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 chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

Tonight on Desperate Housewives, the Wisteria Lane residents gathered to watch while rescuers dug through destroyed houses, looking for survivors from the tornado.  One character offered a friend the hope that her family was not dead beneath the rubble.  Another character angrily thought that they should have prepared the friend for the worst.  The oldest lady spoke of hope.

Dickinson called hope the thing with feathers.  On the surface, that makes hope appear fragile.  I think hope is powerful, perhaps the most powerful force, along with love.

God knows we need it to be.  I watched American Idol Gives Back last night with its relentless images of horrific poverty and despair.  People who live on the equivalent of $2.00 a day who can barely afford a half a cup of rice to feed their families.    Hundreds of children who have lost their parents to AIDS.  Rampant malaria.  The news tonight told of food crises in a dozen countries where production of staples like wheat has been diverted to corn to make biofuels. 

In this country we hear daily about our own economic woes.  There are still people in Louisiana and Mississippi who haven't recovered from Hurricane Katrina.

There's bad news everywhere and it can wear on the spirit of even the most positive among us.

I had a conversation with my hairstylist last night and he talked about how one customer after another talks about how bad things are getting in the economy.  Everytime he hears this, he freaks out and starts to panic himself -- even though he knows that his income is stable, his bills manageable, his financial picture pretty secure.

For me, sometimes I just have to stop listening to everything.  This doesn't mean that I turn my back and ignore causes that I can support, or don't look for ways that I can help.  It simply means that I tune out the sadness, the worry, the freaking out.  Too much of that overwhelms me and I sink into inertia.  When it seems that the little I can do can't possible help, the tendency is to give up and do nothing.

The best defense against doing nothing is to hold on to hope.  With hope, we can believe that we'll come back from any storm; that we can improve someone else's life condition even if it's one cup of rice at a time.

Hope is the thing with feathers, and I refuse to clip its wings.