About Words Matter
Words Matter is a series that explores y(our) relationship to words and language.
In these writings, we learn how to paint transformational new landscapes with words – exposing how rote-ness promotes hopelessness and disunity, and how partnering with language can reinvigorate meaning and care into our exchanges.
This is the first of the Words Matter series, where we explore the creative core of words and language.
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I was on the phone with my lawyer’s boss the day before we were set to go to trial.
“You’re a has-been-who-never-was and you’ll be lucky to get a dime, so stop calling! I don’t have time to keep answering your questions.”
Huh?
His words sliced through me. Not me exactly, but through the shield of emotional paralysis that had taken root since the brain injury three years earlier. Anger swelled at the edges of my numbness.
A-has-been-who-never-was. An innocuous article-noun-pronoun-adverb-verb strung together to create a lacerating laser. Each word pierced. Galvanized by his insult, I scoured my files and found a vital document that later helped me prevail in court.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.
Really?! Feigning impotence seemed like an ineffective strategy.
Is there a person on the planet who has never been wounded by words?
What about their power to heal?
Where were those adages?
Fast forward 20 years.
I am lying on a massage table while a therapist is making some painful adjustments to my chest and asking questions about my personal history. I casually list the events that landed me there: brain seizures, sleeplessness, surgeries, divorce, depression, addiction in my family, a friend’s overdose, caring for foster kids...
“That’s a lot,” she says.
Her words drizzle into my pores like a palpable trinity of truth. Suddenly my body is having a conversation with her that my brain can’t follow. That is a lot. The words hover over my heart and softly permeate my shoulders, where tangled muscles begin to unwrap. Space slides between my ribs, bones relax. Decades of weight dissolve in my chest.
Was she trying to do something? Or was something else–some universal power–moving magic through her words?
Whatever the source of the force, the words landed like a visceral permission slip validating the intensity of the last couple of decades, which until then I’d managed to keep safely frozen in my intellect.
Nourished by an injection of reflection, my body thawed back to life. Curiosity came.
Words define, but do we ever define what words are?
We intuitively know they matter, but do we understand their relationship to matter?
My wonderings led me to ancient cosmologies.
Once upon a time words were a medium for holy creation and communication. The oldest known languages–Sanskrit, Aramaic Sumerian–all revered the Word. ‘Pasha,’ Sanskrit for ‘language’, comes from the root ‘Ba,’ meaning ‘to shine or illuminate.’ In Aramaic, the language of the first translated bible, A-vrah KaDabra, or ‘Abracadabra,’ literally means “I create as I speak.” In the Genesis invocation “Let there be light. And there was Light,” words birth Light. And so on and so One…
Did the body therapist know she was channeling ancient wisdom? How could the sounds of her words penetrate the core of my being and alter my physiology?
More clues.
Sanskrit was refined by Indian sages so that when you pronounced a word it vibrated the chambers of your body in the same way that the earth vibrates. Speaking was an act of harmonizing with the Universe! Language was an embodiment of the One verse!
She had said a singular “a lot,’ but my body absorbed dual definitions. One for ‘a substantial amount,’ another for ‘a destiny.’ Relief came with the declaration of magnitude and its proximity to fate. Each meaning dislodged energetic residue.
Again, the ancients were already on to it.
Wise elders left vowels out of The Torah, the holy book of the Jews, because they believed that vowels fixed the meaning of a word, reducing infinite possibilities into just one. Pronouncing consecutive consonants allowed words to “splinter into sparks” à la Big Bang, replicating the laws of creation by forming multiple meanings. Letters were treated like sacred gifts.
Mystical Kabbalists saw them as the building blocks of all creation and regularly meditated upon them. Congregants were first required to be of a certain age and have a family and job since it was thought that engaging with the infinite possibilities of letters without a stable foundation would induce madness.
When I stepped down from that massage table, the liberatory power of language came with me – I felt football fields of freedom inside my lungs. Those syllables echoed through my upper body, redistributing circulation. Being reflected with resonant empathy allowed my pain to live and move…to finally dislodge. Another par for ancient acoustic courses.
Words were originally onomatopoeic; pronouncing them expressed the resonant qualities of what they described. A quack! or a sigh transmitted a lived sense of the word. A wolf was referred to as a ‘grinding tear-er.’ A lotus was an ‘out of the mud.’
When then, did we lose sense
of their reverberating vibrancy,
of their alchemical power to ride on breath,
of knowledge that the same pulse that animates life animates words
of the awareness that they (words) are carried by the tongue–
the only organ capable of navigating both inner and outer worlds? As populations grew, cultures dispersed and so did the meaning of words. They shifted away from being something that brought people into intimate contact with their Aliveness to being a thing used to refer to other things.
Words became referential instead of reverential. “What do you mean?” replaced “What’s meaningful to you?” We moved towards thinking them more than feeling them, and have been prone to an analytical relationship to them ever since.
Not long ago, I was a linguistics major at a major research university, excited to learn about the noun! and the verb! and how they embodied the two dynamic states of existence–Being and Becoming! Instead, the curriculum focused on “computational models of phonological acquisition, including probabilistic automata and over-constraint.”
We studied units of deadness rather than a radiant medium.
I got a degree in deadness.
No one spoke about uttering units of unity and feeling our Oneness.
Yet, that’s what truly has been, and what I hope for all of Us will be(come) once more; if we wield our words as witnesses of Light, we can all be who we have not yet been–wholly holy.