So Many Voices

The "I" walks into a bar. And enounters a priest. The priest delivers an abbreviated version of last Sunday's sermon: "Chastity is the road to salvation!" "I" admires his brazenness to proselytize in a setting so disparate from the conventionally religious laboratories of collusion, not to mention his succinct elocution of such a complex topic. "I" desires freedom from their own confusion and the capacity to hold onto a truth so naked and pure; to be able to preach their ideas with dogmatic arrogance.

A little further down the bar sits an old man, hunched over with such hyperbolic force, reminiscent of Yvonne Ranier's mundane yet exaggerated use of her body. The endless curve of his back is the composite of unforgiving years of dogged life-lessons. The old man says to "I", "Don't let the 9 to 5 arrest you; instead let poetry seize you." "I" yearns for such surprising encounters with nuance, to lose themselves in the gracious and artful scripts of life, to be so visibly branded with their own embodied knowing.

On the other side of the room is a young child, about 8 years old. She wears her hair in braided pigtails. She's engrossed in her own conversation, yet with no one visibly in sight. "I" approaches her, close enough to listen to their conversation. "What kind of tea would you like? I have mint, ginger and hibiscus." "I'll take hibiscus with a spoonful of honey, please." "Of course, give me just a minute." "Why thank you, you're so very kind. I've been walking all day in the woods and I am parched." The girl pours hibiscus tea from a small ceramic pot with lilac flowers painted in the minimalist fashion of Japanese 17th century aesthetics. She drinks from her own tea cup and emits the most gorgeous and simple "mmmm" "I" has heard in a long time. The tea was clearly the perfect combination of sweet and refreshing, with notes of certainty. Her "mmmm" was enchanting and provocative; it was the most consummate expression of who "I" had always yearned to be but didn't know until that moment - a knowing rooted in her own imagination, and satiated by the sound of her own voice.