kuangning: (quiet)
[personal profile] kuangning
It's quiet here, despite paper rustling, and words are mercury globules spilled, parting around my pen. So I gave up, and now I'm trying this space, a different sort of net for quicksilver fish.

I want to tell you.

One night I crossed a bridge, black water and shining streetlamp ripples below, and wondered if I dared to jump in. The water would have been cold, my jacket heavy, and I imagined kicking against the weight to surface for one more breath and one more look with my eyes stinging. A board creaked under my feet as my weight shifted -- and I shook my head, put one foot in front of the other, and walked on. Such is the seduction of rivers, and the grace of bridges.

One morning, I felt a sunrise, felt it in the drag of the waves around me and the warming of my eyelids as I floated, calm and joyous, until a fish brushed against me and it tickled. It is hard to float serenely while giggling. When I recovered, I opened my eyes to a sky bathed in gold and edging to softest pinks, and all that day, the world was a necklace of wonder strung with beads of awe. I handled it gently, and it reflected back love.

One day, I introduced a wide-eyed child to the concepts of soft and fluff. She giggled and wriggled her toes in the mess of down from the old pillow, and later we spent an hour combing feathers out of her hair, with no regrets for time lost.

I once picked up a thing of magic disguised as polished wood and metal strings, and, with a single note, stepped across the line of the soul that divides audience from musician. I carry no badge, bear no insignia -- but the heart knows. A friend told me that the only thing I would ever need to master in music was myself -- to learn to let the music flow from heart to hands and bypass my head entirely. I looked into his eyes and knew that he knew -- and, one evening, obeying an urge to accompany the music of a thunderstorm with a lesser storm of my own making, I began to understand.

I once put a net of words around an idea, and saw comprehension in the eyes of a reader, and understood something else.

It is not what I have seen, or done, or felt, that defines the space my life will occupy. It is not the impact my experiences have had on me that will endure. It is only what I manage to communicate, to express, to tell or show or help someone else to feel that will never entirely pass away.

Date: 2003-06-03 12:52 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] virtual256.livejournal.com
No one can tell how far and how deeply a teacher will touch the world. Everyone, be they young or old, is a teacher to someone.

Your words continue to ring true in my mind and heart, thank you for writing them.

Raffi

Date: 2003-06-03 02:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jait.livejournal.com
That was beautiful.

Date: 2003-06-03 12:08 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] porcinea.livejournal.com
Wow. Yes. That.

September 2015

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