With stammering lips and insufficient sound

I strive and struggle to deliver right

That music of my nature, day and night

With dream and thought and feeling interwound

And only answering all the senses round

With octaves of a mystic depth and height

Which step out grandly to the infinite

From the dark edges of the sensual ground.

This song of soul I struggle to outbear

Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,

And utter all myself into the air:

But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll

Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,

Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This is my silent scream. The only place where I can have a voice.

I’ve been hushed into silence long enough. My soul yearns for freedom. My heart screams for release.

I have feared the scream. I have tried to hold it back, to control the primal urge to render the silence with a wild shrieking howl of anguish and anger and injustice. I fear that “…as the thunder-roll, breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there…”

But perhaps it’s not be feared.

A plant begins its journey as a seed in the darkness of soil.

A baby begins its life in the darkness of its mother’s womb.

Breakage is the pre-cursor to transformation. Growth. Life.

The seed quietly breaks through its shell, then through the soil to finally transform into its potential. A beautiful bloom. A mighty tree. If the seed feared the breakage, it would never bloom.

Hush. Blush. Bloom. In the silence, in the scream. We bloom.