I once heard ( I think...) "The poet gives voice to the tribe". When I heard that phrase, it stirred the pot in my head and got me to thinking... again.
I find it curious that even in my ever advancing age I still have probably more than my share of epiphanies. Although most are minor in scale, they still make me think that there is still hope for the ever-aging puddle of grey mush in my head. I take these minor enlightenments with great joy even though I don't share most, if any, of them in the fear that those around would question the mental faculties of someone that was just a bit too happy too have just figured out how to tally bowling scores. Anyway, when I heard the poet phrase, I began to think of my own ability to make cogent arguments for what I think to be true or false.
We all have favorite speakers, authors, magazines and songs. Did you ever wonder why? I have my favorites and I may have a bit of an enlightenment into the reasons why. At least for me. It may be because - in part- that these mediums of information or entertainment lend their words to thoughts that we have in our own heads but for whatever reason, cannot place into words that make sense to us as individuals. Yes, it is also because the words we read and hear and dance to agree with our self defined worlds but I think it is more important to know that someone is able to put into the spoken words what we are striving to say but cannot.
Now don't freak out on me here. I am not talking about having brain problems here. Just talking about some thoughts that we have lived with forever but have not quite given complete form to. Like not quite figuring out why we never quite liked Aunt Tillie's fruit cake. We thought we didn't like it because of the taste but it may be because deep in our past we learned that we didn't like it without even tasting it. (Probably from Uncle Rufus who new that it was soaked in rum and he wanted it all for himself. That Uncle Rufus was a lush and we all knew it.)
We all have tons of incomplete thoughts and incomplete beliefs in our heads. I have a friend I will call Bud (because that is his name ). Late in his life Bud began to question why he had the thoughts and beliefs after he was 'confronted' during a debate that an argument that he was making had no basis in reality. It shook him a bit because he had rooted much of the course of his adult life on the basis of a belief that had now been exposed as being baseless. It set him back on his heels for a bit and made him take an honest long look at what he believed and why.
Now Bud didn't have to go to a mountain in Tibet to get the answers. He just had to sift back through his mental filing cabinets to find where the roots of the belief came from and when he could not find the root of the belief, he forced himself to re-examine some of his current thought processes. Bud still believes what he believed before but now he knows why and has a firm footing that he can explain to others.
I probably have more than my share of incomplete thoughts in my head but as time goes along input from others helps to fill in the gaps. Listening to others' thoughts and reading blogs is a great help. Listening to Cyndi Lauper and Jethro Tull songs doesn't hurt a bit either.
