3-14-13 RMB Words Only Felt

Dear Rita Mae Brown,

“Hello, how are you this morning?”

Today I started reading The Hand that Cradles the Rock.

I sleep with the radio on a Spanish station. I am not fluent in the language, although those that don’t speak it at all think I am. I can follow most conversations and get the gist. I can respond when asked questions, but the words I piece together are clunky at best. It is a beautiful language…just a bit beyond my grasp.

The words in your poetry are like that. Some I understand, like a Spanish phrase here and there. Others are in a language beyond me. I could understand them, if I knew you better, if we sat and discussed them at length, if you were able to remember the thoughts and emotions that combined those particular words. Somehow I think you could.

The phrases I do understand…with those I am limited as well, limited to my own experience, my own perspective. I could say I understand all of your poems in that way, in my limited way. That is what people do. We take hold of words, images, actions, everything and make them our own, retell the story with our own slant.

In this way, we think we understand, we think we are understanding. We think that is enough, the best we can do. Will we ever evolve to understanding from one another’s perspective???

As I read today I wonder about your words written yet unpublished, even more so words thought yet never written and the words only felt. There is another language there. Perhaps that is a part of these letters, to find that realm. Can reading between the lines give one passage there?

Some days I make more sense than others. This is what I do in general…many days I reach for meaning in life’s mysteries yet to be realized. How can we understand something that is beyond our grasp, beyond our time? Does seeking it draw it near?

Onward and upward,

Loraine

Cool lines from Songs to a Handsome Woman…

“After all,…We’re just a pair of identical strangers.”

“Whisper it…So that I might grow rather than age.”