quiet rivers

What would have Neruda been like without his love for country? Would Gibran have been just another Lebanese extolling the cedars of his native land without Haskell’s interjections? Would Martin Luther King still be as remembered now without his dream?

What would I be if all possibility was taken out of my essence? What would your sacrifices entail if you had nothing to reach for?

Think about it for a minute. I am as ordinary as you. All those poets you can think of, all the great minds in history; they all got rid of their crap the same way, didn’t they? They were ordinary too, until events, circumstance, and people enabled their visions voices with which to scream.

Why, then, deride me for being being a slave to my desires? Where is the lie in choosing to speak about every cute ass to catch my imagination? Where is the hypocrisy but in dismissing those very feelings?

Are you one to lie to yourself then? When sudden, physical arousal takes over your senses, do you drive them away in favor of silence? Is it such an embarassment every time your body betrays your needs?

I do not think so.

There is everything to be said about a healthy love of life, and an equally-healthy desire to celebrate it, by yourself or with somebody else.

Too many of us are in prison already; mostly, with chains of our own devising. How many times, with every day that passes, do you suppress your attempts at expressing yourself?  Have you always been afraid of being taken advantage of - emotionally or otherwise?

Of course, there are countless perversions out there. But should knowing that curtail your own expressions of caring and desire, simply from fear?

There are so many things I do not know, and a few more I wish I did, if only to have lived deeper still. Like Gibran, I constantly reach for expression of that sacred desire to find this world and to behold it naked. Unlike him, however, I will never find it as fluently as he did.

After all, there was only one Mary Haskell.

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