Breadcrumbs of Hope

Originally Published
November 21, 2022

Sometimes our prayers or answers to questions we pose to Spirit aren’t actually answered directly from Spirit. These “indirect” answers are what are referred to as cledons. Cledons are defined as messages from Spirit—that aren’t meant to be a message from Spirit by those who are delivering them. Case in point: an email that landed in my inbox from my astrologer which was closely followed by a message posted to my husband’s CaringBridge site.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been struggling with hope. It’s not that I don’t have it. It was more the struggle of finding a balance between having hope and not bypassing my human experience. For me, when I’m attempting to understand something I’m struggling with, I make a lot of space to just sit and ponder and wonder. It seems to jiggle things lose. So, I’ve been pondering hope and asking Spirit to help me find that balance.

A while back, I booked a plant and planet session with Maeg from Third Sister. In this session, I pick a planet and a plant I want to connect more deeply with. As soon as we opened the session, Jupiter set forward. We both were surprised, but when we started thinking about it, it made sense—looking at the planet not in terms of abundance per se (though that’s lovely too), but as a way to understand a more mature meaning of hope. A few days ago, Maeg sent an email about Jupiter that she received from another astrologer, Diana Rose. The very first line was:

“We cannot create the future if we don’t believe in it, if we do not have enough hope to sow its seeds.” —Diana Rose

This quote is an answer to my Spirit ponderings and applies to me in so many ways right now. It was as if Spirit was sending me a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. I wasn’t getting direct answers, but little bits of things to wake up my curiosity. First, Maeg and Jupiter. Now the idea of creating a future with seeds of hope. I could have let it lie there and put the quote up somewhere that I could see it, but in a very “Hansel and Gretel” kind of way, I felt like I needed to follow the breadcrumbs further into the woods. So, I began to ponder hope as a seed that creates our future—which led to today’s pondering…

My husband’s second round of chemo started last friday and to be honest we were less than excited about the prospect. It just takes a lot out of both of us. A while back, a friend who is a nurse had suggested shifting our perspective about chemo by renaming it something else, something more inspiring. So way back in July, we picked “hope” and have referred to each dose of chemo as a dose of hope ever since.

When we woke up today, I knew I needed to let friends and family know that we were starting the next round, by posting on CaringBridge. With the above quote in the forefront of my mind, I explained how we named chemo hope and I shared the quote from above. Within in minutes a friend of my husband’s responded with this excerpt from Disturbing the Peace**:

Between 1985 and 1986, Vaclav Havel conducted a series of interviews with the Czech journalist Karel Hvížd’ala, who was living in West Germany at the time. In Czech, the resulting book was a kind of confessional autobiography, called Long-Distance Interrogation. The English translation was published in the spring of 1990, and called Disturbing the Peace.

“...[T]he kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t… Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons… I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental… Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
Disturbing the Peace, pp. 181-182

Wow. I’ll be unpacking that breadcrumb for quite a few days. Maybe another newsletter will come from those musings… we shall see. My point is multilayered. My takeaways right now from Spirit are:

Sometimes the answers we seek are all the more powerful because they don’t come to us directly. They come to us from a place of connection with the outer world. From those we love and those who love us. From strangers and acquaintances. From unexpected sources and places. They come from musings and curiosity and the tenacity to keep going even when it’s challenging. The answers aren’t always clear, but they lead us on a path or a journey to something deeper, more pure than if it were handed to us on a plate.

The answers are found in the breadcrumbs of life and our ability to make the connections and to move into a perspective that allows us to see the greater weaving before us. The answers aren’t really answers at all—but pieces that remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves and that we are most definitely, 100% not doing this alone—whether that means we have human help or Spirit support.

I don’t have any definitive answers about hope and that balance I was seeking, but I do know that the trail of cledons, the magic of connections and happenstance, the deep connection to myself and to Spirit are what will bring me to Hope’s door every time.

Much love and may you follow your own trail of breadcrumbs this week…

Xoxo Jessica

**Note: I have not read the entire book. I only know of what was posted and that it was a cledon for me. I do plan on reading the source this excerpt came from, but at this point I don’t have enough info to suggest the book as a whole.

View the Transcript

Last Updated:
February 3, 2023
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links; I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.