the return of hope

Some days more than others, this blank page before me has more qualities of an enemy than a source of promise, of inspiration. It can stare me down with a disgusted, daring look in its eye, arms crossed to my advancement; it knocks me down a time or two when I have to reach for the delete button, when I've bothered to thread some words together only to realize the nonsense that prevails, the structure faulty, the story hollow.

Sometimes the written page is just as formidable. My own words, words as I was at one time pleased with, unprepared to share but proud to have crafted, being re-read weeks later, even years, and suddenly I am embarrassed to find them printed in a pile in my closet. I wonder if anyone has ever stumbled upon them and felt sorry for me, wanted to tell me the truth about my talent. Or worse, the written page that isn't mine, the caustically simple words of some great poet, a best-selling author, between the lines saying, you'll never write this way. You won't figure out the just how to say things like they can.

Billy Collins, one of my favorite poets, former national poet laureate (can you imagine the honor? the pressure I'd feel on my brain?), says in his newest collection, "When a man asked me to look back three hundred years/ Over the hilly landscape of America,/ I must have picked up the wrong pen,/ The one that had no poem lurking in its veins of ink." In my reality, if Billy Collins knows, we can all admit we have felt the same.

If we could only remember, however, that every time you have a reached a point that you believe to be the lowest, change is on its way. There is always a newness hurtling towards you, the air is heavy with it, an approaching revelation, an open door and just the push to get you through it, an idea or a knock or an answer striking you directly between the eyes, something never to be un-seen or un-thought, and the hill suddenly goes up again.

For the first time, in a long time, I have genuinely re-learned what it is like to feel hopeful. There is something to be said for the moment when you go from wanting better things to truly believing they are possible. I have had a lot of kind words over the years, occasionally of the tough love variety, that have encouraged me that life doesn't always stay the same, that we persevere always and forever, and that the changes that endurance can bring will just show up one day, plainly and for all to see, as if it was part of the plan all along. Because, as I know now, it is.

So no matter what happens between now and next Tuesday, the point is this: when you can't anymore, you can. And I think it might have to be the sort of thing you can't really know until you stand there, facing into it, seeing it, literally and figuratively, through your very own weary eyes. When you've reached what you believe a solid standstill, when you can't figure out what's next; when the options have supposedly met exhaustion, when the wells of creativity have drawn up empty; when the page, blankness and all, looms over you, demanding what you have to say but the words don't come: there is hope.

After nearly three years of job-searching, I finally have an inkling of possibility. And as it turns out, an inkling is more than enough. For today, it's all I need.

Details, when I have them, to come.