quiet rivers

I have always believed that when you look beyond what is evident, when you peer past the superficial, almost every choice you make in consequence assumes far more than you can ever admit to anybody. The same potential underwrites every attempt at expression, particularly when it comes to personal journals or poetry.

What I feel compelled to write are all about assumptions I achieve everytime I go beyond, and over the years I’ve learned to measure the clarity of my own understanding in comparison with my own past writing. When I can, I stop and gauge how far I have come — how I might have been enlightened and transformed, how I might have regressed and waxed merely verbose — and thus my own sense of worth ebbs and flows.

I write, yes, but mostly to grow. If thought were to be seen, then it might be in the words you and I put down. And if we write enough, and if other souls care enough to really read, and perhaps go beyond, our visions might yet appear in another’s sight.

Someone has said my writing appears to give the impression of something, or someone wanting to break out. Is that not applicable to most of us who venture into semantics? But no, I cannot equate — now or ever — this grasp of my own raison d’etre with that of others. This only leads to a kind of comparison I have no desire of entertaining, even if only in my own mind. Each of us are unique in our personal experiences, and though we might meet at some crossroad with enough insight to agree on a common understanding, such a meeting only lasts as long as the commitments those same experiences, which are all so different, enable us to honestly contribute. At some point, we revert to what has proved comfortable, that dubious shelter of our own devising; created by self, brick by brick, from the accumulation of past hurts and joys.

I look back to what I have written so far, as I am prone to do when lost for words, and I see how an overly-discerning eye might remark how I seem to be verging into cynicism. That might be right, too. And then, I could go on playing the same piece of music again and again, and to no avail.

When you turn your soul to looking beyond what is obvious, almost everything you subsequently do and every word you employ to describe that which took place takes on a color biased with the sum of your experiences. But that has not really stopped me from writing. I write mostly to grow, but I have not really counted how cyclical my thinking has been, in the same way I have failed to keep track of the times I have loved and lost the same way and yet loved again. And granted that I have not eternity to treasure the scratches and bruises I have contracted everytime I have stumbled, I have still to reach a point when I start to take pleasure in regretting them. God grant that I will be long dead by then.

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