABIS as part of your talk on the 6th. I think it
would be a very lasting symbol of the effects of this more
lighthearted brain injury awareness week.
Sorry for writing such a long winded email! I got a little
carried away. Please think about it - no pressure - and get back to me.

Thank you so much!

Vanessa

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHARITY AND JUSTICE

Carmen Deedy is indeed a gifted storyteller. She has been a featured teller at two events we’ve attended, one in Tennessee and the other, more recently, in Texas. Carmen’s featured stories are about her growing up years in Georgia. She is a child of Cuban refugees
It would be difficult to sleep through a Carmen Deedy story, even if you were very tired. Her stories are structured on dialogue. She alternates between the narrator voice—her naturally soft southern drawl, and the family voices delivered in a high-pitched super-speed ultra-emotional patter of Hispanic English. Following her stories is a little bit like taking a wild ride on the midway. You climb a little, you speed up, you slow down, you almost stop, and then you are catapulted around again. And even if you could sleep, you wouldn’t dare, because her stories end very abruptly and you have to be listening, or you’ll be lost in the applause, trying to reconstruct the finale.
I wouldn’t dream of trying to tell a Carmen Deedy story. Her stories are hers and hers alone. But there is this one story—summarized here, not told--about her father, who was starving, eking out his last few pesos for the smallest portions of food that money could buy. Each time he did this he was given extra food. Starving as he was, he was also ashamed to take the food and so, at some point, he insisted on taking only that for which he had paid. Then the one who was dishing up the extra food for him said that he needed to learn the difference between charity and justice.
The difference between charity and justice! I wrote that line down when we got back to our hotel and didn’t find it again until this week, when I began to sort through the treasures brought home from the Texas storytelling Festival. I wrote it down because it grabbed my attention. I knew that, when I got home, I’d have time to think how proud we are, in this bountiful country, of our volunteers, our philanthropists, our generous purchases at silent auctions. And to these I am bound. In a flurry of good-cause activity I am both giver and receiver. Still, I can’t help but wonder something: How would our society structure itself differently if we spent more time contemplating the difference between charity and justice, then acted upon the conclusions we reached?

HOPE AND THE BIG SADS

It’s not the little sads that take away our hope.
It’s the big sads that do it.

A little sad can be cheered up with an ice cream cone
Or a friendly smile,
Or a piece of good news.
If you can’t see through a little sad
You can surely see around it
To where the hope is waiting on the other side.

But the big sads! Oh the big sads!
You can’t see around them, no matter how far you stretch your neck.
You can’t climb over them. There’s not enough oxygen for the trip.
You can’t push through them. They’re as hard as stone.

Still, the hope is out there somewhere.
You’ve only to look around you to know that.
The evidence is in the people you see.
They’ve surely had big sads, maybe more than one.
You can see that they got past it.

Maybe some day we’ll pierce the biggest sads
With radar or ultrasound or some other ingenious invention
Til then we draw our hope from others
The way we did when we were kids
Raising our eyes to grown-up faces
Wanting to be tall as them
Not quite knowing how they got so tall.

WINNING

Daydreaming on the bus. A dangerous pursuit. You can miss your stop that way. Believe me! I know this firsthand. But bus-seat daydreaming can lead to true profundity.
I was lost in thought when a persistent tapping on my arm finally roused me. It was not—after all a passenger squeezing past in the crowd. It was one of my favourite 20-something guys. He’s just started a new job.
“How did it go yesterday?” I asked.
“Not that well,” he said. I was already firmly on the path of compassionate responses and firm reassurances by the time I realized he was not talking about his job. He was talking about the high school soccer game he coached last night.
“We were only down 2 to nothing at the half,” he said. And then, I’d say, though he didn’t use this language, they lost heart. “The last half was 45 minutes,” he said. It seemed like 4 hours.”
My hopey little mind was warmed up and getting ready to call the plays from the bench. I was thinking about the tragedies that ensue when people lose heart. He was telling me how everybody was blaming everybody else for the loss.
“Perhaps,” I advised, trying to sound gentle, “perhaps you’ll need to gather them in the locker room and tell them inspirational stories about underdog teams that didn’t have a chance, but then they scraped their way to victory by supporting each other and pulling it all together.”
I was struggling to recall various movies I’ve seen about hockey teams, basketball teams, soccer teams. They’re basically all the same. Most of them end with the statement that they are based on a true story. You don’t really need to see them to know how they’ll turn out—so predictable is the result. But you watch them because you want to. They give you hope. I wanted to suggest some titles.
He must have noticed that glazed hopey look in my eyes. He must have been wishing he’d told me about his work day instead of his soccer evening. “I don’t think that’s what we need,” he said patiently. “They’ve heard every kind of locker room speech before.”
But I was just getting warmed up. I was thinking about goal-setting and how difficult it is for underdogs. I was reflecting on the emotional power of hope, and how it transcends statistics and probabilities. I was imagining is team—transformed by his words—practicing late into the night, pulling out the final play-off game at the last possible second. It’s not that easy to get the attention of a person who is in this state.
He, in turns out, wasn’t really trying to get my attention. He was replaying last night’s game in his thoughts. “What we need,” he said, breaking into my imagining happy ending, is for me to tell them what they did wrong and how they can do it differently.”
It’s a short bus ride. I suspect he wasn’t all that sad to see that we were pulling into my stop at City Hall. We were about halfway down the length of the bus. “There are five people standing between you and the door,” he said helpfully.
I got to my feet, opened up my white cane. “Stay to the left,” he instructed as I stepped forward. “Now over to the right. Okay, back to the left and go round one more.”
I was out the door in a second. That guy had executed a perfect play. Satellite technology couldn’t have done a better job of getting me through the maze. So I guess he knows his stuff, but I still think he ought to give an inspirational speech, raise their hope, give them a vision and then bring in the skill.

