Jenny Hare, a wonderful artist from England with a beautiful blog, wrote me this morning to talk about  photo I put up the other day, it zeroed in on the words “hope” and Jenny assumed I painted it, I did not. The artist is named LV Hull, a prolific folk artist who works and lives in Mississippi.

The words “hope” are actually part of a larger work.

Maria bought it during a trip through the South some years ago.

The point of her painting, in the form of a cross, is that wherever there is despair, there is also hope.

Above is the entire artwork, it sits out on our back porch, I am thinking of moving it into my study.

I’m reading a wonderful book about the Underground Railroad – titled The Underground Railroad –  by Colson Whithead, it is a novel,  it won the National Book Award and deservedly so, it is riveting and challenging and disturbing.

I was struck by the hope so many slaves clung to in the midst of unimaginable degradation and suffering, so much worse than the whiners in our political campaign on both sides have experienced. On her blog, Jenny, a former journalist and an author, wrote about the challenging of hope as an artist or creative person.

She panicked when she started work as a reporter, but a friend came over and told her to “Just write…anything, doesn’t matter what, just type something and you’ll be fine.”

It was good advice, and Jenny took it, it got her going. It still does. My photo of LV’s cross touched Jenny the other.
“When I began to paint just now,” Jenny wrote on her blog,”I realized that I was itching first to write. I asked the question, what do you want to write, Jenny? The answer was just that. Hope.”

Jenny wrote eloquently about the struggle of the artist and the creative to keep hope alive while also living securely in the world. I know this feeling. When you work alone, there is really no one to prop you up but you. I often write a book chapter and ask myself why anyone will care what I say, or sometimes dread rejection and irrelevance.

It is up to me to find hope. I feel the same way about the politics of the country now. I am  hopeful, good things come in all sorts of unexpected and unpredictable ways. I read about a teacher who has started a blog to spot fake and hateful news and alert advertisers to the fact that their ads are supporting bigotry and hatred. Often, he found, the advertisers, who give money to online marketers,  don’t know, and he has already been responsible for having 400 ads pulled from racist and anti-semitic websites.

He was shocked by his own success, one teacher sitting at his computer.

I think of one of the characters in Whitehead’s novel, she has seen her husband and family sold off, a friend have his hand chopped off for stealing, and lost many friends to starvation and overwork. She has been degraded and abused in every imaginable way, but she is grateful to be alive, and clings every day to her belief in a better life, a better future, a just world.

If she could do it (she is based on a real person), I can certainly do it in America in 2017. My own people were murdered and enslaved for many years, and here I am living a free and better life. I am grateful for that every day, no politician is going to take that from me.

Hope powers my writing, my blog, my photography, my love for Maria. I never dreamed that I would find love, I found it when I was 68. I never gave up on hoping for it. One day I might even have a raging international best-selling book. One can hope.

Jenny thanked me for writing about hope. “Now I will  paint for the sheer, joyous, love of it and my heart is already there on the canvas waiting for me to begin.

I loved Jenny’s paintings, they are beautiful and she has sold many of them. I love her discovery and re-discovery of hope. I commit myself to hope every single day, hope and creativity are two of the most important things in the world. They can life me up and they can lift others up.

How nice my photographs can lift up spirits so far away. They are angels, every one of them heading out into the world to do good. That’s why they are free.

There is good work to be done. My refugee family is arriving soon, and I am eager to mentor and support them, and hopefully show them as the vulnerable and good human beings they are, not as the demons some cast them as being. They have suffered enough.

Here’s to hope.