I Write, Therefore I Am by Tao, Faery Award Winner Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Hello MM viewers! I'm awarding the Faery Award to this fine piece nominated by Cailean. Way to go, David! Thanks for coloring the Mosaic in faery nice style!  :pharoah2
Check out this tile in the prose forum, Stonehenge as well!



Aloha Loyal Readers (or not),

Back again with another installment of my frivolous journals.  Why so much to say or write them down?  Why splatter the brain on a white sheet of paper or a black screen of binary bits?  Perhaps this prodding:

A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them! – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Perhaps I'm drawing more familiar with the concept of mortality.  Unwilling to depart the world eventually without recording some fragments of my overactive mind, a terrible thing to waste, it’s my attempt to show here I lived.  I thought therefore I was.  Billions pass this way, civilizations come and go, but ideas can last forever.

The work of art I do not make, none other will ever make. – Simon Weil

Perhaps it's the greatest gift I can give, to share discoveries and rediscoveries, of wisdom past and commentary present, of life more than the everyday, a glimpse into the human condition.  It's the world seen through the plastic lens of my Polo glasses; it is part of me.  Those entrenched in the daily grinds don't have the luxury of time I'm fortunate to temporarily acquire, and so I serve as surrogate to their curiosity.  It scarcely qualifies as philosophy and may be a poor interpretation of art.

I sit in the petite upstairs den; the bark of neighbors' dogs intrudes from every open window.  But open they must be, or the humidity of this place would prove most unsettling.  It's been raining for two weeks, not a constant downpour but intermittent showers, heavy nevertheless, overshadowing our voices.  Everything is wet!  But between foreboding clouds of gray the everlasting sun casts its spears into the ground now and then, opportunities to check the mailbox, roll out the garbage bin or give Ehukai his dinner.

It's a strange scene, different moods looking out each of our panoramic upstairs windows.  To the left a dreary, drizzly, soggy frame, misty and dim, to the right shiny leaves waving in the sun and miles of open sky as if rain was never a conception.  This in the same day at the same time as microclimates pass through our homestead, we're treated to all.

Woke up to another rainbow, half to be exact.  Cut off at its peak, the other half never materialized.  I stared at it to probe its secrets, to see through it...and did.  It knew my intentions.  Vague and intense all at once, it vanishes from my vision, melting into the clouds behind it.  Look away and it's back, light and color playing tricks on my eyes.  Add another mystery for science to solve, just particles is light or a wave of energy?  Like an object of desire out of reach you can only behold casually, reach for it and it will disappear, withdraw your hand, it lingers ever present.  Ay, there's the rub.

I'm no writer, no formal training, lacking a dazzling vocabulary and sometimes even imagination.  However as you have seen, I'm easily inspired.  If I could only press paper to head and have feelings magically set to ink, I may yet properly convey that sublime elegance I spoke of.  I have the privilege of being able to write in two vastly opposed languages, but in neither to my full satisfaction.  Such is my dilemma.  And yet there's much to say and it's not too late to start.  Someone once said, "We write not to be understood.  We write to understand."  Maybe.

Once upon a time I wrote as a child, unabashed and forthright.  One of two articles published in a local paper was an essay on my outward indifference of not having dad nearby.  It was okay to feel and dream and wonder and tell about it, when I knew nothing.  Then I became a man and the artist was dead, buried in years of struggle, education and refinement, in sensibilities and "maturity."  It took half a lifetime to remember the youth, the natural being, to discover how to be fully human.

Perhaps it's natural progression, the years are required to shed the certainty and fearlessness held in youth, didn't know better then.  The older we get the more we have and less we can afford to lose, yet it is now we find the courage to lose the pretenses and falsehoods we've grown accustomed to.  It's a new kind of confidence that experience bestows upon us, a newfound security to realize and be what we truly are, to find our older souls.  And a voice no longer silenced.

And silence, like a poultice, comes
To heal the blows of sound. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Silence is golden, and terribly lacking in today's world.  Wounds from "blows of sound" lay undressed and festering in the population gnawing at our psyche, its symptoms the unkindly manner in which we regard each other.  People are too busy to hear their inner voices or even recall their existence.  Each of us at times may want some noise of his own, but when it comes not of his choosing as it often does now it is pollution on his soul.

Solitude is ever harder to come by, a relic past.  We live and work in the same places and even vacation at the same spots.  Ah, but we desperately long for it.  No car commercial shows its sparkling new gem in smoggy commute; it's always some pristine country road, "closed course," says the fine print.  There's a reason the best-selling SUVs are shown exploring the wilderness, no one in sight.  And resort ads of empty beaches, deserted lagoons and secret waterfalls offer the chance to "get away from it all."  What "all" are we getting away from?

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T. S. Eliot ended his masterpiece "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with this passage.  He too, it seems, preferred silence and solitude.

So here we are, two people searching for the same, a peaceful corner of the world away from dogs, kids, yard machines, power washers, circular saws, dirt bikes, giant trucks, tour planes and helicopters, anything fueled by gasoline, electricity, or milk.  Is it so much to ask?