"A Ruffled Mind Makes a Restless Pillow"

(The title is a quotation from Charlotte Bronte)

Sometimes, being a writer is a curse. There. I said it. A curse.

No! you exclaim, placing your hands upon your chest in wide-eyed astonishment. Surely you jest, O man behind the curtain!

I'm not jesting.

And don't call me Shirley (I know, that doesn't work as well in print, but Leslie Nielsen is dead and someone ought to acknowledge it; it might as well be me).

Further, I say it is a curse, albeit a rewarding and desirable sort of scourge, because often the process of verbalizing inspiration insistently takes place on its own time schedule, even at the cost of much-needed snoozing. Last night for example, I went to bed and tried to go to sleep. Tried and tried and tried and tried. Couldn't seem to settle down, almost as though in my mind I felt that "something [was] stacking up to happen" (from May Swenson's "How Everything Happens"); and I just couldn't figure out what it was. I tossed. I turned. I watched old TV show episodes on Youtube (Note: By the way, I discovered that someone had posted all of the seasons of V.I.P.E.R. on Youtube, a show I used to love to watch when I was a kid; now, I find it actually belongs with Macgyver and ALF and Who's the Boss? in the rubbish bin of reality). Nothing doing. It was as though someone had locked the gates of "Shut-Eye Town" (from Eugene Field's "The Sugar Plum Tree").

Now, I have been through this process before. It's an unfortunate byproduct of the Muse's whispered nothings. The artistic synapses reverberate with gesticulating ideas struggling to emerge, only waiting until just the right moment to peek out of their hidey-holes. Most of the time, the end result is not the waking of Sleeping Beauty but the producing of a hunch-backed, half-formed bellringer. However, every once in a while however, an idea comes out which is unprecedented, uncharacteristic, and completely unexpected.

For me, that happened around 3:30 a.m. this morning. Once I finished typing, I fell right to sleep.

Of course, some of you may not like poetry; in fact, many of you may not like it. And I don't expect you to read it if you are against that sort of thing. But one thing you ought to know, and I think I've said this before, call it the Spirit, call it the Muse, call it the sub-conscious, call it conscience, call it the soothing shouts of shrieking silence, whatever you want to call it, it does not matter to me; what does matter to me is that we understand the importance of listening when it speaks to you.

So much of what occurs in a normal conversation revolves around talking (it seems), but almost no one wants to listen. "My turn!" we shout, jumping around with our hands in the air like Methodists full of the Holy Spirit; "Wait till you hear this." It is easy to talk, to share information about ourselves and the abnormally trivial facts we have hoarded about the world, both natural and unnatural, but often our urge to express ourselves infringes upon our ability to be absolutely still while others have the floor. Patience is a virtue, and listening is often a demonstration of that virtue in its singular purity. Perhaps, we ought to put aside our pride, our self-centeredness, our narcissistic need to impart and instruct, so that we may receive something that we ourselves could not possess in any other way. Whether we are in earshot of a friend, a teacher, a judge, a parent, a sibling, or a stranger, perhaps we should close our mouths and open our ears instead, choosing rather to disconnect ourselves from the "benign indifference of the universe" (from Albert Camus's The Stranger), "break out of the tiny and tawdry theatre in which [our] own little plot is always being played," and spurn the "sunny selfishness and [the] virile indifference" which our inability to listen encourages (from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy). Only then can we uncover the essence of the first step toward harmonious dialogue, the enriching pollen derived from the dewy stems of dialectic, for human unity does not always come from voices in unison, that is, everyone doing the same thing, at the same time, for the same reason; sometimes, more will be achieved through the establishment of sincere harmony. Even if "there were chairs enough for a world" (from Pablo Neruda's A Sentarse), perhaps some of us still should choose to stand, with lips sewn shut and ears directed toward the speaking stars. Then, and only then, will their incessant whirring greet our waiting ears as a lullaby instead of a disturber.