LITTLE FRANCES ANN

There’s nothing quite like a ghost story to bring out the rebel in me. From the moment when a teller says “Now I’m going to tell you a ghost story,” I start daring that teller to scare me. I do the same thing with anesthetists. They say, “Now you are going to sleep,” and I think, “No I’m not! “Only difference is, anesthetists always put me to sleep, and ghost tellers never scare me. Well at least they never used to.
I can’t say why I don’t have much of an emotional reaction when storytellers go on about dead people appearing in windows, going bump in the night and moving objects around. Instead of getting the creepy feeling that makes you run back to bed after a midnight trip to the bathroom, I tend to just sit there. I listen politely enough. But there are plenty of real life things that scare me -rollercoasters and the cost of housing and speaking to audiences with doctors in them to mention just a few. Perhaps the process of daily living gives me all the fear I need. But then, just when I think I understand myself, just when I am almost certain that I’ve had my quota of life surprises, some unexpected event comes along to shake me up, to keep me interested, to raise my hope for a future of unimaginable discoveries.
Donna Lively was the first—and so far only—ghost teller to scare me. The amazing thing is that the conditions for not scaring me were absolutely perfect. She was telling at the Texas Storytelling Festival ghost story concert. The M.C. had maximized my defenses by making a big deal of being scary. Several tellers had already told stories that entertained but did not scare me. We were approaching the concert’s end. Donna was the last teller up.
Donna’s story made no show of being ghostly. She told us a heart-breaking and all-too-familiar family story about a little girl named Melissa, or maybe it was Maria, who was never quite good enough to please her parents. Her father made the situation playful by routinely comparing her to a mythical model of childhood perfection known as Little Frances Ann. Little Frances Ann would never have done this naughty thing, or that naughty thing. No matter what obstacles crossed her path, she was always polite and clean and considerate. Then one day—and I should say here that this didn’t scare me though it did explain why Donna was able to put this story in a ghost story concert—Melissa and some friends went to play in a graveyard. There they discovered a grave—the grave of Little Frances Ann. Apparently Little Frances Ann was not mythical after all. Our Melissa had an unmentioned sister who had died before her birth. Her parents were grieving a real person. Melissa was no substitute.
With the part of the story that was supposed to be scary now safely out of the way, I settled back to listen for the ending which, I was certain would be coming soon. But the end did not arrive as I had expected. It was farther off than I had thought. We were only about half done. In all sorts of ways Melissa changed her life so that she might follow in the footsteps of Little Frances Ann. She stopped getting dirty. She did as she was told. She was respectful. She was helpful. So successful was she that her daddy began to call her Fran.
Well, life went on and Melissa’s grandmother died. She accompanied the funeral procession to the graveyard, where they filed past the grave of little Frances Ann, but she kept her eyes looking straight ahead. She dared not look, for she did not know whose name would be inscribed upon the stone.

And that’s how the story ended, with a thank-you and an exit and a standing o. I was on my feet in a flash, clapping and cheering loudest of all. Nearly four weeks have passed since I heard that story. In that time I’ve heard a dozen more stories and attended a couple of workshops. I’ve been to a funeral, a volunteer appreciation, an annual general meeting, a training session for nurses on Indian reserves, a palliative care conference, choir practice, a Greek dinner, a strawberry tea and a day for blind people organized by the CNIB. I’ve been to Toronto. I’ve been to Medicine Hat. I’ve done laundry. I’ve bought pillows. I’ve been videoed. I’ve even planted a few flowers. But I haven’t forgotten that story—and I’m still wondering how certain I’ll be about the inscriptions on the stones in graveyards.

ALIENATION, ANGER AND THE RASPBERRY

Perhaps, among all the things that threaten hope, no one thing is more confounding than that sense of alienation you feel when it seems that you are alone, that no matter what you say, nobody will really understand what it is that you are suffering, and what it is that you most need to communicate. And so, on this bright morning as I write file notes on clients who would give anything to move beyond anger, and answer email from Lenora who is cutting back raspberry canes, my attention drifts back to a poem I wrote several years ago. It was my olive branch of solidarity with an angry-but-treasured client named Danny. It was my way of saying that maybe I understood just how hard he was trying.

