Words

IT IS STRANGE TO BE HERE.  THE MYSTERY NEVER LEAVES YOU alone.  Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world awaits.  A world lives within you.  No one else can bring you news of this inner world.  Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul.  These sounds are words. The world is full of words.  There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on television, on radio, in the paper, in books.  The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us.  We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies.  Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together.  Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly creates.  Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sounds of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here.  Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity.  Under our feet is ancient earth.  We are beautifully molded from this clay.  Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us.  In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection.  Words are the oblique mirrors that hold your thoughts.  You gaze into these word-mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning belonging, and shelter.  Behind their bright surfaces is the dark and the silence.  Words are like the god Janus, they face outward and inward at once.

~ John O’Donohue ~

Excerpted from “Anam Cara”

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