Explosions of hope

I’ve had a song stuck on repeat in my head for most of the last week.

Actually, its not even the whole song. Its just one line that I can’t seem to stop running through my mind. Its from ‘She Burns’, a song by Northern Ireland born singer/songwriter Foy Vance.

“She is a little explosion of hope”

It doesn’t feel like its been the most hopeful time recently. There seems to be political uncertainty and instability on all sides. In the US, we’re still recovering from an downright unpleasant election which served to reveal some deep and often bitter divisions in our current home. I’m reading tweets from Aleppo that are beyond heartbreaking – death and destruction in 140 characters on my news feed. News of abuse scandals on both sides of the Atlantic.  Confusion over what’s real and what’s fake news which just serves to make the world a more bewildering place.

In recent weeks, I’ve felt a bit like Hillary Clinton – can’t I just stay in bed with the dogs and a good book?

But then there’s this whisper in my head.

“She is a little explosion of hope”

This week my inbox lit up with explosion after explosion of hope. As part of a writing assignment, I threw out a call for any of my expat contacts that might be willing to share their experiences of volunteering.

By and large, these are women who, like me,  gave up a conventional career for the craziness of traveling around the world, ‘following’ their spouse’s career.  Women who move from country to country, building lives in strange cities where they don’t know anyone and who start from scratch, again and again. Tough enough to do, right?

But these women….these women didn’t just build their own lives, they’ve been building communities, changing lives. Story after story kept landing in my inbox – stories about working with refugees, stories about therapy dogs, stories about families with critically ill children, stories about being there to help new arrivals in strange places where they just don’t have anyone else, stories about feeding the hungry.

“She is a little explosion of hope”

A few days ago I pulled into the car park at the local branch of our county library. For Texas, it was a cold and pretty miserable sort of evening. The sort of night that you don’t really want to be out in. The parking lot was full. The library was noisy. There were kids chattering over books displays. In the five minutes it took to pick up my books, I heard at least three languages. Checking out the ‘recent additions’ section on my way out, the selection was eclectic, diverse, inclusive.

An “explosion of hope”. People reading, seeking out knowledge, new worlds, new experiences, learning.

“She is a little explosion of hope”

Last night,  I lay in bed listening to the rain and the wind of a Texan storm with dogs who don’t like storms on either side of me, thinking about a little dog at our local animal shelter. She’s not conventionally cute but she has the sort of eyes and face that Disney animation teams dream of creating. We don’t know all of her story but its clear that she hasn’t had the best experiences in life. She’s had some pretty major surgery.  Despite this, she continues to gently reach out to everyone she meets, offering affection and trust.

“She is a little explosion of hope”

Hope is a fragile and precious thing and some days it seems to be in short supply. I love that these little  every day ‘explosions’ of it disrupt the relentless bad news. These simple, individual things give me a little more faith that maybe, just maybe, we’re going to be OK.

If you’d like to have Foy Vance’s song lyrics stuck in your head too, check out this acoustic version of ‘She Burns’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TfRPCdMfCM