He, in turn, was grateful. Unbeknownst to me, he had also tried to extinguish a persistent raspberry. In return he wrote me a poem about hope. I have lost track of his poem, but I still have mine. So here it is.

THE RASPBERRY

Who would expect a seed of anger
To flourish in soil where a careful gardener
Nurtures only flowers of gentleness,
Sprouts of wisdom,
Sprigs of forgiveness?

Perhaps it is the same one who expects a raspberry plant to grow in concrete,
For grow it does,
In the arid place, not a growing space
‘Tween the driveway and the garage.

With roughened stems in scrapes our arms
Blisters our palms on its prickly exterior
Re-asserts itself when the garage door crushes it!
Persisting unwanted, year after year!
While its coddled neighbours wither.

And who would expect to quickly vanquish
The raspberry plant by pulling its roots out?
Denying its planthood,
Or moving it elsewhere?

Perhaps the same one who expects deep anger
To shrivel and die if we simply ignore it,
Disappear if we merely ask it,
Be less angry when we talk about it.

What else in the world could be so intractable,
More unpleasant, less defensible
Than long-brewing anger
And unbidden raspberries growing in concrete?

THE TRIUMPH OF THE WOUNDED TULIPS

The tulips opened up their flowers today
Red and yellow in bright array.
They’d thought they might not bother this year
Since the snow weighed them down and laid them on the ground.

They drooped and moped for a week or so
Nursing their buds mid the wounded leaves.
But the periwinkle called “Come out and play!”
So the tulips opened up their flowers today.

MEDICINE HAT'S FINEST

One day last fall my phone rang. It was an offer—an all-expenses paid trip to Medicine Hat. All I had to do in return was speak at a staff development event focussing on palliative care. And though it would be dishonest of me not to admit that I had been hoping for an offer from Paris or Vienna or New York, I can still remember the time when I could only be invited to make an out-of-town presentation if I called up and asked to be invited, then agreed to pay all my own expenses. So I negotiated a modest fee with Medicine Hat and said I’d be there in early May.
I might have stayed in Medicine Hat’s finest hotel. Instead of doing that, I wrote to my old friend Janice and invited myself to spend the night with her and Ben. Janice and I grew up on neighbouring farms south of Lougheed Alberta and went in different directions to live our adult lives. One time we surprised each other by meeting at a conference and she,. Waiting until I had finished my second glass of wine, then seized the opportunity to persuade me to go white-water rafting on the Athabasca River. Once we survived that, we again went in separate directions until she began to notice references to me in the media and became a reader of THE HOPE LADY Blog. She said I should come and visit if ever I was in Medicine Hat.
It definitely would have been a mistake to have stayed in Medicine Hat’s finest hotel. Staying with Janice introduced me to the kind of service the queen might expect at the Ritz Carlton. Even though she was within minutes of playing a major role hosting the Alberta Archaeology Association Conference, you would never have known she was in the final frantic stages of pre-conference prep hysteria. She provided me with limousine services, hosted bar, poached salmon dinner and lots of laughs. While cooking me whatever I wanted for breakfast she told me she had been showing her friends the copy of my photograph that appeared with the pre-event advertisement in the Medicine Hat News. At my free public lecture she turned to the people beside her and said, ”We grew up in the same community.” Apparently even a minimal amount of reflected glory is better than no reflected glory at all.
So I’ve forgiven her for taking me on that white-water rafting trip, for I hardly think I would be as well treated in Paris, Vienna or New York as I was at her home in Medicine Hat. And if you are ever invited to make a speech in Medicine Hat, I suggest you prepare yourself for travel by making friends with Janice.

