What do I care?

What do I care, in the dreams and the langour of spring,

That my songs do not show me at all? 

For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,

I am an answer, they are only a call.

But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,

Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,

For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,

It is my heart that makes my songs, not I. 

~ Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933) 

I found this poem in winter, near the beach of my childhood, and dreamed of spring. And with it, the promise of fairer weather and better days. But now that spring has arrived, I find myself weathering a different kind of storm. I'm staring into a vast, churning void, heaving with absence and silence and unsaid things. It is a torment and an anguish to hold so much unresolved for so long, and in the midst of it I feel profoundly unseen, unheard, even unknown. It is as if I have become tangled in someone else's version of a story, and it is unwieldy, intractable, unyielding to all my efforts to shape it into something kinder, more generous, more benevolent. And there's a wailing sound coming from my mouth, a keening that's been made by the pain sustained in the story, so there's this awful noise coming out of me and there are people who think this is what I am, that this role that's been forced upon me is who I am. No. It is not. But the story has been so overwhelming and so relentless on so many levels and for so many reasons, and in all of that loss and hope and longing and grief and striving and brutality, there must be a voice. Let my heart have its say. All of that suffering cannot be visited upon a single person without choking out some form of expression in response. The wind cannot sing through the clefts and curves of the sand dunes without scouring them into new shapes, but neither can the beach be dragged away from its moorings without the ocean roaring its terrible songs. But those howls are the voice of pain, and I am not my pain. I am undone in pain, but I am not destroyed by it. My mind is proud and strong enough to be silent. Even at my lowest ebb, I have had the presence of mind to guard and defend some place of sanctuary within myself, so that I have the wherewithal to do what needs to be done. To declare painful truth in the face of the vicious onslaught. To chant the wracking lamentations of that other story without being consumed by them. But it is gruelling work, it is exhausting, and I am worn down. So now that the spring I dreamed of has arrived, bringing kinder weather but uncertain relief, I take comfort in these words, written nearly a hundred years ago, which remind me of my strength, my ability and my worth: I am a flint and a fire, / I am an answer, they are only a call.