Words

Words are strange things.  Simply scribblings that have been accepted by the masses to mean something and whose meaning, in this day and time, can just as easily and arbitrarily be changed.

Some of us use them with the precision of a surgeons’ knife to cut to the heart quickly and almost imperceptibly.  Some of us use them with such beauty and eloquence that the rest of us are enraptured and addicted.   Some of us stumble over them, misuse them and find our hearts dissatisfied and disappointed at the messages we share.  Some of us string lots of them together yet, say nothing, because we believe ourselves to be wiser than we truly are.

Some of us have to be reminded to simply use them.

Amazingly, however we use them, they seem to create our own reality as we speak them, type them or write them.  Our own words make our worlds more than do the words of others.

Such power in random scribblings of lines and curves, don’t you think?

And yet, we need them.  I need them.

My heart races when just the right one appears.  It breaks when I have no one to share them with.  It longs to use them in such a way that others are changed. Challenged.  Encouraged.  Directed… to the first and final Word.

And, yes, my heart needs to learn when there should be none.

I don’t do that well.

Silence.

And the power of the words I should never have spoken overwhelms me.

It’s a funny thing.

The words I want to remember seem to vanish like the life-giving warmth of a breath on a bitterly cold day.  Those that I want to wipe from my mind seem to be recorded and replayed over and over in the dark corners that I can’t seem to find.  And, those that I desperately need seem to fly past my eyes and ears so quickly that they don’t have a chance
to alight in my soul and sing of hope.

Still…I can’t live without them.