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE

One time I lost my head and mistook myself for a sighted person. I don’t know quite how it came about, or how long it had been brewing. Mostly I chalk it up to the giddy euphoria of getting my Master’s degree.
Getting a Master’s is one of the few life goals I ever set for myself. I envisioned it before I was twenty. Actually I didn’t really envision getting a Master’s, for I knew that would be hard, given my tendency to be an average or slightly above average student. But I envisioned myself as having a Master’s. So when my fortieth birthday was rapidly approaching, I gambled on the possibility of being admitted as a mature student, hoping I’d somehow picked up some real smarts along the way. My Master’s degree was everything I’d hoped it would be. With those letters—M.Ed.--behind my name I felt emboldened to do things I hadn’t done before, like applying to teach a humour course at the Naramata Centre summer program. And when the Naramata people accepted my proposal, I set out to teach a course that would be so visually satisfying that no participant would be able to claim they’d been cheated by the narrow view presented by a blind instructor. With a little help from the sighted world I assembled overheads, posters, cartoons and other funny pictures. Then I planned out a program of humour that I hoped would keep us laughing for the entire week.
We arrived early at Naramata, the way instructors do, and set up our campsite. We got the keys to my classroom. David helped me set it up. While we were putting stuff on the walls he glanced out the window and noticed a blind man passing by.
“There goes a blind guy,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe he’ll be in your class.”
“Surely not,” I said. In all our Naramata family summers, taking everything from massage to storytelling, we had never once encountered a blind person. But later on that evening, when the classes assembled in their rooms for the opening welcome, I heard a cane tapping and a classmate volunteering to find him a seat.
My heart sank. I couldn’t believe my terrible luck.
I had been a blind student so many times, but I’d never once considered the possibility of teaching one. I remembered the early university years, before the advent of disability services, when I would stroll in on the first day of class and introduce myself to the professor. “I’ll need some system for writing exams,” I would announce. “And I’ll need you to talk while you write on the blackboard.” And those professors faced with a lecture theatre of 500 first-year sociology students, would start calculating before my eyes. Some of them weren’t too gracious. Most of them were amazing.
Then there were the years of disability services. I would phone professors several months in advance to warn them that I would be taking their class. Disability Services would arrange my exams. I would ask the professors to read the material they were showing on the overheads. I expected them to be gracious. After all, this time I was in the Faculty of Education. The classes were small. Most of them were gracious. But some of them would simply put up an overhead crammed with information and leave a silent time for the class to copy it down. I turn to my neighbour who would begin reading in a hoarse whisper that could be heard all over the room. Some profs would actually start talking again over the sound. The life of a blind student is always a mixed bag. You want to fit in but you need special consideration.
Three seconds after he arrived, my new blind student came forward to introduce himself to me. I tried to reach out but words of welcome caught in my throat. We were on two different planets. I could hardly speak to him, so furious was I at his presence. Here was I, making my teaching debut with a stimulating class for sighted participants, and he wouldn’t be able to participate. He, on the other hand, was delighted to find me. He hadn’t been blind for long and was having a little trouble adjusting. He’d been feeling pretty down, he confided. He thought maybe in a humour class he’d be able to make it without feeling too conspicuous. He had never imagined that he would find a blind teacher. Already it was giving him hope.
That night, while the other campers slept in the fresh mountain air, I fumed in my sleeping bag. In all my years of teaching professors how to teach a blind student I had never once considered that my presence might have angered them, might have ruined their plans, put them on the spot, made them feel inadequate. A mild inconvenience, is what I would have called it. What was I going to do with all my visuals now? How was this guy supposed to participate? Why hadn’t somebody warned me?
By the time the crows had begun to welcome the dawn I was ready to set about undoing a whole week’s curriculum. Every day’s activity had to be re-planned. There would have to be choices participants could make. In each block of choices, there had to be at least one choice that would work for a blind person.
Now a humour class is not the easiest thing to teach. It doesn’t work if people don’t laugh. The class turned out to be a group with mixed abilities and expectations. Many a time I thanked fate for sending me the blind guy. He had a natural gift for humour that kept us all in stitches and made my job much easier than it would have been without him. I ended the week happily.
Then I made myself a promise. I would never again try to teach like a sighted person. Anybody who ended up in my class would have to do without visuals for a while. I’ve kept that promise through twelve years and hundreds of classes. It has saved me a lot of work. And if a blind person ever again shows up without warning, I will be ready.

BRINGING ON SPRING

Sixteen yellow pansies and twelve purple petunias.
My contribution to bringing on spring.
I planted them out in veranda pots
And wished them all well
Though I really can’t say that I ever before
Planted flowers with patches of snow on the ground.

But we’ve waited too long for spring to come.
And somebody had to do something!!!

BRUISING

There’s a simple hope concept I’ve been talking about for ten years or more, the idea of bruising. It’s a paradigm that takes your friends and relatives by surprise. Something happens to you, and your reaction is—well—an over reaction, totally out of proportion with what they would expect from you. Suppose, let us say, that you bump your shin on the open dishwasher door, momentarily uncomfortable maybe, but certainly not life-threatening. And yet—inexplicably—you cry out in anguish, leaping in the air, cursing on the descent. Nobody but you can understand your reaction. Nobody but you knows how much it hurts. Nobody but you knows that, just yesterday, you barked that same shin in the same place. Now it hurts much more today because it is already bruised.
When I first wrote about bruising, I understood it best in terms of the dishwasher. That analogy helped me make the personal link to the bruised people who brought me their sorrow. It helped me encourage them to take it slow, give themselves time to get back into the mainstream, protect themselves and not be afraid to rest for a while.
Today I understand the bruising concept more deeply. David and I are moving slowly in the wake of Linda’s death, operating at arm’s length, taking on the responsibilities of the encroaching world with uncharacteristic ambivalence.
It is not yet three years since we began the journey through illness to death with my mother. That journey was followed closely by a journey with David’s father. Then, at Valentine’s, we started down the road with Linda. And we find, to our surprise, that we are fragile. A kind word brings the threat of unexpected tears. An evening out exhausts us. I do believe we are bruised.
“Bruising is a natural phenomenon,” I would say in a hope presentation. “Bruises do heal. It takes time, and possibly ice to make them disappear. Most of all, it takes protection. You can’t keep hitting on them.”
No doubt about it, it’s a bit of a worry, doing things when you are bruised. Today I am looking ahead. On May 23 I will have given 13 hope presentations to a variety of audiences during the month that began April 23. One down, twelve to go. And I wonder how I can be counted on to inspire hope while I’m in this state of recovery, experiencing joy in moderation, not sick enough to cancel out.
Hope ethicist Christy Simpson once coached me in a time of discouragement before a public lecture. “Do the hope stuff you do with others,” she said confidently. “You’ll find it will work on you.”
And it did work on me, so she’d probably give the same advice again if I called up to ask for it. For now I will say, “Thank heavens I’m an expert in hope. I’d hate to be facing twelve presentations on despair!”

