The Thing with Teeth

Musings on the nature of hope

Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote: Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul/and sings the tune without the words/and never stops at all…

Perhaps for Emily hope was a small winged thing.
For me, hope has always been the thing with teeth.

These early fall days with their shimmering skies and still-balmy breezes seem like a good time to talk about hope. Day by day as we watch, the season shifts. Sunlit hours shrinking, the air cooling around my shoulders.

In the USA the changeover of seasons brings a two-for-one deal: Back to School and back to school shootings — 218 and counting this year alone. Everywhere you look, the disaster is man-made. Here in Europe, floods are killing people. Across the Atlantic, Brazil is burning — fires the size of Italy. So is Palestine, across the Mediterranean. Burning for different reasons, but the same.

Greed, land theft, racist extractionism, oppression and suppression and manipulation and agitation and all the fingers point back to capitalism. God gave man dominion over the earth says the Good Book, and ever since man has been grasping and plundering and conquering and taking and taking and taking and it’s never enough. There’s always more that can be taken.