In these next few sessions, we're going to investigate some orientations and ways of being

that I would call companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become

stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought

of as fascia or the tendons, complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable.

And our first teacher on this is the wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Naomi is winsome and wise about how writing,

writing, is a companion to life and certainly a companion to hope for her, and it's a

companion to the way we are investigating hope here. The simple act of writing things down. When I interviewed Naomi

a few years ago, she talked about all the groups she works with of all ages. And she has said

that she has found that writing things down, whoever you are, whatever you're writing down,

even if you're writing about something sad or hard,

you almost always feel better after you do it.

She says, rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse.

And certainly this is an experience I've had journaling, not consistently every day, but many, many days of my adult life.

Somehow it helps. And here's another way she described what she says is happening. She says,

you write something down and you're given a sense of, okay, this mood, this sorrow I'm feeling, this trouble I'm in,

by writing it down, I've given it a shape.

It's got a shape on the page so I can stand back, I can look at it, I can even think about it a little differently,

I can wonder what do I do now.

Naomi actually says that she thinks,

she's a poet, of course, but she thinks that all of us actually think in poems. And what she means by that is that poems don't batter us. You're not battered by thought in a poem. You ride a wave of thought. You allow

thoughts to enter. And while that happens, you are shifting, you're changing, you're looking,

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