LEARNING ABOUT TEXAS

We went to the Texas Storytelling Festival.
Texans were surprised we had traveled so far.
We were surprised that they knew anything about Edmonton.
Americans rarely know anything about Edmonton.

We watched women’s basketball on TV.
It took four nights for Tennessee to win.
And we will forever wonder how we got so hooked
As to spend four nights on women’s basketball.

We ate and drank free at the Manager’s Reception
Meats and veggies and fine fruit salad.
Sometimes we were the only ones there drinking free beer.
And we are still wondering why that hotel offers a manager’s receptions.

We thought we’d be paying for hotel parking
We thought we’d be paying for university parking
We thought we’d be paying a toll on the toll road.
And we wonder why nobody charged us for any of it.

We walked the streets of downtown Dallas
And cycled the seawall that borders Galveston
Reluctantly boarded the plane to come home
For we still didn’t know quite enough about Texas.

RECOGNITION

It was Lawrence who noticed the three little crocuses, first flowers of the spring, an uncommon observation for a guy who cares little for flowers. And a good thing it is that he noticed them, for now they lie buried under a foot of snow. I don’t know if crocuses care about being noticed. Possibly they only flower to please themselves. But a little positive recognition never does any harm. It means all the more when it comes from unexpected places.

A MESSAGE FOR LINDA AND OTHERS

Whenever Linda and I were alone in her hospital room, she would tell me she hoped soon to catch up on THE HOPE LADY Blog. She didn’t ask what she might find there, and I didn’t tell her how my writing had dwindled and then stopped altogether. I knew that I would write something special for her to read at the first sign that she might come into contact with a computer. I knew I would do that special piece of writing no matter how busy I was, no matter where I was. I had no idea what the piece would say.
Now Linda is gone. At no time did she come even remotely close to a computer. She did not want to be gone. She wanted to live. That was her story and she stuck with it. Her mind was willing. Her body? Not so much.
And so, to you Linda, this is what I will say. I didn’t quit writing because I had lost my hope. I didn’t quit because I had lost my hope for your recovery. I quit because I was already unbelievably busy when you got sick, and the action around your health consumed all the time and creativity I would have given to writing. My hope, like yours, stayed firmly intact.
When you lose the body of somebody in your life, it sometimes clears a space for memories and thoughts that had slipped below the radar of your consciousness. I had forgotten, and have only now remembered how you worried about me when I first married your brother. You worried because I couldn’t find a job and you thought that was just plain wrong. You thought potential employers might be ruling me out because of my blindness. You came up with schemes that would encourage potential employers to get to know me. If I would offer to work for nothing, even for a week, you were certain they would put me on the payroll and keep me for as long as I wanted to stay.
I didn’t know how to respond to your overtures. It is likely that I ignored them altogether. I was pretty scared at the time. I was only twenty then and I didn’t have the crystal ball that would have shown me the full life of happy and meaningful employment that was about to unfold for me. But I do know that it gave me a lot of happiness to know that you were on my side. This is what we all need, people on our side.
To those of you who have noticed the silence of THE HOPE LADY and taken the time to inquire, I say thank you for asking. Give me a few more days and things will settle down. That’s what I need, a few more days.

AUDACIOUS HOPING, EXPECTANT WAITING

And here are two ideas that belong together: audacious hope and expectant waiting. Audacious hope is the ability to take action toward a goal that has very little likelihood of being achieved (West). Expectant waiting is biding your time until the right time comes along (Marcel as quoted by my buddy Lenora). It seems that audacious hopers might certainly experience a lot of expectant waiting.

RE_SNOW

Geese flying over
Pirate straying off the walking path
Muddy-bottomed pant legs,
Snow every third day
Melting wet the next day.

Re-snow I call it,
Stodgy Old Man Winter!
Won’t accept reality
Won’t adapt to change
Trying to keep the ground covered
Making spring come several times
Just to prove she’s serious.

