When you feel you've lost your voice

Some days, I fear she’s left me, she’s so quiet, lying motionless somewhere between my brain and my heart.  My writer voice.  I call to her, and there is no reply.  But I know she’s there; or perhaps I don’t, I only dare to hope.  Today I cannot hear her voice, but I hope she’s there, tucked away in the folds of my heart the way courage tucks away in vulnerability. 

I hear the voices of others, raw strength and whispered prayers, lilting images carried on the wings of poetry and prose.  And I smile for them, draw strength from them, and watch them fly away.

They fly without me, it seems.  I watch them lift, higher and higher, until we are in two different worlds - they in the air, me on the ground.

It is not my time to fly, I say.  For everything there is a season, and mine must be a digging and planting, a breaking and building, a grounding not flying.  A time to keep silent.

And I wait, for words that reap life and grace to spring up from this dry ground scattered with broken seed.

We’ve planted, I say.  The rains will come.  My voice, she will emerge once more from within the folds. 

Yet, until that day, my soul, scoop the earth in your hands and feel the dirt slip through your fingers and hold the scent of tear stained ground in your heart.  Memorize the songs of birds at dawn and study the dance of swallows across the open fields, and at night, practice flying in your dreams. 

photo credit