WORDS MATTER
"WORDS MATTER" - I’m fascinated by the idea that words can change everything. We touch and change lives more often by what we say than what we do. Not because the doing isn’t profound, but because our days present more opportunity to pour into others through our words than through our deeds.
What we say matters. An expression of love or anger changes a moment, a path, the course of humanity. Being grand or verbose is not necessary.
Only sincerity changes the heart.
Many of us grew up in a time when it wasn’t safe to say what was in our minds and rupturing our hearts. It would have been so useful to have a safe place to talk things out. Thoughts become so big when they inhabit the mind. Trapped there, the drama unfolds until everything feels bigger…and more dangerous…than it really is. If we only had a place to put those thoughts on the outside, a safe place of expression, how much lighter our insides might be.
This is the definition of Poetry. An unburdening of the soul.
At a very early age, I began to unburden through my writing. I loved the words that spilled onto the page. I loved the way they sounded. I loved the rhythm they brought to my world. I loved the order and found my own breath in their rhyme. I loved making others feel good about themselves in what I wrote. And I loved how I felt about myself when I was finished—Cleansed. Smart. Gifted. Special.
Writing is where I discovered my place in the world. It is still the one place where my head and heart can connect fully in the moment; to express an idea that no one else has had, in a way no one else can is cathartic and proof that we are, each of us, unique in all the world.
The writing was and still is—hypnotic. It can take me to the depths of who I am.
It’s a simultaneous connection with the inner core and outer creation. It’s grounding. An anchor. It’s a way of seeing what you feel. The tangible, “I am.”
We all long to tell our stories in the presence and safety of those who connect with our experience in surprising and kindred ways. We all need to be heard, we all crave an audience to validate and cheer us on.
Words are powerful, hurtful, filled with big emotion that comes from places of profound mystery and intensity. To be unafraid to express—to learn how to convey what resides in the heart, to uncover communion between what is thought and what is felt, and to nurture the hand into manifesting story— is writing at its highest call.
What a joy it is to uncover the essence of people through their stories and nurture those stories into living history, breathtaking art.
In one of my favorite books, “The Thinking Hand,” author Juhani Pallasmaa speaks of drawing and design as I view words—as if the pencil were a bridge that mediates between two realities. May that “mediation” is not only between mind and body but between one another.