Saturday, August 28, 2010

Campaign of Silence

No, I can’t prove the existence of your silent campaign. Is it passive resistance that you have chosen to promote your position? Are we fighting right now and how would I know for sure?

No, I can’t prove zero. If you do have thoughts you do not name them. You respond in empty space to my requests to know what you want, reject even the smallest offers. Polite, polite, but sustained in your semblance of non-preference.

Instead, the silence pushes it all back to me to sort out a path, to give shape to who we are and how we do. But your aims ooze anyway in all that you omit, neglect, claim to forget, delete from mention, fail to acknowledge. I infer the shape of what you seek by reckoning with the undone.

No, what I am is confounded and near defeat. Hear me that silence is cowardice. Abdication of responsibility. Deferral of the simple obligations of interdependence. So what if you compel my acquiescence to some unstated wish or set of choices you concealed. If you defeat me in this way, what will you have?

No, dear. Your semblance of invisibility, your faux-positioning of non-preference is a precious and caustic pose- a lie attaining no greater glory, no benefit, nothing. This strategy forsakes the broader field in the shitty smallness of stubborn, smiling, un-speaking spite. Then end we must from my lopsided throwing out for your non-catch. You are not even on your own side in this silent campaign.

Speak up soon please. Through my loss you have nothing to gain.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Leader

I could see as he swept his broad hand from left to right and back an expanse- a capacity to hold the intangible as if it were tattooed in spirit ink in the bones and tendons of his fingers and palm - And more still - that he knew me and stood not only in front of me but also inside of me. He knew the city and state and nation that I knew – black, white, brown, man, woman, child. He had in his bones the mountains that I had, strong rivers, sweet clouds. These were not his to keep or mine, nor ours to own and clench – but ours to acknowledge .

In that same sweeping gesture I knew, I felt the thousands he had touched when he traveled the states. I knew that he stood before me and all of the rest gathered on feet that had walked in the same dust I knew. I felt a lifting in my being that said to me I could trust him to understand and carry at least a piece of my wishes and battered dreaming. This king, magician, warrior, healer – could he be a man who would walk great and not from his talk and his entourage, but from his connection and his grounding to the moment that we occupied together.

I looked as he spoke and I could see myself, and more than myself flickering behind his skin and his brown eyes – as if I lived in his body, thought his thoughts, dreamed through his arms into an unfolding, resolute action that I hadn’t the power to attain for myself. I heard my thoughts shift from the why-can’t-he to the when-will-we. When will we stop our frenzied stuffing of our faces, or rushing, our ripping down the ancient, our chasing of the get-what-we-want endless road to unhappy empty buckets. No I knew that he know what I know that it was never about the getting and the grabbing or the pressing of buttons and the clicking of icons to change the subject to something that scared us less.

I saw in him that he could stand with me in this time. Time of consequence, realization, time to contend and confront the impact of thousands-of-years delusions that had brought us to this place. Could he see with me beyond this dream born of fear? With him I saw a way to walk a different path To become whole, brilliant, calm, grounded, linked in the work ahead and the implicit energy of now.

In that moment, I understand that I had always had what I needed and that we could find a way.