Wednesday, November 02, 2005
About Words
Words can bring consolation, comfort, encouragement, and hope. Words can take away fear, isolation, shame, and guilt. Words can reconcile, unite, forgive, and heal. Words can bring peace and joy, inner freedom and deep gratitude. Words, in short, can carry love on their wings. A word of love can be one of the greatest acts of love.
- “Bread for the Journey,” June 22
*****
The thing is, not everybody can achieve mastery of words - not everybody can find the right words, at the right time.
And some people will never find the right words, even given all the time in the world.
And some people will never understand those words when they see or hear them, and their significances will be lost to them.
I see it now.
*****
We're standing, looking out to sea.
The sky is a hung sheet of black velvet before us, the air a chill cloak of stillness draped around our shoulders.
Perhaps we shiver just a little, hanging suspended in time in those magic moments just beforea a new day breaks.
We hear, rather than see the waveheads crashing onto each other up just ahead. We taste the sea in the air. We feel its humidity on our lips and eyelashes.
And then it begins.
The breakers take on an eerie light blue glow - almost white, as they coarse in to shore like tireless ghosts of time.
We begin to make out where the sky begins and the sea ends, far out on the horizon, and the sea unfolds into ripping, surging life.
The sky lightens, and streaks of colour bleed across its cloud-strewn face. Fist pale reds, then oranges, then vivid hues of gold and yellow - an artist's impression in oil-paints of sunrise, applied to the endless canvas of the sky.
The beach stretches out to eternity all around us, but instead of the virgin sands of morn we expect in minds' eye, untouched and unspoiled by raucous families and lonely walkers...
...we see, out of the corner of our fields of view - its surface pockmarked, scarred, with hundreds of thousands of bottles of every shape and size and colour. Perhaps each contains within it a note or a letter, or perhaps some are empty, their contents worn away by time and nature. Perhaps some are farewells, perhaps some bridge between forgotten times and tomorrow.
We spare them a scant glance - we know that those are not what we seek. We know that those are of little consequence.
We glance out to sea, searching the roiling reflected reds and golds on its surface for it.
Waiting.
Regretting.
Hoping.
We will know it, when it comes. As we knew it, when She was.
If it comes.
All we can do... is wait.
- “Bread for the Journey,” June 22
*****
The thing is, not everybody can achieve mastery of words - not everybody can find the right words, at the right time.
And some people will never find the right words, even given all the time in the world.
And some people will never understand those words when they see or hear them, and their significances will be lost to them.
I see it now.
*****
We're standing, looking out to sea.
The sky is a hung sheet of black velvet before us, the air a chill cloak of stillness draped around our shoulders.
Perhaps we shiver just a little, hanging suspended in time in those magic moments just beforea a new day breaks.
We hear, rather than see the waveheads crashing onto each other up just ahead. We taste the sea in the air. We feel its humidity on our lips and eyelashes.
And then it begins.
The breakers take on an eerie light blue glow - almost white, as they coarse in to shore like tireless ghosts of time.
We begin to make out where the sky begins and the sea ends, far out on the horizon, and the sea unfolds into ripping, surging life.
The sky lightens, and streaks of colour bleed across its cloud-strewn face. Fist pale reds, then oranges, then vivid hues of gold and yellow - an artist's impression in oil-paints of sunrise, applied to the endless canvas of the sky.
The beach stretches out to eternity all around us, but instead of the virgin sands of morn we expect in minds' eye, untouched and unspoiled by raucous families and lonely walkers...
...we see, out of the corner of our fields of view - its surface pockmarked, scarred, with hundreds of thousands of bottles of every shape and size and colour. Perhaps each contains within it a note or a letter, or perhaps some are empty, their contents worn away by time and nature. Perhaps some are farewells, perhaps some bridge between forgotten times and tomorrow.
We spare them a scant glance - we know that those are not what we seek. We know that those are of little consequence.
We glance out to sea, searching the roiling reflected reds and golds on its surface for it.
Waiting.
Regretting.
Hoping.
We will know it, when it comes. As we knew it, when She was.
If it comes.
All we can do... is wait.
