Walking the Wall

    "If every life is a river, then it’s little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
    My name once meant daughter, granddaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out: Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
    I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I’d be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

That is an opening to a book. It’s too early to write a review about it as I’m not finished with it yet, but Incantation by Alice Hoffman is poetic prose. It questions identity, what it means to be who you are and how other people’s words, other people’s secrets, other people’s expectations can define us. At some point, though, we hope to become individuals defined by our own words, secrets even, and certainly dreams. "I am this, body and soul. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am." It sounds like Sarah Teasdale and it is interesting how I am always drawn back to her poetry. The idea of secrets seeming to have so much power, but sometimes when pulled out, we find they really only had the power we had given them–

Dust

When I went to look at what had long been hidden,
A jewel laid long ago in a secret place,
I trembled, for I thought to see its dark deep fire –
But only a pinch of dust blew up in my face.
I almost gave my life long ago for a thing
That has gone to dust now, stinging my eyes –
It is strange how often a heart must be broken
Before the years can make it wise.

~Sarah Teasdale

It will never cease to amaze me the power that words have. Standing in a bookstore, or a library, we open up a book we randomly pick up off a shelf and something, a line, a turn of phrase, catches our attention, like: "I began to understand that the deeper you looked inside yourself, the more you saw what was infinite and eternal" (108), or "But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say No. I disagree. That was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself" (33), and with that power, the power to define your own self.