Saturday, November 5, 2011

No Comment

Photo by Jason Chen

Bite your tongue, silence is golden, if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all...  Each a cliché, a worn out adage, that has no life on this blog. I appreciate every time somebody somewhere takes a moment out of their world to add something to mine.


This is a post, a quick tutorial on commenting, for those of you who have emailed or texted asking how.

Begin with the writer's words. If it's winter, do they heat your rooms slowly like a potbelly stove with adjectives simmering on top? Overspilling when they get too hot, requiring an oven mitt to touch? Do the icy adverbs grip you with their strength? Tease you with their slickness? If it's spring, do the words walk with you down a dirt road, no more or less traveled than any other, as difference already surrounds you? Are you stopped cold by perfect phrasing in the sweat of summer? Cooled more by a syntax only you and the tall trees understand? Is there a paragraph in autumn, written by someone unknown, that makes you wonder how that is? How someone unfamiliar knocks you on your ass with their words, takes your breath away, and leaves you to wonder when you'll get it back... question if you want it back?
                                    
                        Guess what? These aren't the writer's words anymore; they're yours. 

Between stimulus and response there is a space, wrote Viktor Frankl. Within this space, we exist. Within this gap, live our experience, knowledge, purpose, and promise... except it's not a gap at all, is it? These are the very things that connect us to all matter and energy if we dare show what lies in our breast pocket, the one internal to our heart. 

Click on the two cent section, the peanut gallery, the comment section at the end of the post. As if our thoughts are worth only two cents. Pull out what hides in your heart’s pocket. Lay it down with things others have said, or be the first. Choose an identity, even if it’s anonymous. The most beautiful words have been written by the anonymous. If you want to include your name, know an address in space isn't needed. Be published. 


In other words:

1.      1. Click on the comment section at the end of the post
2.      2. Write a comment in the box
3.      3. Select an identity (don’t be dissuaded by the Name/URL choice; a URL is not needed)
4.      4. Click on ‘Publish Your Comment.’
      
don't keep your comments to yourself                                               even if your voice shakes 

2 comments:

  1. One of my favorite words is "ruminate". It makes me picture a cow chewing on some grass in deep contemplation :) You made me think of that lovely verb when you mentioned the space between stimulus and response. Great writers, you included, push us to think for ourselves.

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  2. Thanks, Mary. I love the visual of a cow in deep contemplation!

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