'Wow ... wow ... wow, this is brilliant', was repeatedly in my thoughts and on my lips as I read this. So beautifully written, it just flows. 🌀
The story, the poem, your family’s example of how communication is so much more than what is spoken. How your mother felt to make the choices she did, the power of the unspoken. How we take that to adulthood, “What makes humans fulfil the wishes of autocrats without spoken command or order?” I have been sitting with that for a bit today, in light of my current post.
Music — I remember when I started learning classical piano, I was taken by the emotion in the music and as a ten year old kid I was wrapped that I could play a language understood by everyone. Music does elevate us to other places. And then, as a beginning EAL teacher, I used music to help a Turkish boy read. We recited -sang rhymes as we played them on a keyboard. His language processing was delayed though he would gravitate to the instruments. Our English class was in the music room.
Learning a language, “jumping in the river where the mouth meets the open sea”, I can relate to this from an observational and teacher perspective, of the CALD communities we worked with.
And then there are the many contexts of silence, “so silence can, according to circumstance, speak.” And Orwell’s point you highlight, the power language yields.
And that language is culture and identity, so important in the too many examples of people being forbidden aspects of themselves. Too many languages lost.
The fluidity and evolution of language. Just a beautiful exploration Veronika, with much for us to think about.
“Water cleanses itself through movement, generating its own spiralling flow, regenerating itself through currents and waves, ebbs and tides, springing from the source, filtering through aquifers, winding through riverbeds, quickening along rapids, gushing back into the ocean, leaving the flotsam and jetsam on banks and shores.”
Thank you so much Simone, for such beautiful, reflective feedback! 💙 🙏 𓍢🌊˚˖𓍢ִ
I love your story of teaching the Turkish boy to read through music!
In Hanns Josef Ortheil's story his father taught him to read and write by going into nature and drawing trees. Interestingly, he recalls 'thinking in images' before he was able to express himself in words, and his brilliant dad must have picked up on that intuitively. Seeing the world in images rather than words and stories... (which casts a new light on the whole theory of 'language instinct', in my mind)
It is also intriguing to me how writing on a certain topic (any topic really) develops its own momentum and reveals its essence through the way the words take over and flow (as you have picked up so perceptively here in your resonant comment ('It just flows')
I am always puzzled when I hear someone 'blame language' for whatever... As if it was the fault of language herself (or any particular language) when humans use her in adverse, hostile or manipulative ways. This bewilderment was partly my motivation for this wordcast.
I wondered about how nature helped the boy, what a wonderful father. Yes, interesting point re language acquisition and the theories that suggest the brain is wired for oral language, though not for reading. Yes, the flow of the language as it appears in its symbolic form is more than words, more than thought — when are immersed. Part of something more than language?
The Turkish boy, unfortunately they closed the school at the end of his first year at high school, and I was shipped off to a school in a neighbouring suburb, I never saw Babas again, that was way back in 1992.
Yes, I agree that it is people who weaponise language — we put the meaning in it in how we use it, then it can be cultural assumptions etc, that underpin it to be used to manipulate, as you point out — the mindset. We always bring ourselves to a text, as a user and participant, this is what gives the language meaning? 😊🙏
Language & communication has always fascinated me. I immersed myself in ASL in college and was mesmerized by the culture, the language, the subtle cues they share.
This is beautifully written, thank you for sharing it. Music as a 1st language, just that concept you wrote about has me curious. Humans are capable of so much.
when I read H J Ortheil's autobiographic novel a few years ago, it stuck with me, and I always wanted to share his extraordinary story... esp. since his work is not (yet) available in English. For such a small child to instinctively understand is that music was a way he could communicate (and show the world that he was anything but an 'idiot')
“There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself.” ~ Meister Eckhart
Wow! What a breath-taking exploration of language, its fluidity and its power as both a vessel for connection and a tool of distortion. I love how you've woven the poetic, philosophical and personal together in a way that feels like water itself, moving seamlessly through music, art and histories.
The imagery of language as an ocean, regenerating through currents, tides and movement, is particularly striking - inviting me to see words not as fixed structures, but as living, evolving forces. I admire the way you gently encourage your readers to be more conscious of the ways in which they use and receive language, to listen beyond what is spoken, and to recognise the deeper currents.
