carrying the water

I was thinking last night how lately, holding on to hope and optimism feels like carrying a pail of water. A friend wrote something, full of confidence in the fact that better days were to come, and I felt so thankful that she was doing the work of carrying that bucket for us right then.

I started picturing the water walkers, and how they go so far and pass the pail of water from one walker to the next. They go so much farther than any one of them could go alone. Distances that would seem impossible for one woman.

That’s what it feels like right now. None of us can handle walking all that distance, carrying this precious cargo. So each day one of us has to do it. If we all shut down at once, we lose that bit of hope forever.

This made me think about sometimes how it does feel totally lost, and someone has to dive all the way down to the bottom of the sea and bring a piece of it back up like the little muskrat who clenched the soil in his paw in our Ojibwe creation story.

We have to nourish those hope-carriers, bring them food and water, tell them we love them, and work not to put out their fire.

We have to, when we have the energy, let everyone know that today is our day, today we see the vision, today we can smell victory.

We have to hold that pail as long as we can — because some people can’t do it at all.

But if we all try and do as much as we can, we can use these last buckets of hope, these handfuls of soil to transport us, to rebuild what we’ve lost, and to create a new world all together.