From www.lauriedoctor.com...

Once upon a time people took their vision, their imagination, their dreams and committed them to paper or clay or cave walls. Vision is made new when it becomes physical. Without vision being voiced or voice made visible, we are lost. Nothing changes. Today, paying tribute to what is unseen is an answer to despair. It makes transformation possible. It is both an act of recognition and a cry for recognition. There is time left...

I wrote part of that. It was a joy to shape the words together, to say what about that way, do you mean to say this? Until some meaning emerged that felt right to both. So it seemed. Vision voiced and voice made visible. The cave paintings at Chauvet, 30,000 years old. An answer to despair and a cry for recognition. In and around and though these words I wove my contribution to what it appeared we were becoming. Only by acknowledging darkness is it possible to shed any light. So I thought. And still do, though the price has been high. As it turned out, there was no time left. By the date of the workshop this passage describes, we had become strangers.

Some things are too personal, some say, to write about in public. But I have always thought that what we're doing here, one of the things we could be doing, is to show each other what it is to be completley and uncompromisingly human. In Gonzo Marketing I wrote the following bit in the chapter titled The Value Proposition:

Something animated and vital looks out from our children�s eyes. Whatever it is, we recognize it and know it is precious. Yet except in rare cases today, that spirit is broken early and irreparably. The light goes out all too soon. We know, because at some inarticulate and dimly conscious level, we are those children. We feel the wind of spirit move us at odd moments, but put it down to nostalgia or temporary possession by some impractical flight of fancy. We shake it off and get back to work. Robbed of a voice to speak of these things, something animated and vital looks out from our own eyes, but only in rare, unguarded moments -- and even then, wary, circumspect, suspicious. We let no one see what we fear no one will understand.

Where is the value in this, I wonder? What is the cost? Catching the light, a flock of pigeons turns through the sky over the highway. I am driving and remembering and feeling how much is lost, how precious this life.

These are a couple things I wrote earlier this year. The memory of loss is still raw, unrefined, not yet settled and fixed and filed safely away. I return to these things, to these words and the hope they carried, not to torture myself as some friends (and they are true friends) have suggested, but to remind myself of what my heart can bear, and has. To remind myself of what I will never lose.

Monday, February 4, 2002

what I forgot to say tonight

what I forgot to say
was how brightly the stars
burned through the trees
in your hidden courtyard
the night so cold
just outside the warmth
of your kitchen
your spirit fire
two candles in the snow.
And me there wondering:
had it been snowing
when last you lit them?

what I forgot to say
was how much at home
I felt at last
in the night that was once
too big, too infinite,
how you had taught me this
how I had listened
all those years
for a sign, a song
even when my heart
could not contain
your music.

what I forgot to say
was nothing
when the only words
I could find to speak
held no memory of you
no faith, no fire
no coal black sky
so deep so dark a dream
no morning.

what I forgot to say
was that I need to sleep
to take this darkness down
into my heart's own healing
which I did not find today
and failing, let myself believe
cannot be found
under that same moon
that same night wind
in which your candles prayed.

what I forgot to say
so many times
was that my darkness
once a comfort
is no longer
no more familiar
no more a gift
than it ever was.

my hands are empty.
my dreams are broken.

what I forgot to say
was how
under all the words I said
if I am still now
I can hear
the night
your smile
a deeper faith.
these broken dreams
released
these empty hands
opening into a silence
that breaks like dawn.

why my only one
do I forget these things?
how can I tell you then
that I have not forgotten?

somewhere the tree
does not bend or burn
the night does not end
yet morning always comes.
somehow I find
all the ways I need to say
I love you.

Wednesday, February 6, 2002

I wished tonight that I was Pablo Neruda so I could write
you poetry like that, with windy dark nights and the moon
the color of blood in the river. with old trees blasted by
many winters, yet covered with blossoms in the spring.
with smooth stones and rough wool blankets by a fire dying
slowly under the stars and the warmth of your eyes my last
memory before morning.