Possibilities surround us.

Hope and possibility arrived when I picked up my camera one hot summer day.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Alice encounters the White Queen. The Queen begins to explain how you can't do two things at once, but the conversation takes a different turn.

Alice laughed, “There’s no use trying.” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...”

When I can’t see how a situation can improve, this simple exchange between Alice and the Queen reminds me that possibilities do exist.

We all face challenges, and sometimes, insurmountable obstacles.  A sense of hopelessness sinks in ready to hijack our ability to take the next step.

Unknowingly, we become helpless. Like Alice, we see no possible way to change the situation or pull ourselves through the messiness of life.

Have you ever felt this? I’ve been there myself  more times than I care to admit.

My word of the year, hope, has led me to examine the meaning from many angles. What comes first—hope or the belief in possibilities? Or, does hope emerge when we have reached the state of hopelessness where we finally open up to what’s possible?

Changing what is to what can be, may depend on our willingness to believe in “as many as six impossible things before breakfast…” or lunch or in the middle of the day. 

Somewhere along the way, I believed I could capture the beauty of a butterfly.

Inspiration worth sharing . . .

1. I love geraniums…and wrote a tribute to the red ones.
    
2. Listen to Milo Gilad and the possibilities he found within the autism spectrum. His message: never lose hope.
    
3. No matter what, there are always…Possibilities (Darius Rucker).
   
    

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
—Søren Kierkegaard