“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.” ~ Stephen King, The Body

 

I am on break sitting here at my desk thinking about her. There are thirty-five pictures of her at my desk. It’s how I get through the day. I take a moment to get lost in those fiery blue eyes. I swear I see flames inviting me to stay lost in them, and I oblige.

I write a lot about our aggression, the degradation of our precious environment – Mother Earth and Father Sky – or the weak links in our chain of social relations.

Some have asked what motivates me and I selfishly keep away the most important answer: her. I would like to have given her Heaven. Not this Hell. In the meantime I can only hope these dark clouds dissipate and she gets to feel the warmth of the Sun.

I hesitated on bringing her into this world, but her mother and I wanted her. We planned on it. We worked at it. We succeeded.

Things didn’t work out as planned between her mother and I – such is life – but we, for the most part, have been able to move past our problems to focus on the one thing we intimately agree on: her.

Realizing that it would be our worst crime to deny the other our equal share in drawing strength from her like a flower that reaches out to the Sun we were able to agree to share her equally. This coming Friday begins another week for me to have her. Or is it the other way around? Sometimes I swear I depend on her more than she has depended on me. I have missed her since last Friday when I gave her my last hug and kiss.

I have always been the kind to wear my heart on my sleeve. I broadcast myself to all. It has its disadvantages for sure, but it also has its relief. I have strived to not lock my secrets away. Above I quoted Stephen King and this quote has stayed with me since my youth. And since I am fond of letting my thoughts be expressed through the words of others – is it a feeling of or desire to feel solidarity? I am not sure – I want to (temporarily) end with the prologue from Bertrand Russell’s autobiography:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

P.S.: Despite the dark clouds I do see occasional glimpses of the Sun.

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