Okay, I'm feeling pressure. I have all of these thoughts rolling around in my head saying "Hey! What are you doin'? Let us OUTTA here!?" But I seem to be struggling with the very basic sentence structure (did
that even make sense?). At this point, I'm resolved to just letting them ooze out of my fingers. Otherwise they will just bounce around, ricochetting off my skull and bruising each other. Then they'll just be overly sensitive, painful, puffed up words that hardly resemble their original state. So, here we go. Spilling.
Silence. What is that like? I remember a time while living in New York when I
craved it. I searched everywhere for it, libraries, parks, closets...nope. After 12 months of living there I made the uneducated conclusion that silence does NOT exist in the big apple...could be why it's call the city that never sleeps. The other day I looked for it again. In southeast rural Kansas, surrounded by trees and harvest fields, the nearest town being 7 miles away partially by gravel roads. Nope, nothing. I still couldn't catch the elusive.....
Today I found it. Where? On the way to the dumpster, caring your run of the mill household trash bag, the crunch of my flip flops on the dirt driveway, birds singing, a high wind blowing the leaves of countless different kinds of trees (who knew that each shape of leaf has a different sound when it moves??). Yep, that's when it happened. I stopped. I raised my head, took a deep breath and
looked. Right smack in the middle of common, everyday chore, I discovered the reason why silence has been giving me the cold shoulder. While I stood there, taking a deep breath, I looked around and listened and realized...man, where's all that noise coming from?? It hit me then. It was coming from inside me. ME! My heart, my mind, my soul. It's just a cacophony of sounds, grunts, groans. I haven't stopped long enough to realize it. Not that I haven't been processing things. But I'm realizing now that a lot of that has been surface layers, the small stuff. What I haven't done is gotten down and dirty and dug
deep where its dark and ugly. It was enlightening (and frustrating and not a little bit freaky). As the wind swirled around me I took my first inventory (and my immediate reaction was "whoa! Don't go there! Can't stop now.") And it was painful but freeing! Like taking a deep breath after being underwater for too long. Scary, overwhelming, but life giving.
What does this all mean? Right now, I'm not sure. I only know that it won't be the last time I stop, look, and listen. As I write this I'm having a bittersweet reaction to it. I'm holding back a big fat sigh. The proverbial puffing-your-hair-out-of-your-face sigh. Here we go...
