Interview Answers #3 - Influence

Yourself specifically excluded, who has been the single most influential person in your life? And, why?

A man named Jed. It is a story I'm not really prepared to tell, except through things that were written in the past and so that is how I'm going to answer this question. It sounds so "young" and dramatic now, to me, but, frankly I was young and dramatic. Although it was not always something I utilized and many times I refused entirely, the influence through the years has been as steady as a river flowing through the middle of my life, a river that he set free.

I met him early in 1995. I left here in December of that same year. The following was written in 1997, as an explanatory companion piece to a poem called "Talisman" written in December 1996, a small portion of which is below:

Not knowing where to go,
I come to you.
Not knowing where to turn,
I turn to you.
Not knowing what to say,
I speak to you.
Not knowing what to hold,
I bind myself to you.
Having lost my way,
I make my way to you.

Companion
Once there was a young girl who believed, deep down inside, that she could be more than she was.

But for all of her life she had been surrounded by people who believed only that she was less than she was.

When she began to grow to be someone more - those around her refused to acknowledge the changes in her and so continued to treat her as they had always believed she was.

Eventually, inevitably, she once again began to trust their judgement over her own.

One day, someone new, a man, came into her life and he just naturally treated her as if she already was more, even, to be honest, more than she could ever be.

She found that this simple belief in her actually became the truth in many ways and at any time when she felt less, all she had to do was be the person he believed she was, and almost magically, she was.

When he was no longer a part of her life she found that she still needed the support of his faith to give her the motivation to become that person, to continue to grow.

To achieve this end, she carefully encapsulated all her experiences of him and built of them a talisman in her mind to keep in a corner of her heart.

And then the young woman left the scant comfort of home behind her and began a new life in a strange city.

And when she needed the man's support or a calming island or a reminder of who she was trying to become, she would retreat into her heart and take out this talisman to give her the strength to continue on this path she had chosen.

Over the years it became less and less about the man and more and more about the essence of the great gift that he gave her. An irreplaceable gift of strength and goal. A priceless belief. A gift all the more precious for being given freely, unexpectedly and unselfishly.

A gift of life.


February 1997

Comments

[Jen, also]

Gorgeous.