FOR THE STILL, SMALL VOICE
by Donna R. (Cole) Carter, copyrighted 1989, all rights reserved.
The music swept through her -
memory after memory -
as she sat in deep space,
alone in the void
with only the stars and the sky to keep her company.
A keening, crying voice,
expressing melancholic loneliness,
echoing through the vast expanse of isolation.
Where was it coming from?
Where was it going?
she wondered.
Who was feeling so deeply in tune with themselves?
The cry wailed again,
and touched her
deep in her soul.
It was then that she realized
that she herself had made the cry,
years and years in her past,
and only now was she able to hear it ...
now that she was out
where she had sent it so many years ago.
Aware of what was happening,
she felt the emptiness within,
reached out around her in the vastness
hoping against hope
that
perhaps she could hear someone else's cry.
Her ears were opened,
her mind was ready,
but she wasn't prepared
for the magnitude of feelings
that overwhelmed her in response.
Emotions
expressed over the eons past
floated around her in the air
palpable to her touch, and
she reached out and caressed each one:
the sadness,
the anger,
the joy and the pain...
all the feelings that had been thrown to the sky
for lack of focus and direction below...
They were all still around,
floating in the atmosphere,
waiting to be heard
and ever-seeking release and relief.
As if they were bubbles,
she reached out to them,
able now
to decipher boundaries between each one,
able
to differentiate one feeling from another,
one expression from another
rather than having
a mass of indecipherable emotion
tumbling through the sky
Gravity had never had a pull on emotion,
and she found herself
in that portion of deep space
where emotions had drifted to...
She stilled herself once again
and closed her eyes,
looking back in her life
for the cries she felt as a child:
the times she had thrown her feeling sto the skies,
knowing that
no one on earth could comfort her.
She sat and remembered
long ago pain and heartbreak,
sorrow and grief,
longing and loneliness she had suffered
when she was young.
She searched through the feelings around her now
in an almost frantic way
to find those feelings
and touch them once again...
Maybe she could forget her loneliness,
if only for a moment,
by touching her feelings
and the reality of those other feelings
just waiting to be expressed around her.
"Stop," she told herself,
"you must calm down
if you are going to do anything about this:
If you are to find your feelings
in this emotional closet you have encoutered,
You must become more in tune with yourself than ever before.
You must calm down."
She closed her eyes again
and listened for herself
amid the weeping and shouting emotions around her.
There it was ...
faintly,
but purely,
the feeling permeated her soul again.
The keening cry of her lonely heart
and broken spirit.
"Touch it,"
she felt herself reach out,
"Feel it again...
This is reality...
You are real,
and you haven't lost yourself.
even though you are alone."
She reached out and touched her grief,
her sorrow,
her longing,
her loneliness,
her heartbreak
and her anguish.
She touched,
she absorbed,
she felt,
and she wept with the joy of feelings.
She was not alone,
she had the company of her soul.
