Quiet, Please

Photo by Susan H. Hajec

I am a day late and maybe a dollar short in making this post. In the midst of being “boxed in” by preparatory work for moving, I can’t seem to hold onto a thought long enough to develop it into a full sentence.

“An Interrupted Life” is a classic book written  by a Jewish woman author whose name I can’t pull from my memory library. It is about her imprisonment by the Germans in the 1940s and the robbery they took from the world in this one single life that was lost among hundreds of thousands because human life was so devalued and maliciously destroyed.

On a very teeny-tiny scale, not to be compared at all with the holocaust where so many innocent lives were completely interrupted from the life they planned to live — these frequent moves we have made seem to carry the same theme — Interruption.

Not only do the moves seem like interruption, but in packing up , I see and reread so many of my writing materials, publications, and projects not completed, but outlined and started, and I wonder where and how I interrupted myself and did not stay with them. The stimulation for these ideas bounce back into my being in incomplete and run-on sentences, and the will to pick them up returns once again. 

Ann Murray recorded a song that didn’t make the hit parade but it was one of my favorites and I used it in the “Write Now” workshops I facilitated.

She sang: “Won’t somebody listen to me please, it won’t take long, it won’t take long. Won’t somebody listen to the things that make me strong….before the children of my mind become the orphans of my soul”.

So what I am packing now are the children of my mind and I have given many birth in prose and poetry. I still feel like their protective, loving mother. Yet, I also am discovering some of the orphans of my soul. They still call to me and my commitment to them is becoming ever stronger. I will tend to them through my daily attention and the time and space they need so they may evolve into their destiny — even if their destiny is to reside inside my family after I’m gone.

Because they have been with me, I will be faithful to them. 

A verse of Anne Murray’s song says:

“The writer —ain’t a rich man, he’s got problems of his own,
But he keeps writing, songs he knows no one may ever hear, because he know that if he stops…..
he’ll disappear.” 
“Won’t somebody listen to me please, it won’t take long, it won’t take long. Won’t somebody listen to the things that make me WHOLE…before the Children of my Mind become the Orphans of my Soul.”  

So from my Writing Well, I offer up one of my Children of my Mind that was in one of my workshop booklets I gave out for “In the Silence Is Your Source.”

Quiet, Please

   It is not quiet enough in my life to hear the things I want to say. There is a level of quietness when words, thoughts and ideas rush in like unending ocean waves rolling onto the sandy beach.  Yet before I can catch them in my pail or collect them like unique and individual sea shells left upon the sand, the tide of daytime with its noise, duties and distractions sends the messages swirling back out to sea.

   And I get trapped in the undertow, fearing once more that what is mine to co-create is lost in the vast ocean with only a little hope that, perhaps, it may visit me again at another time, in another place, on some distant stretch of quiet seashore.

I wrote this many years ago, but this is how I feel today.

Feb. 25, 2011 ADDENDUM: An Interrupted Life by E. Hillesum is the diaries of a Dutch-Jewish woman Memoirs of Auschwitz. I just found this information in my 1997 journal of the IWWG Skidmore Writing Conference. I knew I learned it from there. I just happened upon it as I leafed through the journal before putting it back on the shelf. 1997 may have been my first IWWG conference. I think it was. The conference and the women at the conference provided a huge turning point for me in my whole life as a person and defined and supported my life as a “real writer.” I am forever grateful.