Finding Voice

The time for idle talk and half-measures is over.

Finding Voice, is not about performing better or learning to speak more eloquently. It is about resisting this insidious parasitic takeover of your inner life. It is about excavating and restoring what you knew before the world told you what to think.

It is about protecting the sacred space inside where your true voice waits — perhaps what this moment needs is more people who are prepared to hold a line, and create a bulwark against the growing dark. Surely, this begins in finding our voice.

Confidence is not what you build so that you can speak; it is what arrives after you use your voice vulnerably and put yourself out there, even though you were afraid.

The first battleground for the human soul, is our communication space. To be able to hold your ground, stand for something, is a right that seems overused online but if we pay attention is something has has actually been taken away. When was the last time you heard someone say something that was not merely an echo of what they had been told to think, or a performative act, in the standard model of what it means to be professional?

What are you not allowed to say?

Sometimes we have to say things wrong just to get them out. We have to stumble our way towards our own authenticity. I learn what I think as I hear myself speak.

FINDING VOICE

What use to man, or woman is timid fear now?

Do not fold your voice like linen in a drawer. 
Do not soften your edges to make mute company with cowards. 
Do not barter away your wildness for their approval, 
their comfort, their brittle made-in-China peace.

Your voice was born in the deep wells of life — 
raw, salt-bright, roaring with all the unspent longing 
of men who died with their songs still locked in their throats.

You stand here, at the narrowing of the way, 
at the existential crossroads, 
with the dead behind you 
and the unborn ahead of you.

And the world will tell you to quiet down. To settle.
To smooth the sharp corners of your knowing.

But you—you must rage against that tutting and shushing, 
that insipid properness, 
that cowardice they call ’leadership’.

Not in hatred.
Not by apish violence.
But  as holy refusal.

Sacred disobedience
against forgetting, 
against apathy.
Rage against that slow machine, 
the steady drowning of wonder 
beneath the weight of small lives 
and smaller ambitions.

Speak as one who has seen the sun falter 
and believes the something must burn bright 
during the long desperate night of the Kali Yuga, 
some candle, some fierce flicker.

Speak as one who knows 
the bone-deep ache of exile, 
but will not let the song die in his chest.

Speak for the child in the dark, 
who is still without a name.

Speak for the dead whose prayers 
we can still answer through our remembrance,
of what gave meaning to their lives.

Speak for yourself — that you may not stand 
empty-handed at the end
that you may stand for something, 
while you still could.

The time for half-measures is over.

Go 
like the last dove from a shipwrecked ark.

—Rocco Jarman

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