Communication is Essential for Life

Communication - the full interflow of selves...listening, hearing, speaking, responding - is central to developing, maintaining, and nurturing relationships.

Respite for Diaspora - A Parable

"You've got to listen up. Hear the sounds, believe them. See the faces, believe them. Feel the emotions, believe them."

"Speak what they want you to say, but only when they're ready and able to listen. Feel what they tell you to feel, when they tell you to feel it, and how they tell you to feel it."

"Break free, escape? You won't, you can't."

"There was a time when I thought I could. You know - break free, escape. Get way from it. Get outside of it. Leave it behind. Make something new, something better - something never heard, never seen, never felt before."

"Make something so grand and astoundingly unique that it would just have to be shared, to be given to humankind. To smarten people up, to show them the way."

"Like the world had just been sittin' around feeling bad and empty, waiting for me to show up and make them feel all good and full."

"That was a precious pipedream, but that's all it was. A child's story told to myself over and over. Told so many times, it seemed natural, it seemed right. Too right to be wrong. Wrong."

"So now I take my place with all those others - some dead, some living but having no life. We be sittin' around feeling bad and empty. And maybe, just maybe, in our heads, we're waiting for someone to come show us the way. And our hearts? In our hearts, we know we still got it, it's still there. Dormant. Sleeping. Waiting."

"We want to rise again, stand up, wave our arms, scream, yell, pull the others up, and run down the road. To where? Nowhere is."

"Oh, we know it is. But, we don't know where it is. And we're too tired to head off aimless like, thinking it's this way or that...and then end up where we started. Nowhere. Always someplace to go, but nowhere to get to."

"And they and them? Yeah, it's you, it's me. You and me, shackling ourselves with we because we're too afraid to be I. Nobody wants to be they and them. We all, or most of us probably, want to be I."

"We just didn't know how, when we could - and now, it's too late and we can't. We're too weak, too used up. Too little, too late, too...."

* * * * *

He continued rambling on, spouting off. But I had to turn his god-awful truth off.

I jerked the knob off the radio and threw it out the open sliding glass door. It was forever before I heard the faint metallic 'ping' as it ricocheted off the top of a Michigan car in the parking lot, twelve stories down.

Some PBS, Nobel-whatever wannabe: he knew everything, yet had learned precious little. I knew what was what, and when, when, and who - mmm, who. Or, at least I knew three day's ago.

I plopped back into the sofa and pulled one of the cushions over, onto my chest, hugging it with both arms. Her perfume, her intoxicating natural essence was still on it. I breathed her in and could still taste her.

A cool breeze blowing in off the Gulf was picking up a little. Stacked banks of slate blue-gray clouds, tinged with dark rose fading through pink up into white, rumbled, moving inland toward Ocala and upstate from the ocean. With evening deep into their first embrace with the shoreline, I began drifting off, watching the far distant lightning crackling around inside the tops.

The storm would be on me soon.

My cell rang.

727 area code - it was her.

...

"Hi, baby!"

...

"Yes, I was just thinking about you, too."

...

"Yes, oh yes, go ahead. I'm listening."

M. K. Miller
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