Optimism is hope with a broken heart

Thanks, Nick Cave, for writing Faith, Hope and Carnage

It's time to open my Box of Light.

Mary Oliver inspired me with this poem:

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

My gift to you is a box full of light. We need light now more than ever. For decades, I have saved quotes from books I have loved, words that soothed me, challenged me and saved me. I tucked them in a box to savor as needed.

For years I have used 4x6 index cards as bookmarks. Every time I love a line, I jot it down on the card to savor once I close the book. I tossed each card into a big black box, the kind you save photos in. I actually have two full boxes, since I love to read.

This week, I opened my Box of Light to share all that inspiration other writers have given me. The first index card that called to me was from Faith, Hope and Carnage by Australian musician Nick Cave.

My brother, Matthew, recommended the book. My brother picks THE best books. I can judge a good book by how many index cards I use up jotting down favorite quotes. For Cave’s book, I gave up saving quotes and just underlined half the book and will keep it forever.

The greatest line from the book was this: “Optimism is hope with a broken heart.” It still takes my breath away. Cave lost his son, Arthur in 2015. Arthur was just 15 when he fell off a cliff and died after experimenting with LSD for the first time.

How did Cave go on? “I don’t think strength has much to do with anything,” he wrote. “It seems to me that you just take the next least-wounding step.”

The next least-wounding step. My heart gasped reading that.

In time he saw grief as a positive force: “Grief gave me a reckless energy. It afforded me a feeling of invincibility and a total disregard for the outcome, a sort of fearless abandonment to destiny.”

The question grieving readers posed was this: Does it ever get better? His response is yes. “We become different. We become better.”

“Ultimately, it opened up all kinds of possibilities and a strange reckless power came out of it. It was as if the worst had happened and nothing could hurt us, and all our ordinary concerns were little more than indulgences. There was a freedom in that.”

Near the end of the book, he wrote: “When I die, I want to die inside this life. This strange and beautiful life. Not halfway out the door in the hope of something better. Is there something else? I don’t know.”

He made me laugh with these words: “I had a huge appetite for mayhem but I was always trying to find some kind of spiritual home.”

I love that he doesn’t take himself or his music too seriously: “Who says creativity is the be all and end all? Who says that our accomplishments are the only true measure of what is important in our lives? Perhaps there are other lives worth living.”

“Initially, you create solely for yourself in order to discover what you are…But at some point, for me at least, this energy must be redirected. You have to turn it around and pour it back into the world as an act of service.”

“Music is one of the last great spiritual gifts we have that can bring solace to the world. It becomes a sort of duty, in my opinion, to use your music, not for your own aggrandisement, but for the betterment of others.”

I hope you read his book and listen to his music, especially the song, “Breathless,” which exalts the beauty of the ordinary.

“The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to,” he wrote. “It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

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What books are in your box of light?