Too Much With Us

The last card of the tarot that we’re exploring in Lyn Thurman’s “Writing the Wisdom of Your Soul” is The World and it extended an invitation to us to share what we’ve learned through this challenge. It’s been a good journey and still, somehow, the lines from Wordsworth’s poem, containing its own title, were the first words that occurred to me:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

I’ve learned that I have a lot to say. Actually, I knew that already. What I really learned is that I can’t shut it up. Not for long. Not even when I try.

I’d prefer not to try. Not when so many humans have no voice at all. Maybe I worry unnecessarily about them. Maybe they don’t mind so much not having a voice. Maybe they don’t realize they COULD have a voice.

Since I know I have a voice and am fortunate enough to be able to share it, I have found myself wondering why I don’t share it more often than I do. I mean, I share it in many ways, but mostly privately, which doesn’t align with my desire to share it publicly. What has stopped me? Fear. Of being thought stupid, vapid, insensitive, naïve, insecure, unlearned or somehow otherwise lacking. But wait, not just of being thought those things but actually being TOLD that I am those things.

Wooo – that’s a biggie right there!

Yet, here we are, a month of more publicly shared writing than I’ve done in a great long while and you know what? No scathing remarks have surfaced, no attacks on my writing or my character (or, thankfully, my person). Granted, there’s been precious few remarks at all. But there have been views, a few Likes, some more readers who had never before read my writing. And, it’s quite true, they might never return once the challenge is complete.

That, I have decided, is more than alright. I would prefer people return because they found something here that they enjoyed, something that resonated with them, something that brought them a moment of joy, of peace, or simply of relief. Relief to know, perhaps, that they aren’t the only one out there who feels a certain way. Because it’s true: no matter how much evidence you have to the contrary, it’s painfully easy to encounter a difficulty so disarming to your senses that you convince yourself that either 1) no one else in the history of the known Universe has ever encountered it before or 2) everyone else has not only encountered it but, because they are somehow so much better at this business of living than you are, that they’ve conquered this particular hurdle with nary a struggle.

I feel quite confident in letting you in on a not-so-secret secret: Neither have ever been completely true. Ever. And maybe those words are meant for me when, someday, I happen again across this post. When, perhaps, my spirits are low and I want to remember a time of clarity and prescience that everything would eventually be more lively in my writing life. I have been blessed with an abundance of words and, yes, I have taken my sweet time to collect them, to nurture them, and to curate them before sending them out to be received.

That might be the most important thing, then:

My words are mine to be shared when I desire, at my discretion, and there is power there, power I need no longer be frightened of wielding.

There’s one more post to come in this series, an exciting and delicious exercise at looking into the future, then I’ll be on to other things writer-ly and ink-sodden. Hope you’ll join me again on this path, wherever it diverges off to next!