These times feel like a familiar beautiful tune struggling to play – but with missing pieces, interruptions. Turns out that’s what ‘syncopated’ means: all chopped up, leaving gaps (syn – together, plus kop – cut). This sense of something missing came to mean fainting, a loss of consciousness (syncope). The word drifted into language too, […]
An Expression of Pink Trees
March 19, 2017 by
I missed it. At least the camera missed it. By the time I realized I wanted to capture the glorious explosion of flowers haloing out from a stand of neighborhood trees, two days had passed and the flowers were turning gray. That was weeks ago, and now it’s a strange mercy: to keep from feeling […]
Significance
March 8, 2016 by
After being tossed an opportunity to list the most significant events of my life, I watched the parades of memory march by – different parades on three different passes of the question. My notion of what ‘significant’ means began to crumble. The first pass included the usual suspects: outer events that changed the course of […]
Exper…
September 18, 2015 by
I got a sweet little shock when I looked up the etymology of experience and experiment, wondering how they could feel so different while being nearly the same word. Their shared history is adding rich new sensations of fearlessness to daily existence (even to the past and the future, as well as the Now). First, the two exper words: ‘Experience’ […]
A Perfect Score of 42
July 12, 2015 by
I found a new way to relax, even feel more creative and awake, when hearing the word ‘perfect’. My mind started chewing on it after two encounters with someone steeped in fashion philosophies: In the first, he announced that painful difficulties reflected the perfection of the moment; in the second, he said he wasn’t perfect. […]
Resolution Means Flow
December 28, 2014 by
Fierce determination, popular while January 1 approaches, feels opposite to going with the flow. Yet they can be the same, considered in a certain light. Traditions of beginning again personally on January 1, when the outer calendar begins again, offer rituals for backward reflection and forward vision. If the ritual is superficial – a Procrustean chopping and […]
Sea Legs and Inner Ears
September 14, 2014 by
Waltzing back and forth between the right-brain’s flowing cosmos and the left-brain’s key-tapping to make words, not yet being fully immersed in an all-senses state, I feel a dizziness that brings a memory to the surface, one that resonates across the decades: We’d been on a long sailing trip, eating and sleeping on board, as […]
Merit in the Marketplace
May 6, 2013 by
A phenomenal new wordal popped out of the dictionary this morning: the mer root within merit. Turns out it started as sale value, leading to the Latin meretrix (prostitute) and the English meretricious (attractive in a vulgar way). This surprise led to contemplation of merit badges, merit scholars, meritocracies, certificates of merit, earning merit in religious […]
Seven-Story Forgiveness
August 17, 2012 by
Every word, every thought, changes along the vibrational scale of consciousness, so that its meaning is different depending on the speaker’s intent and the listener’s awareness – creating the sound of different notes and tones with a single word. I wrote about this earlier in relation to ‘gratitude’: in the lowest vibrations, ‘gratitude’ feels like helpless […]
Bliss, Fulfillment, Happiness, Passion
March 13, 2012 by
Fun to wonder if the apparent convergence of blogs and videos about “find your passion” (links provided below) has been statistically true – or is just a mirror of my own focus. Multiple notes and links led to discussions of this staple of the “consciousness movement” in a compressed time span. Impatient with so many […]
Flicker and Peep
February 29, 2012 by
These are the words – flicker and peep – for the play of light and shadow, for the sound of sound, in the felt senses. Waking early, in the cold and dark, I notice flames dancing and crackling in the fireplace now. Outside, coyotes yip-whoop in starlight. Time collapses between aboriginal and modern. The resonance […]
Adaptation: Not Always Second-Hand
January 15, 2012 by
Once again, a word-origin is revealing a hidden coherence: ap, which becomes apt, adapt, aptitude, adept and inept. It’s about fittedness, fastening two phenomena, one or both of them in motion. Like dancing: the fittedness being between the music and the body, or between two or more bodies, in spontaneous or rehearsed choreography (on a […]
First Wordals
August 11, 2011 by
Wordals – as word-portals – evolved in my writing practice as mind-unlocking gateways into higher/deeper states of awareness. Unlocking the traps of words frees the mind into a more vast experience of being alive. All around us now is talk of potential new universal languages, decryption of recently discovered ancient languages, possibly extraterrestrial symbolic and […]