Hopeful Huevos

For years I’ve enjoyed practicing Active Listening as part of living my faith and developing the spiritual life of Love, but I recently read this:

“Active hope is a practice…It is something we do rather than have. Since active hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express.”       —Joanna Macy in Active Hope

  I keep my Easter decorations up for the full season of 50 days until Pentecost, and one of those is my newly acquired handmade Ukrainian Egg. I purchased it to share with the residents at the memory care residence where I work, to discuss some of the meanings behind the colors and designs on the egg.

As I currently sit enjoying its beauty during the quiet points in my day, I let the meanings swirl and blend in my mind and heart, stirring up this Active Hope to use on behalf of the struggling situations I see and feel around me. May your day be blessed by beauty in an extraordinary way, as well.                    

(if you can’t see the image of my egg, open this message in your server)

Red—Love

Yellow—Spirituality

White—Purity

Black—Remembrance

Eight-point star: Around 988 A.D. this sign of the sun god became a Christian symbol

Dots: Stars in heaven; Mary’s tears

Spirals: Life doesn’t always go in “straight lines”

Designs encircling the egg: Eternity

If you were to create your own Hopeful Huevo (Spanish for “egg”) what image or design would give meaning and significance to your Easter season this year?

Personally, I’m going to begin a new section within this blog called Hopeful Huevos to share ideas, inspiration, and reflection within my own personal work of learning to use my white racial identity to actively disengage from white privilege and instead use it to create room for others at the table. “Tending to the Margins” sometimes means relinquishing my own invisible white advantage that dominates the conversations around me every day (such as the way a salesclerk at the market will immediately drop her attention from a person of color to ME, a tall woman from the dominant culture, when I walk up). Making visible the invisible forms of white advantage is an important form of actively bringing hope to the world for my family, as well as the many families I will never meet.

Blessings on your own forms of Hopeful Huevos this Easter season 2021,

LeAnn