The voices in my head..

..echo and bounce around in the silence. I listen to them all as they make their pitches.

There are women, many of them. One loves her husband and cries when he goes on work trips, even for a few days. She likes simple things- clothes, movies, eating out, spending time with friends. The other cries over her lost husband, and worries over where her jewelry is stored, whether it is safe. Left to herself, she could wish endlessly for days gone to return. The third lazes her days away, and tells me I lack experience, to take everything I am told with a pinch of salt. There are men, just as many. In them, I hear only undertones. hear the doubt in one's voice as he asks me what I plan to do, where I plan to go. I hear disapproval in the other. Why can't you be a professor? Why are you wasting your life like this? Do you know what you are doing?

I hear all of these-
Admiration
Unspoken envy
Doubt
Disapproval
Fear
Uncertainty

What I don't hear is a voice worth following. What I don't hear is a voice I can trust. I miss the voice that I used to follow on leaps of faith. I miss the sound of my confident silences.

Quotes for the day

In a microwave world*
Anticipation is like ketchup*
and Power is neutral, like tofu.*

It's apparently what you do with it that matters.

Push-button publishing seems to mean that we can now say the first things that should never have been in our heads in the first place. (And yes, maybe that applies just as equally to this post, inspired by the worst *quotes I have read, all in one day, before noon). Brains like frilly multi-colored pinata pigs, shaken together, words like confetti strung into party favors to be dispensed to the children that came to the party, too polite to refuse to read.

Sharing

"You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."

I give you these words, these quotes and songs and realities I have learned, I have heard. I give you stories of experiences, both mine and those of others. I give you time, sympathy, affection. Gestures of caring. I give you this space in my thoughts. This time and space in my mind, in my conscious actions- this should be giving, should it not?

But at the end of it, I am less. There is little left in me to offer, of worth to you. Am I lessened this way because I gave of myself? I doubt it. The self, the true self, should grow when shared. In the silence at the end of our conversation, shouldn't the self expand in the long exhale? How do I find this self, the one that is replenished by sharing with another?

When I give you these things (quotes/words/ideas), you construct for me a little space, it seems. A reality that is encompassed only by those things we share. And I give, eagerly, to gain that space, that corner of your consciousness that I can stake a claim to. But neither is that my sole reality, nor do I have any permanence in that claim in your mind. But each time you want to fill that emptiness, you come to me for words. And I oblige, believing I am giving of myself. I believe I am being good, a true friend, in listening to you and allaying your doubts, I like to think I am being true to myself. But which self? Certainly not the one that wanted to grow, and not one that is any richer for our conversations.

Outside your mind, outside the structures my words construct in your realities, there must be a self that is fuller and more complete, a wellspring that these small streams bubble from. Something deeper and truer, quieter and more content. Fuller in its search for cohesive, unifying thought than I am in these chance findings of shared phrases.

Perhaps love

(Old favorites, this one is by John Denver).

Perhaps love is like a resting place
A shelter from the storm
It exists to give you comfort
It is there to keep you warm
And in those times of trouble
When you are most alone
The memory of love will bring you home

Perhaps love is like a window
Perhaps an open door
It invites you to come closer
It wants to show you more
And even if you lose yourself
And don't know what to do
The memory of love will see you through

Oh, love to some is like a cloud
To some as strong as steel
For some a way of living
For some a way to feel
And some say love is holding on
And some say letting go
And some say love is everything
And some say they don't know

Perhaps love is like the ocean
Full of conflict, full of change
Like a fire when it's cold outside
Thunder when it rains
If I should live forever
And all my dreams come true
My memories of love will be of you

----------

(John Denver/ Placido Domingo)

Wish you were here.

I wish you were here with me now, my sad-eyed friend. On this winding road on these mountains you dreamed of, I see past light and color into a long-ago Sunday afternoon. How patiently you clipped those articles out of the Pioneer, the travel section every weekend afternoon, after everyone had read the papers. I see your fingers fold the edges over, so they'd fit in the folder you made yourself. I see you caress those yellowing sheets in the night, as you dreamt of Paris and New York and San Francisco and the big, bright future.

I wish you were here, all passion and fury. You would have liked this, I think, leaves trembling in the wind and the smell of fall in the air. The autumn leaves you wrote about, when the closest you had been to them was a handful of pressed maple leaves, over twenty years old. I see your hands, holding the fragments together in Delhi afternoons, making envelopes to keep them safe.

I miss your clear-eyed compassion, your sense of where you knew your life was going. I miss your intuition about people, sharp as diamonds. I wish you were here, to frame this confusing world with your ideals, your sharp sense of space and togetherness. I miss the peace you had through your anger, the way each word you spoke came from the heart, whether in anger or in love.

I wish you were here, if only to turn me back into who I used to be when I was you.