The prophets said that every tomorrow is a gift of God, our destiny is to live in the present.

This morning, I dug out an old Shel Silverstein quote that touched me once, he said “listen to the musn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’t, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me…Anything can happen child, anything can be.”

Listen to dreams, wrote the poet Langston Hughes, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”

Hope is a feeling of expectation and a desire for certain things to happen. In a sense, it is an act of faith. I believe faith is one of nature’s greatest gifts to us, we are the only living thing on the earth known to feel it. To me, it is the most precious gift, not to be wasted on despair and argument.

Merriam-Webster has a deeper definition of the idea. To hope, they say, is to cherish a desire with anticipation. To want something to happen or be true. To hope for the best. To desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment.

For me, the tyranny of our time is being trapped in the whirlpool of argument and grievance,  the sinkhole we call politics that is sucking all of us into the ground beneath us. I do not look to the left or the right for fulfillment, or to Fox News or CNN, or to a prosecutor or a President to save me. I look inward, inside of myself, the truly sacred space.

And  I wait for our own kind of Messiah, a leader who will unite us and see past our differences and care for the poor and know empathy and give us hope. He is or she is out there, waiting to take the call.

I hope – I have faith – for the best, and I am full of desire for fulfillment. I reject the tyranny of the hater and the victim and the angry cynic.

Hope is a profoundly religious idea, and religion has been pushed aside by feckless faces on screens. In the  Koran, Allah commands his followers to never lose hope. “So be not of the despairing…” – The Holy Quran, 15:55.

In the Bible, Psalm 42::5, Christ asks: Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted with me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

In the ruins of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph comforted the Hebrew faithful with his faith in the prophecy that the city would rise once again. In the 12th Century, Maimonides noted in his “Guide To The Perplexed” that “the world is ordered and beautiful, even if it seems ordered against us.”

I am not a conventionally religious person, nor am I a Muslim or Christian or a practicing Jew, but when I read these passages, I wonder where the perplexed can go today in our fractious and divided world for hope and comfort. I know where I go. To me, my sacred space.

I understand why people of faith found so much more  hope in their religion than people who turn to cable news or seething websites for hope and truth. They are condemned to disappointment, they will never be fulfilled, they will gorge themselves on judgment, hatred and conflict.

There is no hope in the news of the day, or in the eternal conflicts of ambitious, arrogant and greedy men.

That is the death of hope to me. I do not trust hope to the arguments of the day, I’m not sinking into that hole. it’s my job to find it and nurture it like a beautiful garden. I try to water and weed it every day.

Today, I’m going to the Mansion Halloween Party, and I will find hope there, in doing good, loving and being loved, in reveling in the miracle that is life. I am full of admiration for the people who struggle to bravely to keep hope and love alive in their lives even as the light fades.

Every day is a gift to them, a succession of small miracles. Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is uncertain, perhaps this is why they call today and every day the present.