Inside the landscape of every word is a rabbit hole into an alternate universe with fantastical stories, upside-down meanings and unexpected adventures.
In every word is a wonderland.
And since we wonder, mostly, using language, what if we broke open the words that comprise our thoughts? What if we traveled inside the ones that matter to us most? What if we found the wonder inside them? Perhaps if we wandered down their backstreet enigmas and cobblestone complexities, our lives would be more filled with wonder.
What we are about to embark on is an adventure. An experiment. A rabbit hole.
We paint our reality with words. But, words come pre-loaded with meaning. If we allow ourselves to be satisfied with what we have been given, we paint by numbers. But we don’t have to. The depth and texture and pigment of the world we create is up to us.
Psychology advises positive self-talk and changing the negative tapes of the past. Advertising spends millions annually doing consumer research on brand name likability. Poets labor weeks over the individual context, the connotative implications, cultural framing, historical significance and sound components of a single word. What energy do the words we use carry? Many seem dead or flat as if they have lost their fizz…download, cool, jog. But others pulsate with opportunity, vibrate with possibility…ignite, wicked, persnickety.
The phonemes or sounds of words influence the way we feel, in addition to adding dimension to what we think.
What do the letters look like? What shape do they give the word? What shape could they give the word? How does changing the font or size or spacing between letters change the impact of the word?
What is your personal interaction with grief?
How has it touched you? What about your mother? Your husband? Your best friend? What are all their experiences? There is a conversation at play within the constellation of everyone who has ever felt grief.
Take a more seemingly simple word like “black.” My sense of it will be different from yours. There’s Civil Rights and Chanel, dark moods, Jewish Kippahs and ACDC’s “Back in Black.”
Or take an unfamiliar word like “liminality,” meaning the space between. Ask your sibling what it means. Ask your neighbor, your co-worker, your commuting buddy. Give it arms and legs and wings. Let it fly. Give it lungs and feel it breathe. The word has energy and power. It can keep you in limbo or give you room, shut down hope or open your mind.
Explore it. Travel the word.
Words have cultural context and historical relevance
Take the word web. How is it applicable to the financial world, to the international community, to the medical community? What context did it have 20 years ago? What about 200?
Words are like people, like animals, like plants. If we know where a person has come from, what a dog may have been through, what drought or blight a tree has endured, we become more understanding, more familiar. We honor our relationship in a different way. The same is true with words.
A word’s etymology is often quite different from its modern day definition.
Etymology has the power of history inside it. Through going back, etymology offers us a different way to move forward.
Take the word nostalgia. We use the word in present-day common vernacular to mean a longing for something in the past. We wear college t-shirts, buy period lunchboxes, listen to old music and the like.
But the etymology of nostalgia is much more intense. It comes from the Greek nostos meaning ‘return home’ and algos meaning ‘pain.’ In the late 18th century it was defined as ‘acute homesickness.’
If we say we feel nostalgic for that innocent time when our children were young, it feels somehow shallow, two-dimensional, too simple. It captures the sweet “awww” of reflection, but not the burning ache inside us, unless we are familiar with its etymology.
The best poetry class I took in college gave us the words “anger” and “joy”. They gave us crayons and unlined paper and asked us to draw a non-representational picture of how we experienced each emotion.
My anger was a tight black spiral in the center of the page. The young woman next to me drew big red lines that crisscrossed the whole page.
Through this exercise the instructors re-introduced us to these words. They empowered us to see and feel and share the depth, texture and complexity of these words.
My anger was a tight black spiral in the center of the page. The young woman next to me drew big red lines that crisscrossed the whole page.
Through this exercise the instructors re-introduced us to these words. They empowered us to see and feel and share the depth, texture and complexity of these words.
Words, previously flat, came to life.
We did this same exercise in music and acting and dance. We played with juxtaposition. Saying yes with our mouth but no with our face and body language. We looked at the irony between taking a sweet melody and adding angry words.
Everyone did it differently. So, not only did it dimension-alize our personal understanding of the words but broadened our collective understanding of all the various ways they can echo out.
To physicalize what is normally relegated to a page or a screen transforms it in a way usually only poetry has the power to do.
Everyone did it differently. So, not only did it dimension-alize our personal understanding of the words but broadened our collective understanding of all the various ways they can echo out.
To physicalize what is normally relegated to a page or a screen transforms it in a way usually only poetry has the power to do.
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye offers a stunning example of the power words have to transform us, in her poem, “Kindness.”
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Unfortunately, great emotion does not always have corresponding words. Certain languages do not make a home for certain feelings. As a result there are people held emotional hostage by their native tongue.
I frequently find myself feeling this way about the English language.
I frequently find myself feeling this way about the English language.
As a culture we have preferred to reduce down, to simplify, to quantify and to measure.
We are opposed to complexity that cannot be broken down into elements, messy emotions that cannot be sanitized and repackaged. Consequently, our language has become similarly compartmentalized.
We have unbraided the strands of complex emotions into discrete pieces. We can be happy or sad. Angry or loving.
We are left trying to choose between feeling good or bad, left feeling incomplete—like we must be crazy for not being able to choose the “right” emotional box. The truth is we simply haven’t been given the right words to articulate the way we feel.
Advanced Emotion Intelligence researcher, Eugene Yuta Bann, theorizes that people transmit their understanding of emotions through the language they use.
So, if we are not given the right words for how we feel, we cannot communicate that feeling. Not to ourselves or to each other. This leads to misunderstandings and feelings of inadequacy. This leads to isolation and silence. And this leads to a dangerous catch-22 that can result in tragic consequences, not to mention misdiagnosed “disorders” and “pharmacological” abuse.
