In the Humming

I know she loves me like a sister, curling a frame around and through and about the empty spaces between us and I was melted at the sight of it. But for all this feeling, we are not friends in word, yet…

I have a wonderful friend who has often pointed out the dry taste of American English, knowing its weight because of the other tongues upon his lips so often.

It’s a curious case of my experience in this crazy Western world I am, that, here, the unspoken and the unseen are a riddled case of the truth and the beauty. In fact, I feel the stronger words are those unlipped, and the brighter light, that which cannot be named.

I live with words like shadows of a courtroom and American know-how from oil to gas to brains shutting out the principle art of the human soul- to be alive.

The ice-cold clinical lilt of “synesthesia” and “musician” and “academia” has braced me a bridge beneath which I gather my stones in the dark, and from which I rest in the expanse of the unworded. Even then, I’m searching to speak, however, buried in poetry and compositions and color palates to “get at” the things that leave me alive and speechless even more deeply.

Spirituality and faith have left me tools, and they are the strongest and lightest tools I know. They lament and fury and sing when the language of my people organizes, proves and collects. How else could I have learned that the soul has shapes, and the love of another is tasted across a room, or planted and weeded faithfully, or ripped from experience, or owed with the scent of cold steel, or can even die…?

How else could I, but from a steeping childhood in the stories of worlds and Words not my own, teach me to hear when panic whines and shrieks in a nearby bathroom stall, when tears announce their fear in the face of a baby, and when the chest of a man lying next to me has ribbons of sorrow so deep that even he has no name for them yet…

There is, for all the talk of whether or not God is real or dead or too old to care or too present to be a Being, Something deep and speaking. If you’ll permit me a child-like gaze, I hear that Time and Love and Beauty and Truth and Sorrow and Death are all creatures that live in the garden of this Something, but only if you visit the garden can you see them at play. Or so I have also seen.

This is not to say that the personalities of the people in each room must all bow to the unspoken and see something other than the path they are born to discover, but merely to point out a humming that I cannot yet shake the hand of, and I want to.

I suppose we can bend the vowels on our tongues to prove a life unalive and safe, or, perhaps, there is room to cease speaking for speaking’s sake and make a home in the waiting room amongst all the small creatures that are already living there…