The essence of hope

It's that time of year, when the tall stalks of the morning glories are everywhere blooming, singing songs of summer, and yet the light is already beginning to die and the days are growing shorter.

How do we hold that sense of both/and?  For some reason this reminds me of an email my husband sent me yesterday: Apparently Windows NT was released exactly 20 years ago yesterday, and he remembers architect Dave Cutler saying at the release party, "These are the good old days."

It seems inevitable that the height of perfection would always be tempered with an awareness that, at some level, "it's all downhill from here." The flower is perfectly beautiful, and yet inherent in our perception of that is the recognition that it will wither and fall: as it says in the Bible, "All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever." (1Peter 1:24-25)

... and that's the essence of hope, isn't it: that something -- we're not sure what -- endures forever; that there is some constancy that outlasts changeability, some ultimate union that surpasses all our petty divisions and disagreements?  And even, looking within ourselves, that there is some spark of being that remains immutable, unfailing, steadfast and true even as the physical plant is always in flux?