Hope - Gloria Guest

*I share the following previously published blog post in keeping with this months topic on writing from the heart and how I choose to try to use my writing as a tool to encourage and uplift others from where I've been and where I'm headed.

With winter lingering I’ve been thinking  about a poem that I wrote quite awhile ago about the hope that I felt one year in finding the first crocus of spring. We need hope even more when it is nowhere in sight so even though winter is still with us and spring is still a ways off I’m going to share it. Some of you will recognize it as I’ve published it on my blog or Facebook before or perhaps I’ve sent it to you sometime when I hoped it would help you through something you were going through.

Hope

Signs of Life

Purple stems protruding from prairie earth

With snow still visible on the ground

A day when my heart seeks shelter and solace

How brave and fierce the Crocus is!

Not grown in potting shed or tended in gardeners plot

It’s undaunted courage inspires me and woos me

I cup them to my face

And inhale their fragrance of hope

While Creators breath midst prairie breeze

Surrounds my searching soul

During trying circumstance

Gloria Lynn Guest 2002

Spotting the first crocus of spring has always been to me the sign that spring has truly arrived. While it’s premature, I can always hope that spring is not too far away.

Hope is a small but mighty word.

It’s as strong as an anchor when the winds are blowing and the waves are crashing; the only thing we have left between us and death.

It’s as fragile as a flickering light in the window, placed there by a mother, wife or child of a soldier in a conflict far overseas, lighting the way home.

Hope is as gentle as a baby’s breath or as fierce as a battle cry.

The embers of hope can stir in the heart of one or two and catch fire across an entire nation  Yet hope can also appear in the form of the small purple crocus that bravely grows on a snowy hillside.

Without hope, men give up and die and with it, they find the strength and will to fight and live.

Hope doesn’t come in predictable ways but through the window of the unforeseen; it’s presence perhaps even going unnoticed until it’s all you see.

We don’t find hope. Hope finds us. It seeks us out in whatever circumstances we are in and whispers a question. Do you dare to hope?

Gloria seeks out the early Spring Crocus' on the sunny side of hills near her hamlet of Caron Sk., where she resides and also the hills of the farm near Hardy Sk., where she and her husband farmed and raised their two sons. She writes words of hope on her blog at gloriaguest.wordpress.com and also plugs away at writing her Memoir entitled Dandelions From Heaven - A Story of Hope & Healing

. Her blog and memoir deal with the not so easy topics of Childhood Trauma, Grief, Suicide, Depression and other life circumstances that she or those she has loved have faced. In her writing it  is her utmost desire to shine a light back for those who are coming behind while still seeking the light she needs to shine on her own path daily.