The Taste of Language

For the last few months my poet's hand has been caught up and uncomposing. Nothing I attempted to entice the fancy and musing proved fruitful. Instead, I found all my words were insufficient to what I desired to express and what I had hoped my pen could produce. I was living amid castles and in the alpine heights, swans were drifting on the rivers, the snow drops were blooming, so much beauty and romance I was nearly drowning in the essence of poetry, my kind of poetry, yet now one word seemed to reconcile itself to the page.

I was forcing my hand, forcing my heart and forcing my spirit to say what I thought this atmosphere ought to mean to me. Reverence, romance, desire, passion.... but when I sought down deep into the part of myself that I had nearly buried under my expectations I found a few words that sobered my mind quite quickly.

RESTLESS AND ALONE

Hear me in this point of concrete thought
Of anguish that my dullness wooed
My brain is in bright fragments
   each one an angry shard
Immediately and unannounced
 Entering through my sorrid flesh
Piercing to my soul when blinded
By the sudden pain entreating
   To possess all my thoughts
All things are in confusion and
I hardly know where my comfort lies.
  Restless, Restless, Restless
Can you hear the whisper in that word?
The gentle presence of a foreign spirit,
Stirring up power in my distress
My spirit searching to be satisfied
But in all my acceptance, finding none.
Alone, Alone, still here alone.
Can you hear the ghost in the word?
A few syllables tempting me to moan
There is also a great hollow tone--
As though I sat weeping in a shell
Of black pressure on an aging coal.
  The desperation to find a home
And find a hearth already lit
By a strong and constant hand;
The soup is warm on the stove
   And here, they have to take you in.

That is what I felt, I wanted to be seen and understood so badly, more than I have in my whole life! The worst part was I could not understand myself, even now I am as puzzled as to where I am going and why, and what I am meant for.  Home is a beautiful idea, but have I ever truly been home? what is home to me? who is home? ah, there's the rub, home is not a place for me, it is certainly a person or persons. For a long time it was my family, but as I find myself less and less with them I hear the words of my mother's prayer on Yom Kippur four years ago, "Cherish your time with your family, the time will come when you will go and start one of your own." Can I express to you the ache that builds within me? How can I start one of my own? I feel like the blue print for this project has been deliberately withheld from me. Because I am not the architect, maybe I am the cement mixer for now, that makes sense in so many ways, the turning and churning has been endless, with every rotation realizing that I am not moving forward or in any way towards some physical destination, but in a stationary stance mulling over what is being processed within until it is ready to be laid down and smoothed out. There is a lot of waiting in this period of building, but the final product will be all the better for things worked and laid down in their time and in their places. Pour me out Jesus, over and over I am expectant for that feeling of being emptied out and seeing the quality of this foundation laid straight, with every turn I hope it is the last so that the next project can be begun.

The other side of this experience is my heart is broken, it is grieving for a dream that won't ever be and a hope that has been fulfilled in a way I had not expected.After a day so beautiful came a storm so unpredicted and no sooner threatened than thunder echoed away. My heart is broken. Not because I have been jilted by a man, or betrayed by a friend, nothing quite so dramatic. I am going through some growing pains, I have never grown so much, so fast, as I have these last few months. Passion is every growing and exhausting, the tectonic plates of my world are shifting and causing a new terrain that has not yet settled. Maybe I am heart broken for a time I am hoping for but that has so far refused to present itself. Words hold a powerful magic, they come to sound exactly as they mean, that is there are some exclusions, Sanguine, for example, sounds tranquil, ha! but it is so directly the opposite! the bright and vibrant joy on a child's face as they try ice cream for the first time, that is the vision I have with sanguine. Now ask me about a serious word, like courage or delight, those two I want to wind up into myself. To be courageous and delightful is my ideal. Valient, ah, this is a vision of the classic knight in his exhausted power and sweaty from battle kneeling at the feet of a flourishing maiden as he makes his undying pledge handing her his sword. Language has a taste, images flood into our minds at every verb, and emotion has an emphasis at every comma. People have built these words and themselves into our internal dictionaries for them. So what do I do when I look into myself and find my thermometer set at "Restless and Alone"? get to work on fixing that problem and reminding myself that the very presence of a desire is proof that there is a means to satisfy it, we drink water because we thirst, eat food because we are hungry, marry because we want to be known and supported... but this desire that I feel is one rooted in something not so easily obtained. As my beloved Clive Staples Lewis wrote, "If I find in myself a desire nothing in this world can satisfy, then I can only conclude that I was made for another world."

* Sorrid: a welsh word in origin, meaning to pout, sulk, or take offense.