Inner Voice

Journal & Essays

It’s very silly to tap into a part of the mind that deals in falsehood. It talks and blathers all night long and keeps you crazy all through the day, whispering lies that, if you took them seriously, would leave you all bundled up in a chrysalis of confusion—a total paralysis, I mean, in the act of reflecting on the self. Ignore the voices that confuse your sense of being and tell you that the fundamental things you thought you could trust in are lying on shoddy ground. These little devils of thought try to upset your peace by pulling at the very strings of the heart-core and flipping upside-down your notions of what’s really important. “You thought you knew yourself,” the voices say, “but you’ve been deceived all along.” Then they proceed to tell you some absurdity that would make you miserable if it were true—or, actually, it makes you miserable to consider precisely because it’s untrue. The tension between the truth and the untruth of a thing leads to bodily effects and you can feel it in your whole being, this clash between what reflects reality and what is merely a devilish confusion meant to lead you astray. Listen to the simpler voice that speaks to your inmost part. Joy is meant to be our lot, not self-fracture and distress.

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Why shouldn’t I share the things I write? Is it vain to desire it? Why do I bother so much about vanity and the danger of being too caught up in the self? It ends up being more stifling than anything else. Why not acknowledge my humanness and say, Yes, um-hum, it’s fine and proper and very normal and even good to share the things you make. It’s all right to want affirmation and a sense that you belong. Why do I try to quash these things, believing them to be residue of fullness (rather than emptiness) of self? It makes for a difficult relationship with myself. I can’t keep trying to perfect myself all the while squeezing myself into nonexistence. It just won’t work that way!

A Poem about Becoming

Poems

A petal is no lighter than a tree
The difference is merely
How simple can each one be?

Indifference

Poems

Nothing troubles you, so why do you ail?
You talk as though you’d lost the moon.

But I have, I have lost the moon.
For when I look at the world, it merely looks back,
like a mirror with no color
or a pond without life.

When You Were Young

Short Fiction & Prose

When you were young, in the days before you forgot how to dream, the stars were your guardians and the moon was your friend. Each night, once you were safely tucked into your warm bed, thousands of white and frosted stars would gather to dance upon your windowpane. They called out your name in a lilting voice as pale and shimmering as the moon-glow. But you slept soundly, and never woke; and while you slept, the stars knit you a blanket from lily petals and a nightcap from lily stems, their cold and nimble hands (did you know that stars have hands?) fluttering about without a sound. Then, their work done, they laid the blanket over your bed and set the nightcap atop your head, and you were cloaked in a glory of white.

Who can describe what the stars did then? It is too strange, too marvelous to tell how their voices came together in one, great, quivering nova of sound—more beautiful than David’s harp or the pauper’s lute—and sang you lullabies about distant lands and the moon. Oh! in these night-songs the stars brought you to the sands of Arabia and the mountains of Tibet; dressed you in silks and made you to dine with kings. They saw the longing for adventure that was in your heart—the courage, too—and christened you a voyager on their travels to the sublime. You went, I think, with a willing spirit, even as you slept.

Then, in those days, dawn would show her rosy face and interrupt the darkness of your room. The stars, like shy night-visitors, withdrew from your bedside and disappeared, in quiet flickers, out the window whence they came. Soon you began to stir, yawning and stretching your arms above your head. In the moment before your senses returned, before you opened your eyes, you thought dreamily that the room smelled a little of lilies; you heard a peculiar song hanging, just barely, in the air. You wanted to keep these discoveries, to stay with them and find out what they meant, but the voice of your mother broke through the door, calling you to get ready for school. You ate your breakfast and dressed, beginning to think of other things; and you would have forgotten it all, but that, as you were brushing your hair before the mirror, a thin green stem tumbled down and landed on your chest. Your reflection glittered in the mirror, your face as pale as the moon.

Marriage

Short Fiction & Prose

This is the time when all the clocks go striking in their syncronicity. Happy marriage! Happy wedding day! What a beautiful life the two people who are in love will be beginning together. It won’t be all lilies and nosegays, but it will be an inseparable bond, an intertwining and entangling of thoughts and hearts and bodies that sends out the message of communion in a very powerful way.

Emily Marie

Short Fiction & Prose

Emily Marie was a quiet girl, unassuming and full of love for forgotten things. She was a good student who made good marks in her French and Philology courses and she worked at the university library shelving books. From the money she made at the library, she parceled out a small amount each week—just enough to buy herself a book from the shop downtown. Her bookshelf thus grew one book larger every seven days, and she was getting crowded out of her bed because the books were beginning to spill from their confines. It is therefore not surprising that Emily Marie began to dream of pirates when Treasure Island landed on her baseboard and of white rabbits when Alice in Wonderland fell astride her pillowcase.

Morning Struggle

Short Fiction & Prose

The boy woke up feeling exhausted. What a chore to greet the morning! he thought, and turned over to groan and sigh and contemplate the dreariness ahead. He did not like to think too long of his work, for he found the office dreadful and dull—it gave him a headache. Nor did he do well to meditate on his friends, for he had very few and the ones he did have talked with a lisp and were always preoccupied with their own affairs. The only thing that got the boy to roll from bed was the prospect of breakfast: a biscuit and honey with a hot cup of tea. Without the thought of breakfast to cheer him, he might have pulled the blankets across his head and slumbered right through the noon.

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