I hate to sully this page. To clutter it with words too poor and ugly for its beauty. There is such a cleanness to a fresh sheet of paper, a blank webpage, an empty canvas. They share a common purpose, to be filled, but by whom? Who is worthy to spoil such innocence, to invade the unassuming openness of the possibility of the vessel? What words are worthy of being transcribed? I fear to write ugly things, thoughts which are incomplete and haphazard. I wish all my thoguhts could flow majestically ordered and profound from my mind, through my fingers, into the glow of my computer screen. But I have no such skill. I am not Mozart whose scratch sheets and practices compositions have never been found if they ever existed at all.
I can only begin where I have already begun: incompleteness. It is disappointing, but inevitable. I am not where I wish to be and have never been to that strange country of imagining where the dreams are more real than the waking and all you have to do to receive is ask. Delays. Expectations abruptly and coldly refused. Retreats. I have so much to say, but I am not entirely sure what it is, yet. Like Orual in Till We Have Faces I am with book as some women are with child. I have only just conceived. My thoughts are new and unformed yet very much alive. The proverbial nine months is a long time to wait for something that teems in my brain like the ants that infest the older dormitories at school in August. Disgustingly, fervently alive.
Waiting. Waiting for visions and for circumstances I can smell coming, experiences I know will shape me and have not arrived yet. Can I just do them now, please? Check them off my list? Get started working through the pain and growth so that I can start enjoying life sooner? Can I be done now, please? No? I see. I understand.
Well, no. I guess I really don't understand. But I should very much like to.
I am bad at patience. My curiosity and my desire to act to experience fuels the pumping of my heart until it swish-swashes now and again, the gentle murmuring of eternity cooling and slowing my actions. Like the anxious, timorous horses of my younger days, I fret and strain at my halter, rapidly bouncing up and down in place because I am not allowed to go forward. Please, let me run!
For me, for now, the path is slow. God asks me to wait, and be still. To bite my tongue until I have something to say. Something real to say, not just the snatches of my inspirations and the groanings and grievings of my eyes as they become increasingly witness to a sorrow to deep and too old for words. I am too young to speak to such things. My words are for the living and cannot help the dead. I must be content with insufficiency and trust that my Maker will, like Baalam, fill my mouth with His words. For I undoubtedly will stain and corrupt the virgin page--only He can create a Life and a Word without death.
