Hope and Time - The Bench

(too long for email - lots of photos below…)

The most well known song from the musical Rent is entitled Seasons of Love and the song refrains that 525,600 minutes measures the span of a year but then asks the question of whether love can be used as a measure of the span of year. Playing off that, what about a similar connection between hope and time? In the conversation between Joy Harjo and Krista Tippett in this week’s

The On Being Project

Hope Portal, there were multiple points where the question of how we measure time was raised. That might seem a simple thing to answer - use a clock - but as we know, time is not a fixed concept but a relative concept as weird as that seems when we hear the fixed tick tick tick of a clock in the background (as I do while I am writing this). Similarly, how do we measure hope? That might be even more difficult to determine.

One way for me to measure hope (and time) over the course of 2024 was a bench at a park. If you have been following me work here for a while, you have already heard about the bench, but for those who may be new...here’s the bench that I am referring to. This photo was from this past Tuesday morning.

It isn’t exactly from the same angle as the others that you’ll see, but it is the same bench.

Last year, I had an idea of photographing one of the benches at Winton Lake (not this one actually) at 7:45am each time I went to the lake. I started with that bench and then started to gractiate toward a different one - this one pictured here (and also further below). I tried to frame it the same each time with the idea of seeing what the space looked like at (roughly) the same time each day. I didn’t know what I would do with these photos until later in the year when reflections started to emerge for me and I began to write what ended up becoming my self-published book, Ordinary Benchmarks.

I photographed the bench in all sorts of weather, on days when I had plenty of time, and on days when I was in a rush. I photographed it when I wanted to be out there and days when I really didn’t. I was out there on days with great joy in my heart and on days when my heart was heavy and hurting. In the moments there and in what I ended up writing, I found myself marking time and finding ways to mark hope. I find myself needing to be reminded of this hope today with some of the events locally and globally over the last few days.

Even though I am not photographing the bench for a book, I continue to return to it as I did in the above photo - each time reminded of the passage of time and keeping space for hope.

Here are some of the photos from last year.

If you are interested in the book, you can click this link below for my information page with information on how to order.

Ordinary BenchMarks

Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed

PS - Scout at the bench last year as well