Words
/Word Sparkles
Peering forth at the light of existence, you could almost hold it cupped in your hand. You try to describe to someone else, even to yourself. The very moment you speak a sound to capture that wide, great light crystalizes. With the first utterance of sound, the whole shatters into thousands of reflected lights, like when a crystal is caught in a sunbeam. Sparkles fling off into multiple colors, dancing in the dust beams.
Whole To Part
You hold a vast wholeness within you. Words, by their own nature, are composed of tiny bits and pieces. You say the sky is blue, but at the same time, you also know the sky can be black, grey, and even red or orange. The problem with language is that you can’t say all of that at the exact same time. So, only a partial truth is expressed at any given moment.
As words spill out of our mouths, we enter the realm of partiality. It can’t be helped. It’s the nature of language. Chopped-up little pieces attempt to capture the wide world around us. That’s hard enough as it is. Now imagine trying to use words to capture inner dimensions that are not bound by outer forms. That becomes a “horse of a different color,” as they say.
The Perils Of Our Guides
On the path of greater consciousness, this is one of the challenges for teachers as they guide their students. Students are only capable of hearing from their own perspectives.
Yesterday, the teacher said the sky is blue… and that was accurate for that precise moment in time. But, today, we are in a different time, another moment of existence, and it may no longer apply. We are different, the teacher is different, the sky is different.
Now, the student sees an orange sky. The student insists, “No, the sky is blue, the teacher said so, and I refuse to see this sky of orange.” Or, faced with an orange sky they can no longer deny, the student then feels as if the teacher lied to them and rejects the teaching of the teacher entirely.
Clinging to the words that were previously uttered is how we enter into dogma. It becomes a “truth” frozen in time, locked in the dead past.
As students, we need to remind ourselves that the words of any teacher are only signposts, pointing in a direction, to a dimension on an inner path. Words can never define the teacher and, by the same token, words cannot define us either.
A Lot Of Words
Some of us have a lot of words. We’re looking at you, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Both men were filled with words of passion and sentences of history that consumed vast pages of books stretching into infinity. Well, infinity is a slight exaggeration, but it looks like that when you’re still on page one of their books.
Words are good. They delight, entertain, provoke and encourage. Words tickle our fancy. Some of us word-smiths are enamored with words. We gather cherished words and phrases around us like little children. Two favorites of mine are “as is my wont” (thank you, Shakespeare) and “gird your loins.” In addition, some of us bulk up our repertoire with beloved words from different languages.
Ernest Hemingway shaped his writing style with “clean words.” No flowery prose for him. He wanted his writing to be as clean as the cold, crisp white wine he quaffed in copious amounts in his novels. Nothing sticky or cloying about his drinks or his writing. He wrote like an Anglo-Saxon language warrior, short and to the point.
His clean lines have a haunting quality to them. From his book, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway crafted one of his most lovely string of words:
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Joyful Words
Words guide, inspire and inform us. Well-turned words can lift us up to higher realms. Words that are connected with awareness to a higher consciousness can stir us awake like drops of milk added to our coffee, forever changing its hue, forever changing us.
Still, in the end, each of us has to take our own steps into awakening. Along the way we realize that the words themselves are not our truth, just tiny sparks of it, ever-changing in the very moment we find ourselves.
Let’s rejoice in our words as we smile privately to ourselves, all the while knowing that vast universes stand behind all the sparkles of light.
