Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops – at all

Emily Dickinson

When I’m feeling depressed, but I am still able to write, I feel a tiny bit of hope stir.

The depression swims deep, like blue veins in my arm, invisible, beneath the skin.

I want to tap my wrist to bring them to the surface. To expose the root of this sadness.

To see the disconnect, the defective wiring, the source of this pain.

So I try to rewire the circuits between body and brain. I go for a run and I percolate, and I ruminate.

And some days I play with ideas and words and images. I etch, erase, and edit.

It is a good day when I can write any of it down.

But as my jogging body stretches and unfolds – hips like cement, calves straining, my movements are stiff, slow and plodding. I’m hardly moving forward.

I have to breathe deep, loosen into the cadence, trying to knit the loose ends from the trauma back together.

And returning home, I am spent.

Later, doing chores, up and down the steps, my feet are heavy, I sometimes forget the task at hand.

In the kitchen, scrubbing the pots, the dry, cracked skin of my hand feels tight and sore as it pushes the yellow sponge, catching the the crumbs as it glides across the countertop.

The cool water rinses through my fingers at the tap as I lift and turn the lip of the scratched old pan, to rinse over and over.

Each task, done a thousand times.

But yesterday, after a hot shower, as I was drying off with the towel, my eye wandered to the framed watercolor hanging on the wall.

A soft pastoral scene of the West Virginia mountains, the New River Gorge near where I grew up. I’ve glanced at that picture nearly every day for years.

But today I saw it.

And I felt a tiny shift, a slight lift, in my mood. And I simply thought: I would love to have a notecard of that print to send to my friend.

And that was all.

I think that sometimes the best I can ever do is to keep moving up and down, I can’t always move forward. There won’t always be any actual progress.

But maybe this is what healing looks like.

Maybe healing is simply being able to notice. Maybe, for even just a moment, it is seeing color.

Maybe it is a glance of the mountain’s horizon through smoke. Maybe it is the memory of an old friend.

Maybe healing is squinting my eyes at an imagined vanishing point – not seeing an ending, but being curious about a possible beginning.

Maybe healing is this tiny flutter deep in my brain – a lightening, a levity, a curiosity, a question.

Maybe healing is writing these words, my restless rustling, like a thing with feathers.

Maybe it is hope.