Many voices crying out, wanting to say themselves, to speak who they are, shouting what they mean. They want to be heard, to be shared. They assault with the realness of their being and all that makes them need to speak.
To listen, rather than only hear, is to let the voices possess you, allowing if not welcoming this intrusion into our silent apartness. To listen would mean being more than an object hurling back their echo, remaining unmoved by the wailing, shouting, crying, pleading, and demanding.
It might seem easier trying to believe the voices have nothing to say, that they are just noise, that they come from no one, that no human heart gives them birth, that no soul seeks like in their utterance. If we could believe they were not there, we might be safe. Yet, the voices keep breaking in, crying and wanting and needing to be heard.
My father was a writer. He wrote all of his life, inflicting upon many of us his novels, plays, articles, essays, and self-help books. Some were marvelous; some merely well-intentioned. But of all the things he wrote, his journal is his legacy: by turns wise and bewildering, it neared 1,100 type-written pages when he died in 2010. Although perused many times, this is the first time it will be read - cover to cover, page after page.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
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