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We would all most likely report that we know the difference as human beings between life and death.  Does a bug know?  A dog?  A cat?  A plant?  The planet?

Certainly a dog or a cat DOES have hope.  Every time I walk near my friend’s little old (11 years and counting) Chihuahua that I am nursing back to health he makes a visible physical movement of SOME KIND toward expressing his HOPE that I will stop as I pass him and rub his tummy!

This old neurotic cat I inherited (15 and counting) races toward the bathroom every time I head in that direction and flops her thickly-furred tortoise-shell self on the floor by the toilet HOPING I will sit down there at the same time and brush her!

Was the pomegranate tree sitting in its hardened soil, dry-as-a-bone spot in my yard HOPING that I might lay my washing machine’s gray water hose in its newly created adobe circle basin and give it WATER today?  Do the millions of ants scurrying around my yard HOPE to find food?

Is the state of ongoing life itself, as distinguished from the final state of death, ALWAYS about that one single thing HOPE?

If any of the cycles of being alive that we mostly take so for granted became STUCK – any ongoing life connected with the ongoing cycle itself would be threatened – and with that threat perhaps ALWAYS and most importantly goes the threat of the annihilation of HOPE.

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Our species probably continued on down our evolutionary pathway BECAUSE we had HOPE:  Hope spoken, hope not spoken.  Hope known consciously – or not.

A stuck cycle of trauma means to me that HOPE itself is tampered with.  Perhaps for my mother finding Alaska, finding ‘her spot’ of perfect beauty and peace on that mountain WAS the literal embodiment of HOPE for her – and in her states of being aware of the experience within herself of having hope fulfilled she could be – and was – temporarily at peace.

During the rest of the time her disturbed HOPE cycle took over her (and her life).  At those times HOPE was all tangled up in the nevers and always and forevers that indicated her physical body-brain had been formed in her earliest life in a trauma-filled world that so toyed with her hopes and their fulfillment that her HOPE cycle BROKE.

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