Breaking Silence

I simply could not stop looking and listening. While others sat in the warm cabin of the day cruise ship, I stood on the deck for hours, snapping photos, embracing the cold wind that stung my cheeks and laughing aloud at times at the vast Alaskan display before me. The deck filled with watchers as we inched closer to our legislated 1/4 mile distance from the glacier, and talk stilled as the engines went silent. In the cold we stood and listened to the sound of an eons old glacier breaking silence.

I remember waking, years ago, to the sound of my own voice mumbling unintelligible syllables. In that dream I was being pressed upon by a supernatural presence so powerful that I knew my breath and soul was about to be extinguished if I did not succeed in speaking aloud the magic Name that would deliver me. I I tried with extreme effort several times to utter the name, yet no sound came out of my mouth. I marshalled every last ounce of strength in my body to try one more time, and that is when I woke up.

The slowly melting glacier and the dream scenario are the closest images I can think of to describe the struggle I have had these past two plus years to name my thoughts, to capture and describe the questions I have lived with and the trails of reasoning and remembering I have followed. The inner struggle has been so intense that I have found myself unable to speak, unable to articulate or even name to others the inner paths I walked along. I have been mute.

For all my adult life, words, sentences, and paragraphs have been my home territory and frequent journal entries a necessity for my mental and emotional health. Writing and prayer enabled me to sort through gnarly relationship challenges and to see myself and others with different eyes. I was sure of what truth was, and the focus of my life was listening to, with, and on behalf of others, helping them to approach God with words and find truth and hope in the process.

But these past two years I have wondered often if I will ever again feel a comfortable certainty about what is true, what isn't, and how to live in truth. These past two years I have been a woman who has carried on an extensive and at times excruciating inner conversation, struggling, with all my might to find and speak the words that might reveal and frame the truth and meaning .

Several years ago I wanted to post regularly to a blog that others would read because I felt my words might be able to influence and help others to seek and live truth. At this point, I see my posts to this blog more as a promise I need to keep, a means of personal discipline and accountability, and a way of breaking silence.