Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
I’m reading a marvellous little book called “Dispatches from the Global Village” by my friend Derek Evans. Derek is a remarkable individual, having most notable served two terms as the Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. He now lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and is the spouse of my long time homeopath, Pat Deacon.

What I really like about Derek is that he embodies a certain tempered optimism that the human species is capable of great things despite it also being capable of unimaginable acts. Derek has assembled a book out of a series of columns he wrote for his neighbours in Naramata, BC. THe column are the musings and reflections of an internationally important peacemaker. There are many gems in the book, which I’ll share over the next couple of days, but I offer this one tonight to those who are despairing at the moment that we might just have it all wrong.

This is a poem that Derek spotted on the London Underground several years ago by Sheenagh Pugh:

Sometimes things don’t go after all,
from bad to worse. Some years muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives;the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

This poem reminds me of a line that escaped my lips earlier this year when I was juggling with friends Tenneson Woolf and Roq Garreau. I said that I though juggling is so compelling because “there is always the possibility that a ball might not drop.”

[tags]derek evans, sheehangh pugh, hope[/tags]