My thoughts were beautiful, and dwelt in solitude, but the solitude of artistry, not depression. My heart has wandered from this place and into another, so in a sense, I am no longer here either, in the physical location of my body. My body goes through the motions of my life, pleasantly, because my mind is not in the movements: my mind embarks on dreams of beauty while my heart embarks on the wings of those beautiful and unique dreams. The smiles inside of me speak volumes for my state of mind, and the senses inside of me say more to me than my own words can express, but the writer inside of me is compelled to define them. So, how to express myself?Bon Iver, even if it were wordless, is musically able to define my mind in the grey mist of a strange summer's day. (After all, the musician added lyrics last in his songwriting, as his story tells, and I can relate to the wordlessness of the emotions.) The heart can saythrough sounds and through images what it might be unable to express in words. My words are inadequate to express feeling and wordless thought, but I can set the stage, describe the moment as it exists in imagination, and hope that the emotion is determinable, or that the moment is recreatable.
Setting.
I am in a cabin: a very small structure, whitewashed over worn gray boards. The front room is small and narrow, but flooded with the hazy light of the mid-wood. A twisted rag rug of red, white and faded denim spreads across the foot-worn floor. The furniture is of crude construction, but the cushions are ample. Air conditioning is unheard of, and a creaking fan stirs the damp, warm breezes that come in through tired screens in double-hung windows and a wood frame porch door. The constant hum of bog insects and the chirps of bullfrogs press in with the humid air and the tap-tap of adventurous flies and moths form the unrhythmic percussion of living inside these four walls. The kitchen is small, with a back door leading to three unfinished board stairs and a patch of mud between two trees. The unsanded table makes room for meals, but eatng is secondary to dreaming here. A side room serves as the bedroom: just two windows and a double bed clothed in a patchwork quilt.
I spend all of my time on the front porch. It sags a little over the sloping ground that seems to begin somewhere in the middle of the house and end in an orangey puddle on the gravelly road in front. The white porch rails are a resting place for my feet as I sit in a rickety kitchen chair to write and write and write in utmost silence. I am not alone, though I sit by myself. Even in the growing dusk when I light the Chinese lanterns and the fireflies begin to twinkle, speaking amongst themselves in secret light-languages among the trees, I am not alone.
Someone is strumming a guitar just beyond my field of vision, and I hear a harmonica, perhaps a tambourine, and now the sweet and wordless voice of a mountain angel? Far away, the music is gently quiet, and yet inside me, the music stirs the chords of my heart with unremembered memories. Some ghostly band is riding to me on the thickness of the still, Southern night air. The sound is the music of angels on the eve of Christ's birth, the song my heart sings inside of my silent body as I wait.
Sadness echoes on the melody of beauty and belonging to the world, as it is here in this wooded place, miles from all else. The night smells musty like still water and moss, but fresh as the moving streams below the oak roots and the bread cooling from the oven. It smells like milk and honey of the promised land, and perhaps this is the promised land of the New World, the place where life begins and ends, a thousand times over, and alive with dreams. If I close my eyes, I can see it still, from the rounded vine-covered peaks overhead to the sickle moon to the grey kitten the color of a dusky raincloud who has claimed my porch for his home. But I dare not close my eyes lest I should reopen them to find the dream has vanished.
The narrow dirt road below is the path of life and my heart walks along it, even as my body is still and silent in waiting. That wooded glad with narrow, dusty trails among trees...trees thick and gnarled and smooth as fruit rinds and knotted with decay and scored by wild animals and tender as green shoots: so many trees. Some of the paths become obscured by underbrush or weeds, some by sudden bursts of wildflowers, and others by distinctly fallen trees. Each path in the wood ends, in its time, and the end of a path is not the cause for tears. There is always another path worthy of exploration, another trail to follow with joy, not with fear of how it will end. It will end, but that should make the walking of it less enjoyable.
The haunting music of the dreams ever accompanies and the sweet scents constantly envelop. Even from the porch of my cabin, I can feel the life of the wood unfolding before me, from the ending of paths like the closing of a spent bloom to the beginning of a new path like the swelling of a tiny seed into a great tree. I am in the spring of life, on the edge of existence itself, a veritable Eden, perhaps, as none knows where it lay.
I close my eyes in the fallingday to feel the dappled patches of golden sunset-light as they spread across my face, pressing through the forest's denseness, just to find me. The rushing sounds of the river below and the poplar leaves above blend with the wordless angel voices, bringing the fairytale to life and a smile to my face in a half-sleep daydream as the story of the wood makes itself known to me in inexpressible sensations and nameless moods. How can words describe them without inadequately--and superfluously--explaining that words cannot describe them? The insufficiency is painfully obvious, and even in the analysis of the insufficiency, some of the whimsicality is lost, slipping through the cracks, returning to the earth from whence it came. The wood is the beginning and the end of everything.
I fall into silence again, though I realize that I had not spoken at all. Never in my life have I said a word worth saying, a statement original and witty enough to be worth lifting my voice to articulate. Within my silence is where I belong: scratching my pen to the strum of harpstrings and the hum of angelic voices across the tree-lined way. In the mist, they remain hidden like the road before me, but their voices sing of hope. I continue on the path laid just for me, pressing onward into the veiling mist, into the mysterious and wonderful existence I will always live and never quite discover.
I want to sit with you and talk
about everything in the world,
and I want to sit with you in silence
until my heart knows yours.
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