Since beginning the BlissQuest and keeping a blog, I’ve struggled with my voice.  Voice is so much a part of us as individuals.  Whether you’re a writer, a housewife, a designer or a programmer – your voice defines your communication, clarifies your thoughts and expresses your needs.  Without your voice you cannot ask for help, or supply affection. 

Your voice might be touch, or a smile or in my case the way I write.  You might speak in ones and zeros, or with paint or dance or hugs but everyone speaks.

Voice is tempered by the language your parents spoke, the things you love, the things you hate.  Voice is as fluid as the changing seasons and my differ in fall as much as the spring. 

Part of the problem I’ve had with my voice and the medium of the internet is having a public forum, I naturally censor myself.  I have no desire to hurt anyone or upset the people I love knowing full well they are occasional readers.  So I endeavor to say that which is not untruthful, but ultimately ends up being not the whole and unmolested truth. 

The problem is that although I work at maintaining a voice – it is not my true voice.  Therefore I do myself no great service, nor do I really serve anyone who reads.

Where is the line between tact and honesty?  I used to keep a journal.  Sometimes when I struggled with a particular problem, I’d write 17 pages before I’d stumble across the solution or the true face of my inner turmoil. 

Since blogging, I have not journaled near as much as I used to.  In fact, the problems that plague me I’ve tried to work out on the web and because I sensor them, I rarely find inner clarification, which leaves a muddled ball of incomprehensible blah.

So my question is this – Is a blog more worthy of the unmolested truth, perhaps long winded and harmful? Or short – vague, sweet and not bogged down by heavy material?  I still have my journal, and I’m fully capable of using it, therefore maintaining my blog for updates of my Quest.  But I’m curious as to what readers think.  How much of the Quest is necessary for the blog?

I picked a spot in the back yard.  Illegal to bury animals in the yard, but despite it all I just couldn’t bring myself to throw the body away.  I might be a heartless bitch, but the kitty deserved a burial.

As I dug the whole, Zoey stood nearby and when I was done I saged the site and the body.  Peter said nothing about my use of white sage and when I was finished we looked over and Zoey was curled up in a ball in the whole.   No one will ever convince me that animals don’t understand death.  They totally know. 

Downstairsgirl came back as we were about to intern the body and said, if it were her cat, she’d want to have the choice of cremation.  Fair enough.  Good point.  I left it to her to call Houseguy as she knew him better.  He was awake in Pittsburg and said to go ahead with the burial. 

Everyone else left so I did it by myself. 

I was reminded by the smell of dirt, and the crushing sound of the metal shovel in the dirt, that it wasn’t all that long ago I’d had to perform a similar task for my beloved German Shepard, Dutch.  That day took a lot out of me emotionally and I hadn’t thought of it in a few months.  Of course, when I was finished I went to sit in the shower where I cried.

Yes, heartless bitch-not-a-cat-person-catlady sat crying in the shower over a cat that wasn’t even hers.  It was still a creature.

I went straight to the grave after my shower to smoke a Clove and say my good byes.  I had one match, and as I stood there over Louie and lit up – a gust of wind blew out my flame.  So much for a cigarette.

Since then I’ve been a little listless.  I went to the store and bought a fair sized pile of chocolate and I’ve been alternately creative and depressed.  This house is not really what I was hoping for in terms of a safe-quite place to write.  But I’ll keep plodding along. Three weeks left till my due date.