Friday, September 14, 2007

Born on the National Day of Prayer...


Three days earlier:

America had its wake up call – a call being answered by whom? Really, no f.bomb kidding!

It is my duty to report to you - unless you’re the one taking your absolute last look and thoughts on all you knew, all that you have loved and longed for… Is that one you?

Shall we raise a flag for such an idea - to waive good bye to those who are gone and go? Good bye neighbor. Good by relative, or lover, or friend. Some waived a flag today; others on your behalf are being laid beneath one. That is the wake up call we heard.

Our child: Hope?

Hope – as the child was aptly named was born on this, the national day of prayer. Where did this hope come from – this ephemeral, this fondness – this longing for hope even in the absence of itself?

Call life what you may – the child Hope, so names life a main event. Some say something to the effect of: “Save pie-town liquored-up speeches for circus folk.” Another school of thought blasted back: "If anything be blessed – hope may have had something to do with it.

Whose right? Who’s wrong? A constitution let’s both sides forget about some impasse to continue on. Hope’s first thought: a national day of prayer? Or a realm of growth and knowledge taken into our minds to cohere, too adapt, to do what even our own imaginations are fueled by: those before us whose works served humankind?

The child Hope…, born on the National Day of Prayer. Who would have thought? The difference between just 3 days in what was otherwise an ordinary onset of autumnal lunar shift tides and leaf-laden car rides on the way through an extraordinary September morning?

It is rumored 'hope spans sorrow in the humanrace'. Today, Hope turns 6.

Haven't you seen that kind of hope in someone’s eyes? Isn’t that where you were re-granted a feeling of such hope - a glance of hope - holding it closer, longer still?

As all parents do, Hope’s parents loved her as the most precious of gifts. They nurtured Hope, seeing Hope grow from an almost alien-esque state of something we may not know enough about to confirm or deny. All the while – calling life something we do bow down before in some unique way of our own while thinking it be someone else’s way; even thinking it to be our own– then casting a name upon it like some sort of belief system you get on podcast or cable: The works and deeds and service of those today and before are so much bigger. Hope is bigger, fuller, and stronger still.

Today – Hope celebrates a birthday; a birthday in time essentially between the start of the first geophysical year 50 years ago last June 2007 and…, groups of people still fighting and making war over words in books clung to like stray dogs lapping the bile of cart animals gone crazy in a desert bazaar.
Is hope older than the bizarre? Does it matter? Who cares? Good. Good ideas abound.

Hope spans sorrow – the sorrow of broken faith placed in mere mortals as the emissaries of some creation maker spraying sanitizer and freshener over everything in some Houdini-like re-do of our civilization touted to crashed the gates too reportedly squeezed out too much booty on simulator TV. Does hope stand above this all – above the complexity and intricacy of where all the blocks fit?

Hope looks onto life from star-lit eyes – the eyes of first sight, first knowledge and child like. Each lash laden blink re-affirms the span of beauty to hilarity of our kind. Even the mean, the bad, the grossly distempered ill-spoken – holding onto hope. Imagine that? Was it hopes crooked hand revealing hope still, like forest mirth, or side-eye glances of Pan’s lost boys looking for Ca’tain Hook? Who says hope doesn’t have a crooked hand at times?

Fresh! Exuberant! All smiles…, wide eyed. Hope sets off – to school. Universally, we do that among our kind – the kind who seeks out hope. The look of endless expanse in every window Hope looked in on her way – Hope’s way - the what we do too somehow manage a policy among ourselves setting forth how we interact – our intercourse – the process of process. All these things within each of us - each hope within.

Oh yes, something about a story. Not so much a story, as it did happen this day. HOPE turning 6 today: Well it happened. I remember it - and you were there. It happened for every good reason, a story of those who do the deeds.


Hope beats for everyone – some would characterize that as messed up; others - how it brings new ideas, even fresh vistas and blank slates where impossibility and confusion stood before. Hope is indiscriminant. Hope may even favor the prepared? Today, Hope turned six somewhere this day.


  • In dozens of other places, in streets a google-click away - Hope died in remote places as a matter of inconvenient truth - those who also hoped for life - a hope within us all.

Hope was presented to the front of her classroom to be asked: what is your hope, Hope?

Smiling, she looked over her peers, classmates, those assembled around in the classroom - in the hallways. Her mind raced to the windows and out through the blinds and beyond.

Outside, a breeze pushed swings on a playground; sun rays glanced off steel bars worn by the hands of those like stars, like Hope. like you and me. it is too – a hope beyond all other disagreements. Outside, Liberty-lady a lookin’ over the Hudson onto the school where Hope has stood. Where Hope stands and plays.

With a torch as light built onto a nearby rock reaching up from the vast swallow of the Hudson, beneath the halo cast as nimbus on her head rests the story behind the construction of that ‘La liberté éclairant le monde’ as a milestone. Hope holds a tablet whose inscription bears these words "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI" (July 4, 1776).

The real story of sweat and waiting and changes and delay – the building of this edifice – this thing jutting out of the Harbor of Upper New York Bay. Today, as then, a milestone. Hope turning Six, and a day older than the next. It was work and it was toil to build this representation thrusting up from the Harbor, off the shrore in tempest wind and pitching seas- one of many Hudson cool jewels of a story behind an edifice which bares our name.

Hope stands to tell you a story of that statute, outside. Hope’s harbor, where she stands this day – in each of us, is a way harder at work.

“a hope for tomorrow.” — Hope


Copyright Vic - The Network