AUTHENTICALLY HAPPY

“How are you?” asked my friend last night.
I said, “fine.”
“Fine?” she queried. Possibly the scowl on my face was confusing her.
“Maybe fine with a small f,” I said. “Yes, I’m small-f fine.”
Actually, if I’d been more with it at the time, I should have said Jangled rather than fine. Big J Jangled, ringing ears, spinning head, racing thoughts, list of things to do, taxi waiting outside the door. Choir practice was over. I was on my way home to write emails. Over the next thirty-six hours I would tell a story at a concert, give two keynote speeches at different conferences and practice music for Sunday. And I would pay attention to my family, give them support, give them attention. I would pet the dog. I would water the plants. I had no time to talk about it.
“Good-bye,” I called over my shoulder. I was moving on.
“I am over-stimulated,” I said to David later. “Still, I think I’m fine.”
What does it mean to be fine? Is being fine the same as being happy? Martin Seligman writes that authentic happiness happens when three factors work together: pleasure; meaning; and engagement. I have all these three. What do I love more than music and storytelling? What could give my life more meaning than being part of a family, making a contribution, being important to others?
It’s the engagement part that got a little out of hand. I said I’d keep the choir going while the director went to Australia. A lot of people stepped forward to help. I wanted to include all of them. The result is fantastic, but it’s more work than I had imagined. I wanted to tell my stories at concerts. I didn’t pursue it because I was too busy with other things. But then people started asking me to tell stories. I didn’t realize I’d be so busy. And how many times had I wished that people would start seeking me out for keynote speeches? Conference planners pay good money for keynotes. When I agreed to do two on one Saturday I did not know I would be telling a story the night before, or leading the choir, or visiting family at the hospital.
As I write this morning, I know that I was correct in telling my friend that I was small-f fine. It was late and I was tired. Incredibly though, even though I was scowling when I said it, in the big picture, I was and am authentically capital-H HAPPY!

THE CULTURAL DIVIDE

An acquaintance asked to kiss my hand
Because she is from Turkey
And people in Turkey kiss the hands of older people.
That’s how she explained it.

Which got me wondering
Just how old you have to be
In order to be eligible
For a kiss on the hand in Turkey.

And while I was wondering
I also wondered
Just how long it would take me
To be comfortable with being kissed on the hand.

And just how long it will take her
To move beyond the practice
Of picking out people who look older”
And kissing hands in Canada.

And all of this got me thinking
How amazing it is
That we cross so many cultural divides
In the course of a lifetime.

SECRET BLOG

A friend of mine has started a blog.
I read it every day
To see what she has to say.
But I never tell a soul
Because it’s a secret blog!

I am the only one who knows about it.
Well, maybe not the only one.
She might have given the blog address
To some other interested blog-reader.

Or it just might be that a blog peruser
Flicking and clicking out there in the blogosphere
Has already found it
And marked it
And promised to look it up again.

PEOPLE WHO VISIT IN HOSPITALS

This is a salute to all the people who visit in hospitals,
Paying more attention to the needs of the patients than to their own need to be acknowledged.

To the ones who take along the newspaper,
Knowing they’ll stay longer if they can sit reading quietly.

To the ones who get frantic calls in the middle of the night
And the ones who lie on terrible cots and sit with aching necks in straight-backed chairs.

This is a salute to those who visit the ones who spend their days visiting in hospitals, Giving a vote of confidence to the ones who spend their nights on terrible cots or sitting in straight-backed chairs.

Norman Cousins once said that a hospital is no place for a sick person,
That one who has a choice ought not to stay there.

So let us salute those who visit in hospitals.
They are the ones who can tell you
That a hospital is no place for a well person.

BABY COUNSELLORS

March. It comes every year. It’s the month when you suddenly notice that confident mature counsellors have taken the place of last September’s baby counsellors. They have learned how to listen compassionately to sad stories. They have learned to let go when things aren’t working. Best of all, they have learned to celebrate achievements—really celebrate them—recognizing the true value of small things.

I tell them in September that it will be this way in March, aware that they don’t believe me, and even I am doubting it. It’s hard to picture, harder than picturing outdoor petunias at Christmas. Nevertheless you can count on it. It’s as predictable as Reading Week and term paper stress.

I love to watch it happen. It’s my early sign of spring.

AND THEN THERE ARE DAYS

There are days when the world is your oyster
And people listen to you
With open ears and open minds
Then beg for more when you thought you were finished.

And then…

There are days when you go in with a plan
That should have been a good plan
But appears to be a poor plan
And trying to change it doesn’t help.

Those are the days when you have to concede
That the really good days
Might be really good luck
Instead of really good planning.

Those are the days to finish early
A better alternative
Than giving up hope.