We have unbraided the strands of complex emotions into discrete pieces. We can be happy or sad. Angry or loving.
We are left trying to choose between feeling good or bad, left feeling incomplete—like we must be crazy for not being able to choose the “right” emotional box. The truth is we simply haven’t been given the right words to articulate the way we feel.
Advanced Emotion Intelligence researcher, Eugene Yuta Bann, theorizes that people transmit their understanding of emotions through the language they use.
So, if we are not given the right words for how we feel, we cannot communicate that feeling. Not to ourselves or to each other. This leads to misunderstandings and feelings of inadequacy. This leads to isolation and silence. And this leads to a dangerous catch-22 that can result in tragic consequences, not to mention misdiagnosed “disorders” and “pharmacological” abuse.
Take the Portuguese word, saudade. In the book “In Portugal” of 1912, A. F. G. Bell writes:
“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not, and probably cannot, exist for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”
Take the Portuguese word, saudade. In the book “In Portugal” of 1912, A. F. G. Bell writes:
“intimate feeling and mood caused by the longing for something absent that is being missed. This can take different aspects, from concrete realities (a loved one, a friend, the motherland, the homeland…) to the mysterious and transcendent.”
This is far from simple, easy or reductive. It is nebulous, amorphous and therefore more honest in describing the shifting complex weather of emotions.
There is not a single word in English that means saudade. It is not longing, not sadness, not emptiness or incompleteness. The etymology of nostalgia comes closest but it lacks the deep Portuguese historical significance, the ancestral lineage, the intentional element of mystery and the cultural conviction of its human worthiness.
There is not a single word in English that means saudade. It is not longing, not sadness, not emptiness or incompleteness. The etymology of nostalgia comes closest but it lacks the deep Portuguese historical significance, the ancestral lineage, the intentional element of mystery and the cultural conviction of its human worthiness.
So, Portuguese offers us an emotional reality that English does not.
We think facts are the only thing we can really trust. But the only 100% guaranteed true fact is that all facts are man-made. Facts are made of the stories man tells about what man sees and feels. And what man feels in English may be very different from what man feels in Portuguese or French.
Take the difference between the French joie de vivre and the English joy of life.
Take the difference between the French joie de vivre and the English joy of life.
One bubbles up like champagne, explodes like fireworks. The other falls flat. The twinkle fades before the words are fully out. At best it offers a handful of helium balloons.
Same with raison d’etre. If poetry is her raison d’etre we know it is what she must do. It is in her DNA. Her very soul requires it. If poetry is her reason for being, we’re thinking that’s sweet, but the girl should probably wake up and get a job that will earn her some money.
There is a certain je ne sais quoi to French words that allows them to cross borders, ripple out, be buoyant and deeply grounded, familiar and full of mystery—that permits and invites us to be children of the universe, voyagers in the journey of life.
In America we like to know. We like it spelled out. We want proof and money-back guarantees. We don’t want any room for error, any space for things to get messed up.
But, there is so much space inside every word. Quantum physicists are finding there is virtually infinite space in solid matter. Buddhist meditators find infinite space in the is-ness of being. And poets have been writing about this for eons.
There is a certain je ne sais quoi to French words that allows them to cross borders, ripple out, be buoyant and deeply grounded, familiar and full of mystery—that permits and invites us to be children of the universe, voyagers in the journey of life.
In America we like to know. We like it spelled out. We want proof and money-back guarantees. We don’t want any room for error, any space for things to get messed up.
But, there is so much space inside every word. Quantum physicists are finding there is virtually infinite space in solid matter. Buddhist meditators find infinite space in the is-ness of being. And poets have been writing about this for eons.
So instead of subscribing to a one-dimensional
exchange of pleasantries or a flat download of information
let’s engage in wonder.
Let’s begin conversations with no idea where they will go, with space for discovery. Let’s assume we don’t know what the other person means because very often we don’t.
He said, “I want to be a comedian so I can make people laugh, make them happy.” I told him that he was right. A lot of people do it for the attention. He was quiet for a few minutes and then added, “I can’t really say this without crying,” tears already rolling down his cheeks, “but I would want to be a comedian mostly for people who only had…” it took several efforts to choke out, “only three days to live.”
I stopped browning chicken, turned off the stove, scooped him into my arms, walked across the kitchen to our oversized armchair and we sat down.
After a while, I asked why three days. Had he seen something on TV or read something? He said no. Did something happen at school, I asked? No, he said. I knew there was a yes somewhere. I waited. He wandered his mind, his memory.
Beginning to sob again he said, “Gran only had three days left to live when we went to the hospital to say good-bye, and the vet told us Wally only had three days to live when we took him home. And I just think if I could make them laugh more, make them happy…”
I stopped browning chicken, turned off the stove, scooped him into my arms, walked across the kitchen to our oversized armchair and we sat down.
After a while, I asked why three days. Had he seen something on TV or read something? He said no. Did something happen at school, I asked? No, he said. I knew there was a yes somewhere. I waited. He wandered his mind, his memory.
Beginning to sob again he said, “Gran only had three days left to live when we went to the hospital to say good-bye, and the vet told us Wally only had three days to live when we took him home. And I just think if I could make them laugh more, make them happy…”
He was not simply sad. Not simply mournful.
Not simply loving. It was complex. He is complex. We all are.
Not simply loving. It was complex. He is complex. We all are.
It is so rare that anyone takes the time to ask how we are doing, really doing and then waits for whatever we might answer. It isn’t about the answer. It’s about caring enough to ask the question and being willing to wade through whatever mystery unfolds, together.
