Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Davis Orr This morning in the woods, with my sweet dog, Emily, by my side, and the damp earth breathing up through my boots, I found myself thinking about the future. It doesn’t have to be the metallic, humming one we are so often handed, but a living future. The kind where a hundred-year-old oak stands beside a sun-fed home that knows how to heal its own skin, where technology works quietly in the background like mycelium, unseen,

By Diane Duckworth The Woodland Apothecary After weeks of rain, the woods behind my home offered a simple but profound reminder this morning, healing does not arrive in grand gestures. Sometimes it arrives with a song. It greets us and rejoices in our presence. It arrives in clearing skies and birdsong, in mud that learns again to hold its shape. Today’s apothecary lesson is about listening, and receiving the medicine that is already here. Morning Medicine I was awakened at

By Diane Duckworth The Contradiction In a land of cross and flag Where prophets speak through cable news There grows a garden of contradictions Loud as trumpets, quiet as graves Here, the unborn child is named a miracle Yet the doctor is called an enemy Where life is sacred in the womb And strangely cheaper once they breathe Here, salvation is skyward Stored in the promises of second comings The kingdom is always elsewhere Never in rivers, Or forests, Or the trembling hands o