MAGPIES

Mark called to let me know that the magpies are making nests in the tall trees. We couldn’t take time to discuss it. His bus was pulling up at the stop as he gasped out the news.
Most people would see this as a warning. Nests mean eggs. Eggs mean baby magpies. Baby magpies turn into noisy adolescent magpies. Noisy adolescent magpies turn into adults who build nests.
Most people dislike magpies. Robins are the perennial sign of spring. Even on the sunniest, toastiest, drippingest days in February magpie nests in Edmonton generally go uncelebrated. But Mark has called to share the joy. It’s more than just a promise of spring in February. He’s forgiven the magpie who unloaded on his upturned face as he gazed through the leaves. He’s remembering the baby he once rescued from the street, recalling how he sheltered it in the en suite bathroom of his high-rise apartment, recalling how it sailed away shortly after he moved it to the balcony.
Never one to sing along with magpies, I’ve nonetheless forgiven Mark for the role he may have played in increasing the magpie population. It’s another aspect of the personality that causes him to spend his time helping inner city street folks and children with disabilities. That long-ago magpie rescue was a foreshadowing of the work he was about to do. It might even be seen as an early exploration in fatherhood. Could these pre-leaf nest-builders be the grandchildren?

SINGING

How sweet it was to arrive early for a presentation and be greeted by the joyous sound of 80 women singing! They were singing church songs, even though it was Wednesday morning, and they were attending a meeting. They were singing sweet and loud, singing as if there was nothing else in the whole wide world they would rather be doing.

The opportunity to sing is one of the gifts that organized religion has given. I know a young man who will not willingly enter a church. Yet his whistled tunes on the veranda, his boisterous outpourings in the shower, are the songs we taught him in Sunday school. I do not challenge him on this. Why would I do anything that might silence him? As I hum along with him, and look to the future, I wonder where his children will learn to sing.

CHOOSING

In some ways my computer is a little like my husband. I rely a lot on both of them, and I do tend to take them for granted. Many of the things I agree to do are rooted in the assumption that one or both of them will be there to do their part. And if this seems a little unfair, particularly unwise, putting machine and man on equal footing, there really is no reason for concern. Faced with the necessity to choose, say yes to one and leave the other behind, I am quite certain I’ll take the husband any day!!!!

WHEN HILLARY CLINTON ASKS MY ADVICE

When Hillary Clinton asks my advice
Which she possibly won’t since she’s never heard of me,
I’ll tell her to give up talking about realism
And do everything she can to be inspirational
And to start right away, not waste one more second.

You can tell at a glance that Hillary’s handlers
Have not been doing their research on hope
Because if they had they’d be telling Hilary
You’re wasting your breath shouting, “Be realistic!”
To a crowd that’s decided to be hopeful.

When the blacks were freed from the bonds of slavery
It wasn’t by anyone being realistic
Now deep in the memory runs an audacious hope
Brought spurting, bubbling up to the surface
By a leader of inspiration.

Next year the crowd will be more realistic
In the worst case perhaps a bit disappointed.
But this year the crowd is going to be hopeful
Enjoying the lift of a wild inspiration
And next year will be too late for you, Hillary.

THE MIRACLE

Last week I witnessed a miracle. After spending 45 minutes with a wheezing, gurgly-chested woman who could hardly breathe, I told a story. When the story was done, she was breathing normally.
There are a lot of people who would question whether it actually was a miracle. Followers of Milton Erickson would call my story interlude an Ericksonian technique. Breath specialists would likely point out that she was catching her breath as I was telling the story. Anxiety specialists would say that the story reduced her anxiety, thus increasing her breathing capacity. Professional storytellers would use it as evidence to support funding professional storytellers for breath-enhancement programs.
I’ve thought of dressing up the story for a professional article. I could write about the confluence of counselling and storytelling, the intersection of anxiety reduction and physical well-being. It would all look very professional indeed, until the truth slipped out. The truth is that I was trying to persuade the woman to go to the doctor and ask for a medical solution to her breathing problem which—I pointed out—was far more severe than it had been over the past few months. . She, in turn, pointed out that it would be easier for her to breathe if she didn’t have to talk so much, and she wouldn’t have to talk so much if I would talk more. Then I, not wishing to continue lecturing, told her a story that was in my mind because it had been told to me only a few days earlier and I had noted it on THE HOPE LADY Blog. It had nothing to do with her situation. There was no justification for telling it in a counselling session. It was not in any way humorous. It was not about books or reading.
Here’s the before-and-after summary. Before the story her voice was barely audible. After the story it was loud and clear. Before the story she was talking about suicide. After the story she was asking questions about our storytelling circle. Before the story she could not remember any books she had read recently. After the story she mentioned two books by title and author. Before the story she did not laugh at my carefully chosen joke. After the story she told me three jokes.
Call it whatever you like. I call it a miracle. I am just glad I was there to witness it.

