elide

elide . . . i came across this word several weeks ago & had no idea what it meant . . . i looked it up, finding a definition pertaining to speech, when a vowel or syllable is dropped & the pronunciation glides over the absent letter(s)- there's as in there is; the 'i' is elided - i wanted to remember this word . . . it seemed so interesting

just the other day i opened one of my forever favorite books, Ornament and Silence : Essays on Women's Lives, from Virginia Woolf to Germaine Greer (Kennedy Fraser, Knopf, 1996) . . . and there, circled in pencil on pg. 4 sat elided . . . clearly, i had met up with this word several years ago and had looked it up then too. i'd ['ha' has been elided here] penciled on top of the word a translation, omitted. . . . in Fraser's hands, it referred to women's lives: 'much of women's side of history has been lost in anonymity and self-deprecation' & here she quoted Virginia Woolf, " . . . hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence."

the thesaurus likens elide to shorten or eliminate. it is next to its antonyms - complete, whole, open. to suppress or alter, says the dictionary. it means to leave no space . . .

'when you make space for your body, you make space for you mind,' said this 100th monkey, as he guided us through our 90-minute bikram session this morning. so true, so true, i thought as i made my way home, calmed and clear about what i wanted to accomplish today and how i would set about doing so . . .

and then i thought i might revise this 100th monkey's words to say: we must make space in our day to make space in our body, for making space in our body allows us to make space in our mind . . . and ultimately in our day

which of course brings us back to elision . . . how often is the moment elided, the opportunity missed, the voice not heard . . .

and perhaps that is why i have chosen to spend my life with otis . . . each morning while the world is racing to work, he is strolling to the park to throw the tennis ball a thousand times to the dogs. while family members keep busy on vacation doing this or that of nothing, he heads off in a kayak to explore, returning with a twinkle in his eye, a handful of moss, a perfect fungus its virgin surface a stark contrast to its gnarled back, a sculpted shaft of driftwood, a bouquet of water lilies, roots and all, ready for transplant into the pond at home . . .

i have a memory from some time ago now . . . in the park . . . a frozen moment . . . we were heading towards home when otis just stopped and began throwing a tennis ball against one of those amazing limestone archways . . .again and again and again . . . before we walked through . . . holding the moment . . . being in it . . . not allowing the world to rush him . . . i will never forget that morning . . .it was so simple, yet not simple it all . . .

we can rush through the words -- i'd, can't, how'd . . . or speak them whole, complete . . . we can close the space, charge on through . . . do a lot . . . of nothing . . . elide, eschew . . . and never really know we've dropped the moment, lost the depth, closed off the meaning . . . and every now and then . . .someone comes along and beckons us toward a different way of being in the world . . . and then the only question is . . . do we have the strength to follow . . .
xo
cocoa