Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Emily Dickinson’s poem Hope grows on me like new feathers sprouting on a young bird in spring.

         Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune—without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

 Unrecognized in her lifetime for her literary talent, today  Emily Dickinson is widely respected as the mother of American Poetry.  In spite of lack of encouragement, fewer than a dozen poems published, and no audience to speak of, she persisted in writing. After her death, her sister discovered 1800 poems secreted away, neatly bound in fascicles.

If we were to meditate on the word hope each day, uproot the sources of our hopelessness, what grand potential would burgeon!

Helen DeRosis, M.D.,  the author of The Book of Hope, was my supervisor during the first year of  my residency.  She advised us psychiatrists-in-training to pay attention to the islands of health in every person. “Find and build on these as you treat your patients,” she said. 

At first, I underestimated the value of her straightforward approach, which seemed overly simplistic, but by the end of the year, I digested, appreciated and integrated her wisdom.

Hope is Golden. Transforming hopelessness into hope is like  spinning straw into gold. In a Brothers Grimm tale, an imp named Rumpelstiltskin succeeds in this miraculous task for a future princess in exchange for her first-born child.

(Of course, in the end, his efforts are for naught; he offers to withdraw his claim if the then-queen can guess his name within three days, and she ultimately discovers it.)

To expand the moral to a metaphor, spinning straw into gold can stand for the experience of  transformation or transcendence.

President Obama’s story is a similar tale of rising to the top against the odds, embracing rather than shrugging off contradictions, which he relates in his book, The Audacity of Hope.

The psychotherapist  works on the cognitive level to discover thoughts  that obstruct the road to hope. I’d venture to guess that more important than lack of opportunity, hopelessness lies at the root of much lost talent and creativity.

Here’s my version of hope.

  

A Psychotherapist's View

We are the last to see ourselves

Mirrors, rivers, bays don’t help

Blind spots buried at our core

Keep us guessing why the sore-

The baffling mystery of it all

Until we recognize our task

To grasp close to doubting breast

Bright, bold hope so each fear

Flowers  full into hope-

bearing luscious  fruit

Conclusion: Transforming hopelessness to hope is essential before a person can reap the rich mine of contentment. 

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)