meant to say

Almost every single thing I've written here has arrived with regrets. Second thoughts, second guesses, second third and fourth revisions. Missing phrases or single words that didn't arrive til hours or even days later. I suppose writers much more skilled than me contend with this.

What a medium is this charged real-time electronic page! Bringing to light how solid and how mutable words are. Clear, and ever open to interpretation. Ready, and never complete. And for the sincere mind that wants to speak something useful into being, what a current of potential found and lost constantly circulates - on the page and in the blood. And in the mind, where those inner voices have their way and their play with it.

Today the voices in my head are saying I spoke too simply, that I was facile even, on a weighty subject yesterday. Some of them must be those activist voices that found their way in thanks to various heavy-minded acquaintances. I'm gonna start calling them 'reactivists': that's more their style. Always a word for what's wrong with the world, with the scene, with me, and never an affirmation. Never a truly original thought.

I know good and well it's deep water I was skimming over yesterday. So deep I can barely stand to look into its glassy green depths. But I'm gonna go deeper. This is certainly my intention. Every prayer-full night and every listening day. I'm gonna go deeper, in understanding, just by reading this book on world poverty and inequality. And when I join friends later this week, to plan the year's community garden for immigrant families that are barely making ends meet. I'm constantly asking Life to speak to me, with these and other currents of the Now, about how much longer I can be just another person working for a living. Or whether for the life in me I need to take a more significant path in the world. In this little wordspace I only hope to practice a few minutes of affirmation. To sidle up to the depth on careful, maybe philosophical, maybe even humorous terms if I'm lucky. To polish a tiny pane of light in all this dinginess. To speak to what IS, in all the NOT. That's the sort of word I meant to say -- the sort of uncapturable thing I dared to hope words could sort of capture -- again yesterday.