“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
~ Albert Einstein
Yesterday my son Jacob and his girlfriend Isabel flew into Boston from Phoenix. We waited until they arrived to visit our neighbor’s Christmas tree farm so that we could cut down our own tree—a first for Isabel. They had closed for the season, but graciously allowed us to have the farm to ourselves.
As the three of us stood in the field of trees waiting for my daughter Sadie and husband Luke to catch up to us, I noticed a bluebird on the tip of a tree and pointed it out.
“Wow, beautiful,” Isabel said. Then she spied another on a separate tree. Then Jake saw one. Suddenly, before our eyes, a flock of bluebirds filled the air between the firs and pines. We lost our breath with awe.
I recounted a story from a few years back when I longed for a bluebird feeder because we had never had a bluebird in our yard, though I knew they were around. So, Jake built me one for my birthday. It was the wrong size and shape; bluebirds are picky about their dwellings. However, on my birthday morning, I emerged into the garden to witness a single bluebird sitting atop the house and checking out its suitability for long term residency. My feathered friend even posed and let me take its picture for Facebook as proof of the birthday miracle.
Of course, the bluebird of happiness didn’t stay. All things are transitory, as we know. But the lesson of turning my hope into a wish, coupled with the action Jake took which then manifested a bluebird in our yard for the first time, was not lost on me. It can be distilled into a simple equation: HOPE=WISH+ACTION=MANIFESTATION
Just last week, a church group visited for an advent retreat. The themes were peace, hope, and gifts. We sat down to an expressive arts activity where they each had an 11 x 14 piece of paper on which to write about the things weighing them down in the world—personal, local, or global. After they had emptied out their thoughts, they turned the paper over to see an outline of a dove in flight filling the page, which they then cut out. The final step was to take various scraps of colored tissue paper and glue them over the words expressed from their heavy hearts, thus transmuting the dove into a beautiful thing that would take flight with hope.
We marveled at how the act of creating calmed and soothed us. We noticed how no two doves were alike. The activity reinforced how we each have our own strengths and gifts to transform what we don’t like, or rather to create what we hope for in the world.
HOPE=WISH+ACTION=MANIFESTATION
“Hope is the thing with feathers—” poet Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “that perches in the soul.” Yet, in a world so ready to “abash the little bird,” to hope can take an act of bravery or courage. “But what about climate change,” some will say. “What about oppression, poverty, war, and suffering? Isn’t the human race doomed?”
Hope doesn’t always come in a flock of bluebirds or an unexpected gift. Yet, hope is something we can all have, or more importantly, something we can all do. “The greatest renewable fuel is hope,” I heard David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee say on NPR the other day. And I agree. Hope is a renewable resource that multiplies in myriad ways…when the plane lands safely, when we embrace our neighbor, when we stop to savor a moment of awe in nature, when we write our worries down and transform them into wishes that we then act upon.
For us, at the Christmas tree farm, hope came as a miraculous surprise, when we spotted our first-ever, four-pointed Christmas tree. Four tree trunks grew from one spruce that had been chopped. Hope multiplies when we each dare to wish and act in the direction of those wishes.
Yesterday was one of those days so filled with love and surprises, I thought I would burst, a day when it was easy to believe that if we could just hold each other in love, then hope and light and peace could exist everywhere.
We must stay awake to the world and the people around us. We must hope and believe that our consciousness around the matter can change the world. We must spread and witness the light of awe and miracles (no matter how small) and savor them each day, let them really soak in and strengthen us for flight.