Hope Floats

The term 'hope floats' has been sailing in and out of my heart as of late...enough to where I've spent a few moments reflecting on what exactly it means. What exactly DOES hope floats mean? Of course, it's all relative - what it means to me is probably not what it means to you... but I have to wonder where it came from.

Does hope float because you can't see it? Is it similar to the air around you...because while you can't see that, you know it exists. You can see how air affects things  - like the leaves on trees or the waves in the sea. You can smell air - like the salt and sand by the ocean. You can FEEL air - as it warmly caresses your face  or as it lashes out in a raging cold. If the air we can't see can still cause our other senses to understand it's existence, than surely the hope we can't see should prove to do the same. Is that why hope floats?

At times, it feels as though I am under water; stuck in a sunken ship of lost dreams, tangled and trapped by seaweed that is my fears and failures. It is in the warped peace that this offers me that I realize that hope does, in fact, float. In this case, it floats away from me. I get consumed by the roaring silence of the mystery that is the ocean floor. I feel comforted by the seaweed that binds me because it allows me to falsely surrender to the 'support' it gives...the sunken ship keeps the fear of predators away because they are all too big to fit through the port hole I swam through to find refuge there.  It is here that my hope floats away from me to the surface. Hope is light. Hope is buoyant. Hope perseveres. And while I might no be these things when I am wrapped up in fears and failures, hope remains the same.

Hope rises to the surface. Even in the most dire circumstances, hope will rise. During loss, pain, indecision, misdirection, wrong turns... hope rises. Hope is what can drag you from the depth of the sea to the surface...you just need to believe that it floats.