Week 14--in which hope begins to sing

Beautiful Ones,

I’m sure you are familiar with Emily Dickinson’s famous poem about hope. It’s my mantra right now.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without words—
And never stops—at all—

But when I went online to check why “hope” is in quotes, which seemed rather odd, I discovered that what I thought was Dickinson’s famous poem is actually just the first part of a longer, more intense, and stranger poem.

Let’s listen to the whole poem. Listen with ears tuned not just to her words but to our current world situation:

“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 chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

I thought I knew this poem, but just now, slowly reading the whole thing, I’m hearing it so very differently from what I thought it was saying.

And I’m also hearing Emily Dickinson’s oracular ability to somehow describe what is happening today.

I mean that literally. I’m writing at 5pm on Saturday April 5 as hundreds of thousands of people protest in cities around the country and around the world.

The storm, the fascist storm, is obvious. We are in the chillest land indeed. And yet. Images today of cities overflowing with protesters give me great hope.

So have hope.
Hold onto your hope.
Hold onto what you know is true.
And what you know is holy.
And what you know is right and just and fair.
And necessary.

I think Dickinson got one thing wrong in her poem, though.

She says hope never asked a crumb of me. I don’t think that’s correct. Not today anyway. I hear hope ruffling her feathers in indignation and demanding we do something to save one another.

She is asking us to open our throats and SING not the silent tune, but the screech of justice.

My creative mystic witch sister, Cathy Stevens Pratt, and I have been listening for the last two weeks to what wants to be heard. And what wants to be heard is a prayer practice to heal the world. I know, that’s a tall, if not impossible, order.

But I am going to do it because I have done this before.

If you didn’t know me in 2013, you probably don’t know that my 24-year-old son was sent to prison to force him to name fellow activists in Occupy in front of a secret federal grand jury.

He refused to name names and spent 253 days in a high-security federal prison.

I turned to the Masters and Teachers of the Akashic Record for help. They instructed me to gather a critical mass of friends (which turned out to be 100 people) and have them shower a photo of that prison with divine love for five minutes every day. They were clear that the prayer was to have no words or even intentions. Just love.

It was hard. I won’t sugarcoat it. It was hard. But it worked.

The judge suddenly and unexpectedly released my son from prison four months before the secret federal grand jury was unseated. I am confident that those four months saved my son’s life.

Scroll ahead to 2017 when the current president was elected for the first time. Once again, I knew I had to create some kind of prayer practice and turned to the Masters and Teachers for guidance. They told me how to create a daily prayer practice from Winter Solstice to Inauguration Day. Until now, I thought our prayers didn’t really do anything. Those four years were awful.

But now I can see that in his first administration, he was restrained over and over again by people who actually understood how government and power work. But now, there are no guardians and no guardrails. And we see just how quickly and horribly he can destroy not just the American system but the entire world order.

So now I look back at our prayer and wonder if our prayers helped fortify those guardrails.

So here we are in this moment with people flailing in fear and panic. And Cathy and I are listening very very closely to what wants to be created. We have a plan and will be working on it all week.

We hope to announce it next Sunday.

Until then, keep singing your hope song.

Janet

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