In my best, most trust-filled moments, I feel hopeful for us all. I feel hopeful for the human capacity to learn and grow and change, for the power of love and trust and time and connection to heal us, for the collective good that gets furthered again and again by so many movements and organizations and legislators and artists and poets and business owners and coaches and therapists and scientists and philosophers and teachers (the list goes on…). I’m profoundly hopeful about the ripples sent out from each individual person making even modest moves toward healing and forgiveness and awareness and love.

I don’t always live inside my best moments, though. And even when I do, I think the reality of life’s hardships requires, at least for many of us, an enormous amount of spiritual and emotional and psychological strength to truly see and maintain hope in the face of.

For this reason, I find myself tearing up on otherwise average days, filled with average (for me) amounts of hope and optimism, when I have occasion to read or hear about or talk with or ponder a person whose trust has roots miles deep and branches just as wide. Trust that big floors me.

The nature of the flooring, though, is what I find so remarkable, because in it, I experience permission to feel simultaneously more hopeful than ever (This kind of trust exists! It’s possible! It’s in my presence now!) and more honest than ever about all the ways I’m afraid and all the places where my reachings for hope have taken and take a very big toll. It’s permission to collapse into a strength that feels, at least most of the time, far more vast than my own.

Martin Luther King Jr is such a strength for me.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Do you know when he spoke these words? The day before his assassination (Memphis, April 3, 1968).

I read this and I’m floored. Teared up. Collapsed in the very best way.

Do you ever experience this permission I’m trying to describe? – this shelter that holds more hope and more space for honest fear than you know from day to day? Where is it that you find it?