Oh, How My Heart Murmurs

Years ago, I knew an Australian girl who lost her voice on a roller coaster. The doctors ran tests, but couldn't find a physical reason as to why this might have happened. They said her voice might return one day, but couldn't say for sure if or when it would; in the meantime, she was forced to speak in a whisper. You had to lean in closely to hear what she was saying.

Although I lost track of the girl and have no idea whether her voice came back eventually, I thought of her when I was setting up this blog. From my experience, life, with its many ups-and-downs, is akin to that roller coaster. It’s a gas for sure, but it can also be a crazy, unexpected ride. Sometimes, through no fault of our own, we lose our voice along the way. A marriage ends; a job is lost; an illness is diagnosed. We are told that it is better to be seen and not heard; that our voice doesn’t count or find ourselves paying a heavy price for speaking up with our personal truth. Whether it is shocked into silence by a sudden event, made mute with the fear of ridicule and repercussions or simply drowned out by the noise around us, the individual human voice throughout history has all too often been silenced.

But if you lean in and listen carefully, you will hear the quiet sound of your heart murmuring--that still, small voice within. It lives on, alive and beating, and need not be lost to you or the world. According to the pundits, one of the keys to blogging is to know your audience. In the case of this blog, that's easy. The intended audience is me; in the process of writing it, I hope to find and become reacquainted with my voice again.

Hence, the blog's title: "Hm..." Not only does it represent the initials of my name, but it also refers to "how my heart murmurs" in response to the world around me. I may not have made up my mind on any given subject, but as the sub-title suggests, I'm thinking about it. Whether it pertains to home or away; the past or the present; something that I read in a book, a blog or in the news; or is simply an idea that has been rattling around in my head for awhile, there is a chance that it will make its way into this blog.

Having said that, it has always seemed to me that we use words to try to pin things down once and for all time when in actual fact, all they can do is express the fleeting moment; that all in life is flux, change, movement and that words aren't fluid enough to capture this. The moment I write something down, it may no longer be true. And yet, the words of the poets and great writers have a ring of universal truth to them as if, for a moment, they were able to rip through the veil of time, and catch a glimpse of something eternal, something that endures.

That seems like a lofty goal for a mere blog. To be truthful, I'm not sure what direction this blog will take--whether it will add to the conversation or simply amplify the noise--but something tells me that wherever it leads it, like life itself, will be an exhilarating, always surprising, joy of a ride. Feel free to lean in and listen.