Already, a new month. 

I wake up with strange dreams and things I want to say. I go through self doubt and remember or recreate horrible times. And when I get to the page, there is nothing. It all seems pointless. Who am I speaking to anyway? No one cares, not really. 

It’s too easy to say that. I can’t see everything. And whatever trials people are going through, asking people to care about things is a problem.  I think the best of us do care, perhaps too much. And people are watching intolerable disasters. People are living intolerable disasters.

One opens a newspaper and at best it’s a mix of:

It’s all fine. Everything is not fine. Some people know what to do. Everything has changed and your perceptions are imperfect. We didn’t report it for…reasons. Thank goodness for news media. It’s all fine.

And I’m supposed to come up with some set of words that manages to overlay my emotions, the chaos of the world, and synthesize this into what – writing? 

Yet I feel I have to write something. It’s starting to be too long – again.

I can’t blame anyone else. 

I keep writing something, and then putting it aside. Then the world has a new set of chaotic horrors.

When I returned from a day out, my iPad had updated. One of the choices involved choosing a voice for Siri. The last one sounded like a robot. None of them sounded like anyone I knew. The phrase they repeated, as you clicked through voice 1, voice 2 and so forth, was

The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun.

How apt. And the sun is setting at the moment. The robotic voice gives us a made up poetic phrase. Colors fade with the setting sun. But it is our colors that are fading. We fade with the setting of humanity. We fade with the lack of touch. We fade with the lack of originality.

Mostly, we fade because we can no longer hear our own voice.

I realized this, sitting on a mountainside, looking out. At one point, a few sea hawks circled and came closer to where I was. Circling. Are they ever bored, I wondered, as they rose with the air drafts and followed each other on a gust of wind only they could see or feel. 

No, I don’t think they are bored. They aren’t taught to be bored. They aren’t bombarded with social media and a million people all railing against injustice and the horrors of a humankind driven by money and machines. Everyone has a story. They circle in your brain, like birds, but more like the birds of Hitchcock. They come for your thoughts, crumbs, bread to pull apart, road kill to attack. I am a squirrel inching across the road from one set of trees to another. I am threatened by men rushing past in giant metal trucks, faster. Faster. Women talk of a million things. Everyone talks. On dit – words without knowing. Words without the person.

I can’t hear myself anymore.

I had intended to come back to the blog. I did a bit of saving myself, you see. I quit my horrible job. I am now in recovery from another group of bullies, drunk on their own power, suspicious of everyone. I moved away from the suburbs. I thought that would be enough. But it was only the start.

I feel the loss of the birds I fed, the tree I looked up to, the squirrels and the rabbits that would come visit. As soon as the landlords found I was leaving, they did everything they could do to return the small garden to the pristine, natural golf course-l ike bit of chemically altered turf they really wanted.

You can drive past a house, and it’s cared for. It emanates soul. It vibrates differently. 

The words need woods. The thoughts need the ocean.

I need to remember? Find? Recover? Invent? My own thoughts, thoughts that have been chased from me by repeated blogs, all of which seem to end with a plea for money. “You can’t use the master’s tools…”. Remember? The desperation of even the most academically minded short pieces gives off a vibration of the precipice. They may be right to do it. I’m sure they are. They engage with this world as they see it, and try to win at this game – the one they’ve signed up for.

I can’t even remember enjoying the game.  Who cares about a game? 

I admire the people doing the work to try and save this world from the soullessness which threatens to consume it.

For now, I will sink into the woods.

The cacophony of trauma.

It’s not much compared to the wars and disasters and attacks. But it all stems from the same thing. 

We are going through an epidemic of bullying.

And some of the people on the good side are the same.

The cacophony of trauma.