reticence

Between two poles

Standard

“Automatic cars can facilitate our dark side.”

Many things feel as if they pull me between two poles. At one pole, I love seeing the paw prints of wild animals in the snow – mysterious visitors that I rarely see apart from this evidence of their earlier presence. At the other, I hate snow, and I particularly hate the melty, slick state of it right now (it won’t last long; colder temperatures are on the way). I took my life in my hands by heading down to the mailbox (no slips/slides/falls, luckily).

One pole pulls me to music: Weyes Blood’s “Seven Words”.

The other pole pulls me to poetry and all the memories and emotion tied to it, to the moment I lived it.

To Sleep
– John Keats
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
      Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

 

I even sway  – or perhaps sway most of all – between two poles about how to communicate – at one pole, wanting to say so much but, at the other, saying very little. This is always the danger of communication or non-communication. When more seems to be at stake, when your feelings become much more entangled than you could have imagined, you start censoring yourself or stop asking questions and trying to clarify things to get to the heart of the matter. It’s almost involuntary. But I am aware.

And, with this awareness, I am defying my own inner limitations and trying to be courageous about stepping into the middle ground, between the two poles, to say, do and encompass everything and openness.

Photo (c) 2013 Lady May Pamintuan