I miss my voice.

I feel as if I have been silenced in so many ways, and I need to find at least one outlet for my voice, lest all my thoughts stay trapped in my head and I go insane. I had been taking my blog for granted, assuming that it would always be there. But nothing on the internet is immutable, and my free host closed up after almost two years of faithful service.

It’s true that you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. My blog had been a constant outlet despite the many changes in my life situation. It was the one place I could express myself freely, where I could voice out my opinions and tell my stories.

I want that back, and thus this blog was reborn, coinciding with the third year anniversary when I first started blogging. Imagine that. I’ve been blogging for three years, which is quite a long time on the internet. Despite my occasional periods of silence, I know that blogging will always be something I keep coming back to. Because blogging is a way for my voice to be heard.

The Queen
-Pablo Neruda-

I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.

                                                             Happy Birthday, Me!

Is it just me or does it seem that there aren’t enough hours in a day?

The day starts with me reluctantly leaving slumberland to quickly shower and get dressed and head on off to work. Then comes the paradox of time when you’re at work — on one hand the hours feel so interminably long that you can’t wait until your 8 hours are up, but on the other hand you don’t seem to have enough time to finish the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done. So somehow while at work, time moves too slowly and too quickly at the same time.

And then when the work day is done, you just want to kick back and relax. But a little voice nags at you, “When are you going to find time to exercise and keep fit?” You ignore the voice and think to yourself, should I watch TV? Should I go online? Should I read? There are so many things you want to do with your time, but you can’t seem to cram it all in one day.

And soon, it’s bedtime, and while you enjoy the thought of a full 8 hours of sleep (or more!), you have this feeling that there’s so much more you want to do before retiring for the day. And then you finally *do* go to sleep, and the next morning the cycle repeats itself all over again. Maybe I should move to the South Pole where the days and nights stretch on to forever.

There are some love stories that you hear that make you sigh and gush about the sweetness of romance. Stories about dashing knights and fair maidens and living happily ever after. The story I heard on the drive home today does not fall into that category.

Instead, that story struck a chord deep within me, about how love is truly a decision, a commitment stronger than mere emotion. Yes, we’ve all heard that “love is a decision” spiel before. But when you see a love endure years of numerous fights and drunken bouts, see it overcome an entire spectrum of emotions from hurt to anger to fear and pain, when you see love transcend all that, then you *know* at a deeper level the truth of the phrase “love is a decision”. When you see it lived out before your very eyes, the _intellectual knowing_ is transformed into a _soul knowing_. And then you open the eyes of your heart and see another thing: love transforms. True, unconditional love can change us, can shape us piece by piece until we are a better person.

Love is more than a fleeting emotion, it is a conscious choice. And when the choice is made to love, it becomes a force for trandormation. At every moment, as a person again chooses to love, that force grows in strength. Until the person being loved can resist that force no longer, and both are transformed by that love.

That is the love story I heard today.

I want to blog, but I don’t know what to blog about. Right now I’m not yet ready to type up those entries I was referring to in my previous post.

This transition period in my life just keeps on stretching on and on. It’s like I want to jump in and explore this new world that I have chosen to make my life in. But part of me also wants to pull back and just wait for things to happen.

I feel like life is so huge right now. I don’t know. I guess I’m in a weird mood of sorts.

For me, poetry is a personal thing. I don’t claim to know how to write poetry, it’s just that sometimes that’s the form my words come out when trying to express myself.

I don’t claim to understand most of poetry either. Ask me to interpret a poem and I’ll likely give you a blank stare. I’m not the type who intuitively understands what a poem is trying to convey. One reason may be that I read so quickly. My eyes scan the words, losing all the pauses and nuances the author meant me to feel. I have to consciously slow down my reading, line by line, when I want to read a poem. Even then, reading slowly, I tend to pause and go, “Eh?” and try to reread the poem. It’s rare that I find a poem whose words and imagery really speak to me, and I feel a flash of insight, and a sense of kinship with the author. For suddenly I understand the poem perfectly, and even if I can’t explain it, I *feel* it inside me.

It’s usually poems by Pablo Neruda and some lines by E.E. Cummings that really speak to me.

My unintended hiatus seems to have stretched on quite a bit. I guess I could make the usual excuses about being too busy with work and an offline life. Those are all valid reasons for my lack of updates. But to be honest, there’s another reason — I started to feel a bit uncomfortable about blogging and sort of… watched.

My blog has always been an outlet for my thoughts and ideas and feelings, and it has been a place where I’ve been fairly anonymous. Until now. More people who know me in real life now know about my blog — from those who’ve known me since I started writing to those who’ve only just met me.

It’s weird, knowing people who know you *might* be reading what you’re writing. Somehow it’s more comforting when people who don’t know you personally are the ones visiting. Sometimes it’s easier to be more at ease with strangers because they don’t have any preconceived notions of who you are and how you think. They are less likely to judge you against whatever expectations they have of your behavior. And, they are less likely to be personally affected by anything you might say or write on the site.

So that’s why I’ve been in hibernation mode, sort of. I’ve been blogging in my head, and then finding excuses not to sit down in front of the computer and blog.

But not anymore. People who know me, consider this a disclaimer of sorts of what effect my words might have, on you, or how I relate to you, or whatever. This is my personal blog, it is you who is choosing to read it. Consider yourself warned.