ellipses

I couldn't help but feel as if so much has happened this semester. It's not yet over for me. I still have two exams and a paper. But after completing the first chapter of my thesis, I felt as if an over-sized thorn has been plucked out from my chest. But that would be chipping only the tip of the iceberg. So much has happened, but I wouldn't be able to spill them all here. Most of them are too private to be broadcast in this blog.

But let me just say that I somehow feel weird. When I turned twenty last month, I felt old. But just when you feel old, you start to realize that you haven't learned enough. Somehow, I feel as though I still have to learn a lot of things. One of those precious lessons is how to keep still. I somehow got a taste of that when I wrote my first 'professional' poem. I call it a professional poem because most of the stuff I wrote way back in high school are just "spontaneous overflow (or maybe outbursts? or spurts?) of powerful (and often stupid and uncontrollable!) emotion." That's William Wordsworth's definition of poetry, sans those in parentheses. But the better part of Wordsworth's definition which I missed was the phrase, "recollected in tranquility." Not only is poetry an outburst of some wretched emotion that's eating a hole in you like acid. But you have to be still enough to encounter what that emotion really is and discipline it so that it will bend into whatever word you want or line up in whatever stanza or verse you wish. All without losing the essence of the emotion.

Dr. Gemino Abad, a poet and one of the two critiques of my poem, said that I should learn "economy of expression." He said that I needed to restrain the metaphors a bit, perhaps because they 'avalanched' into you and not really 'cascaded,' as I intended my poem to do.

And true enough, there's always a wealth of meaning in silences.

I think I've been too talkative this past week. Words poured out of me unedited. I think much, but sometimes I think the wrong things and so I say the wrong words. Maybe some people got hurt by the things I said. Maybe some got tired of my ranting. I don't really like taking other people's time. At least that's what I feel sometimes when I talk to people. A good friend reminded me, though, that just as I took their time, they also took mine. Maybe I'm just not used to generosity offered freely like Christmas treats.

I feel like a child all over again, wanting to learn some more. Often, though, I'm a bit reluctant and afraid. After all, God takes our prayers seriously. Especially when we decide to give Him full control of every aspect of our lives.


(P.S. I entitled this post 'ellipses' because whenever there are things which I think are better left unsaid, I just put ellipses instead of try to articulate them into senseless ramblings. I must learn to be more "elliptical"? Haha.)


...