GIVENS, TAKENS, GIFTS

How often I sit here to witness the process of givens and takens and gifts. Today I talked with Barb about multiple sclerosis. One minute, for example, you have a body—a given. The next minute you have multiple sclerosis. Your life is permanently altered because some function plus your faith in the future of your body is taken. And then, when a function returns, perhaps you are able to move your leg again, that movement, once a given, is now a gift.
With Barb’s observations in mind, and a dollop of gratitude that I have never been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I hope to work on short-circuiting the process, so that more of my givens could be seen as gifts without enduring the painful process of having them taken. Yes, I understand that a celebration wouldn’t be a celebration if it were routine. Christmas is only special because it happens occasionally. Still, it seems a shame that givens—like health—have to be taken, or seriously threatened, before we can truly celebrate them as gifts.
Perhaps the first step is to imagine my life without things I take for granted. There are the big things, like meeting David after work, and getting phone calls from the kids. The loss of these would be so large, so traumatic. And then there are the things of no apparent consequence, my navel for one. How would I feel if I woke one morning to discover that it had gone missing, filled in without warning and grown over with skin? My life wouldn’t seem to be changed. Yet it would be different. My faith in the continuation of things with no apparent consequence would be permanently shaken. And so, with Joni Mitchell’s voice singing, “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” ringing in my head, I give over these few lines to a celebration of all the unnamed, unnoticed givens in my life that would become potential future gifts the moment after I lost them.

BARACK OBAMA AND ME

Among the thousands of things I never expected is this: I never expected to be giving speeches that sound like candidates’ speeches for the US presidency. But here I am, talking a bout Audacious Hope, just like Barack Obama.
Gender, race, political aspirations and citizenship aside, we have some things in common, Barack and me. Both of us get a lot of applause when we talk about hope. Both of us use the language of audacity and I believe. He’s getting more coverage though.
Neither of us invented the term audacious hope, though I expect that both of us are inspired by the same guy, Cornel West, a writer on black history who teaches at Princeton. Neither of us is much enamored with the idea of talking about false hope. Both of us believe that when somebody insists that you choose between hope and realism, it is better to start with hope and trust realism to follow, because when you start with realism, hope has a harder time of it.
There really isn’t any substitute for good old inspiration. Obama is out there every day, inspiring Americans with his talk about hope. And though I toil to categorize hope strategies and describe them in the language of academics, there is nothing more rewarding for me than the moment when a depressed or anxious client suddenly becomes inspired.
I have been noticing Barack Obama’s name in the hope research literature abstracts for nearly a year now, noticing it and ignoring it. I have not been interested in what American political hopefuls have to say about hope. But this week I cannot avoid hearing his name and his speeches every time I turn on the radio. The words they are playing are the words I am saying at health care conferences and mental health support groups. No doubt everybody else is hearing Obama’s speeches too. In future people will think I was inspired by Obama.
It’s a funny world, isn’t it?

A THIRD LIFE

Pearl Ann told us a story about a man named Private
Samuel Laboucan from Elk Point Alberta who died twice and was buried twice. His first death occurred at Ypres, in Belgium, when the Germans gassed the soldiers in the trenches. His second death occurred in Wainwright Alberta in 1934. The second death was followed closely by the first burial, in a section of a Wainwright cemetery where the locals would bury the town drunk. The first death was followed by a hero’s celebration back home in Elk Point. He knew nothing of the celebration. He had forgotten his name, and his official identity had found its way home without him. Loathed as a deserter, the nameless man dug graves for the bodies that blotted the landscape of war.
Nobody wanted Samuel Laboucan by the time he remembered his name and returned to Elk point. Those who knew him had grieved and moved on. He had shrunk to a picture of disgust, unrecognizable as the celebrated soldier. Drunk and dishevelled, he wandered alone.
His second burial occurred when the Canadian Legion recognized him as one of their own and moved his grave to a place of honour. He is one of the heroes who will be brought back to life in dramatic presentations in the pageantry of Wainwright’s 100th anniversary. Pearl Ann cried when she told us the story, a belated tribute of grief in a storytelling circle for a man who died before she was born.
His third life, a great wrong put to right, better late than never.

BEING THANKFUL

You got to be thankful for what you got,”” says Bertine in Amy McKay’s novel THE BIRTHING HOUSE. If your man smokes, be thankful he doesn’t chew. If he smokes and chews, be thankful he doesn’t drink. If he does all three, be thankful he probably won’t live long.””
And if you laugh out loud at this, the way we did when first we heard it, then you might understand why, on Saturday, when the temperature rose to a sunny, balmy -20, we stopped huddling in the house and went skating. Sensible people know -20 is cold. Hardly anybody else went skating that day, leaving us the freedom of the oval. Just one more reason to be thankful.

WRITERS BLOCK

“This blog is sensored in China,” says Susan
To explain why she hasn’t been reading it.
And I am awestruck that THE HOPE LADY Blog
Should frighten the government of China.

“All blogs are blocked in China,” says Susan
To explain why this one remains unavailable.
And I am chastened and utterly grateful
To live in a country where writing about hope
Can be put on-line free for everyone.