It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are.
E. E. Cummings

Each and everyone of us loves a good story about heroes and heroines. Our most central guiding stories are often about those who have shown courage in the face of all kinds of situations. Hearing how another has overcome fear, unimaginable odds, terrible circumstances gives each of us renewed spirit and fills us with the breath of inspiration. I have been thinking of courage…what it is…what it means…how to attain it…over the last days. It was not any particular, Hollywood vision that caused this mulling over the act of courage. Instead it was a scene I encountered last week while walking across the Ford Parkway Bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul. I stopped to look over the edge of the bridge at the presence of the river and the ice formations moving and changing shape right before my eyes and then I noticed this…

I stepped closer to the bridge railing and allowed my eyes to focus on the shape of…could it be?…footprints etched in the floating ice. They took my breath away! Who had done this? Since I walk along the Mississippi River with regularity, I know that there has not been many times this warm winter when the ice was solid across. How had this person maneuvered these shifting ice floes? I felt my stomach lurch at the idea of it, looking from the height where I was suspended, I felt my legs go a little weak. Since the main definition of courage is “the ability to do something that frightens one” I knew that whoever had the ability to do this river walking was filled with more courage than I could ever muster. At this point some might also be calling this behavior other words and yet…

What brings any of us to acts of courage? Recently I have been spending some time with second graders who struggle with reading. I am humbled by the courage they bring, week after week, as they try to make sense out of black slashes on white pages. Watching their little brows furrow and their minds search, it is some inner courage…and a large dose of hoping to please an adult…that keeps them coming back to the page. I think of all the students who exhibit such courage to face odds that frighten them to become who they truly are, as E.E. Cummings proposes.

It does take courage to become who we truly are, to reach for our deepest potential. Author and amazing person Brene Brown reminds us that: “Courage is a heart word. The root of the word is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’” While over time we have moved the definition to be more about heroics, originally it meant to follow the pull of the heart and to live into the truth of self for all to see.

The person who made their footsteps visible on the ice of the mighty Mississippi may not have been having a ‘heart’ experience. But they were walking above rushing, frigid waters that threatened to pull them under. And though you may not be able to tell from these photos, they were also walking upstream. Something those who exhibit courage must always do. They were also exhibiting an enormous sense of trust in their own ability and the strength of the ice to hold them. I can imagine their heart was pumping with an exhilarating force as they made their presence seen in the icy path. Certainly this is one physical reaction to living with courage.

Of course, many of us have been watching the news with tears of relief and joy over the last days as a young girl who seemed lost to the world summoned the courage to escape a situation every parent and grandparent fears, that of having a child taken, kidnapped. The full bodied gratitude of an entire community can be felt in both Wisconsin and Minnesota and, indeed, across the nation. It was the kind of ending that everyone hoped for, prayed for, longed for, tried to imagine. Courage? How can it be called anything else? And fueled and filled with ‘cor’, heart so large and full that even those who have never met her are lifted above the tiny, little details of their ordinary day to remember that there is a depth of spirit within each of us that beats with such power to reach toward the fullness and goodness of what it means to be human. We cannot know the sense of rushing, cold waters of fear that this young one has experienced. It is almost too much to try to imagine. What we can do is think of the heart full of desire and hope and spirit that allowed her to make footprints that led her to freedom and the arms of those who love her.

Courage. Boundless courage.

“In a time of destruction, create something.”
~Maxine Hong Kingston

Many people I know are teetering on the sharp, knife edge between despair and hope. Having just come through a holiday season in which we weigh the balance between darkness and light, we are unsure where the tilt of the scale is leaning. There is the constant barrage of real and created situations of chaos. Words and proclamations are used as weapons against the vulnerable and to lift false truths to the place of repeated fact. People are devalued, ignored, imprisoned for nationality, culture, and the color of their skin. Children are taken from parents and there seems to be no visible process for reuniting them. Our oceans are full of plastic bottles that once held…water. The ice caps are melting, the waters are rising and there are those who refuse to listen to scientists trained and educated in ways that could curb the looming disaster. Is it any wonder there is such a sense of falling into the firm embrace of despair?

I found myself in such a place last week. The gloomy skies and dirty, brown mounds of snow didn’t help to lift my mood. But the day had turned sunny and the temperatures had warmed a bit. Swimming in the stew I had fallen into, I made my way to a meeting and then was given this gift….

Driving around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, my eyes were stunned by the show in the late afternoon sky. I had to pull over and watch it arrive…allowing the wash of the colors shifting and flowing inward and outward as if they had an artist’s brush painting the enormous canvas right before my eyes. I watched as people also stopped their cars…people of all ages…and got out to snap a photo. Some turned the phone on themselves and took a selfie with this background…a gift of memory in what up to then had been an ordinary day sliding toward despair from some mountain of hope where we all long to stand.

As I watched the play of light and color and beauty, I found myself being lifted up. Yes, of course, all the things listed above were still true. And yet. And yet, there is the potential for such unexpected surprise in the middle of a day, in the middle of a week, at the beginning of a new year. Isn’t it possible that someplace at the deepest wisdom of the Universe there exists a creativity that says: “Hey! Look at this! Rise to this!” Isn’t it possible that that same creative spirit lives not only in the flowing, flowering of sky but also in humanity? It is difficult to embrace this call on our creative selves when we are free falling into the lap of despair. So we need wake up calls.

I don’t understand why a sky turns the colors it did last week. I don’t understand the temperature or light or chemicals or energy and their combinations that painted the heavens with this awe inspiring image. Yet I am thankful for not only the breathtaking beauty of it but also for its life line thrown out just in time. Just in time to pull me up toward the hope and creative promise of what might be possible. Just in time to offer the gift of pure, raw joy.

The writer Anne Lamont writes in her newest book: “Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared and yet designed for joy.” Truth. And somehow it seems to me that we have the capacity to mend the brokenness when we come from a place of hope and joy and creativity instead of the pit of despair. And so I give thanks for the wake up call and the renewed commitment. Sometimes it simply takes a really amazing, in-your-face cosmic moment that can happen on an ordinary January day telling you to “snap out of it!” There is beautiful, hopeful, joyful work to be done and so on we go…