Greg took this photo of me in Palm Springs during a Modernism Week home tour a few weeks ago. The funny thing is that I was standing in front of that doorway getting ready to take a photo of how the wallpaper popped against the white of everything else with the light from the window in the bedroom giving it a burst of illumination. He was at the other end of the hallway seeing how the color of my dress added to that pop.
I could go on about the design and color aesthetics of this photo, but when I look at it, I’m also reminded of something else– hope.
When I used to speak about suicide, grief, and moving forward, I always talked about how we all have an ember of hope inside us. The challenge is that it’s never burning at the same level of brightness. Some days are harder than others. Some lives are harder than others. We aren’t usually at the same level of hope as maybe other people in our orbit.
But it burns and keeps burning. The key is that we must find it and help it to burn brighter. How we do that varies for each of us, however, I do know that the inspiration to find that hope does lie around us. Sometimes it’s about taking a step back and admiring the sun as it comes up for a new day, washing the previous day away, a clean chalkboard to create something new in our lives. As we come out of a night of darkness, the sun is reminding us that there is light. And hope.
Sometimes life tries to squash that hope. Sometimes people try to squash the hope. Yet inside us, it still burns. I believe in hope. Through losses and a long list of life disappointments, hope has kept me going forward and believing that all just isn’t well, it’s still great no matter what happens to me.