I started this day like I start them all. Wake too early (frustration). Fall asleep right before alarm (fleeting bliss). Snooze (anxiety). Snooze (worry). Snooze (resolution). Shower. Dress/Coffee. Write/Coffee (nothing much -- common themes emerge, they rest on the page, I move on.) Drive.
At some point in my mindless scribbling this morning I found mysef attached to the idea of explaining the difference between faith and hope. I made a rough table with each the title of separate columns and then set out to define each.
Faith was easy.
Faith.
Firm. I listed: will, belief, conviction, release from doubt, strength, steel/iron, fervent.
Hope ... what is hope? The sound of the word, begins with the soft "h" ... (or consider the sound of the spanish "esperanza") -- It took me a much longer time to write: cautious, soft/warm, fleece, tentative, light -- and none of these words succeeded in satisfying me in any way.
Whilst driving, most days I can only focus on what lies ahead, but occasionally, I will drag some things along with me, as was the case this morning. So I thought about these two things, faith and hope. What are they? And even though it was a cloudy morning with dawn deeply obscured, I thought that faith is blue. I don't know the blue color word, but faith is the blue that grows from deep to light -- blue dawn that banishes dark, (the blue that is twenty minutes ahead of sunrise, you know I've timed it) ... and hope is the rosy fingers that spread across the eastern horizon. What continues to elude me, and remains one of my favorite mysteries, is the thin yellowish space that lies between these two. The edge of night and the break of day... the undefined, but widely inhabited part of the landscape that rests between faith and hope.
