Lack of expression is not always due to a paucity of emotion; it is just as often caused by the precarious impression that one has far too much to say — and too little time, energy, or words to possibly say it. Communicating consciously is an act of continuous courage: the very vulnerability of showing one's underbelly being, paradoxically, a prerequisite to inner resilience.

I could provide a highblown explanation of the title of this post; it is trivial for the thinking mind to generate endless, spurious intellectualizations of the real, making them into symbols. The symbols then become confused with and replace the things themselves in the mind, until they are all hopelessly garbled!

How much easier it would be if I let life speak for itself — instead of talking over her all the time! Oh, think of all the beauty she would show me, would I come to her altar with childlike eyes. If I let that false husk be split and shed my snake-skin; I could burst forth no longer encumbered by the sorrow of all the things I never had the strength to say.

Then I would have a new silence, full of tearful awe; and I would have a new speech — echoing down the valley off the cliffs of my precipice. The fragments of my heartwood would grow petrific, gleaming with the permanence of minereal transformation that leaves me a brass mirror for the evening sun. Oh, on this log-split day — carry me away; bind me to naught but the knowledge of the infinite chain.