As a child who stopped talking for what I’m told was a couple of years, I’m deeply fascinated by this topic so much. My school nurse (speech and language therapist) persisted though and eventually I started talking again and correcting the speech defect I had. But still I seldom spoke until I was around nine years old and had spectacularly fallen in love with the alphabet and wanted to sound out the words and emerged from that huge silence.
Which story called me out I wonder and wonder? Which line, poem? I can’t remember which one it was exactly but I do remember reading “The Water Babies” at least two hundred times, once a day for a whole school year when I began to reading stories. I was obsessed with it and here I am, an aging mermaid, living beside the sea in this old fishing town. You couldn’t make it up.
All so interesting, given my pre-birth memories and not communicating with words and how in my early thirties I began my training to become a psychotherapist. A talking therapist where words along with body language mattered greatly. It felt like putting my feet in a pair of comfy slippers and coming home such was my ability to read beyond words. I better stop here as I'll ramble on!
Thank you so much Veronika for sharing your words, they’re beautiful and thought-provoking. I loved all the stories and all the ways you explored language. What a gift you are to the world! ✨
Oh Deborah, your comment feels like a big warm hug! 💗🙏
This particular exploration grew out of a need to move out of the language = tree imagery. Something about that has felt 'off' for me for some time, and somehow the 'Messages in Water' by Emoto and an inner image of language(s) as a network of waterways kept nudging me along.
'An aging mermaid, living beside the sea in this old fishing town...' 😊 this is sweet.
H.C. Andersen's The Little Mermaid has been 'my archetype' for many years...
One of my younger brothers completely stopped speaking when our family moved back from the Middle East (where he was born) to Germany. It was a reaction to the culture shock. Language shock? Is that a thing?
Your responses just make me realise how much I love writing for you!!
Sounds performed by voice and tongue and expelled through parted lips are only part of the production. Sound. Tongue. Vibration. The shell of the outer ear. The spiral of the inner ear. An anvil. A hammer. Nose. Throat. Fluid. Hairs. Waves. Where the mouth meets the mermaid of the sea.
The ghost that is speechlessness. Like Hildegard of Bingen I was given what only recently I have come to know as a gift. An ancestral form of migraine accompanied by an neurological-lingual orchestra of aura that demands a different kind of listening. It brings a different kind of seeing. It is an hour of psychedelic oneness mushroom free! For maybe 20 minutes of it - always in the poetic middle- I am aphasic. An odd sensation of oneness in connection yet my faculties cannot link up to speak what I think. I can only feel through it. I wait. Time is not felt in minutes.
I look for the lacunæ. I sense that space. I feel into it with communication. Body first. Below the gold trimmed words thoughts dress up in clothes. Naked if the last skin of silk can ever be stripped away. You speak to it well. It is real. It slows down to find us if we let it.
Everything that cleanses maybe is a spiral. Energy. Flow. It gets block in the collective. Stuck many places. We still are flesh and soul. Always a foot in both. Spirits having a human experience.
Beautiful poem you wrote here. Sandburg’s too. “Sing—and singing—remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind “
Love is a language beyond words. Lets keep it alive. In words. In spaces. In the heArt of all we do. Speaking. Connecting. Being. Born in the great truth of silence. The first sound is no sound. Listening through a shell. Til the sound finds our skin. 🙏❤️
"an hour of psychedelic oneness mushroom free! For maybe 20 minutes of it - always in the poetic middle- I am aphasic. An odd sensation of oneness in connection yet my faculties cannot link up to speak what I think."
Language, words, metaphors, sentences, silences, poetry, poiesis [poiesis (/pɔɪˈiːsɪs/; from Ancient Greek: ποίησις) the process of emergence of something that did not previously exist] ~ this happens to be our creative medium (and here I mean 'our' = yours and mine, and all other word-wizards and -witches/ you know who you are)
I had to smile when you wrote in a recent comment about 'language as rivers' while I was working on this essay. When learning a new language we aspire to fluency. (This is not a random choices of wording)
When we are speechless the flow of the river of language is not blocked. It filters through the aquifers of the inner wilderness, either seeping underground or evaporating into the clouds.
"Born in the great truth of silence. The first sound is no sound. Listening through a shell. Til the sound finds our skin." beautifully said.
And when the sound finds our skin, perhaps the our breath finds its voice.
I am fascinated by gestalt of language. Rudolf Steiner used his practice Eurythmy to help students connect to feelings of the movement of Phonetics and language. Eugene Gendlin created a practice called Focusing where one learns to refine/discern the expressed word which comes from a felt sense behind word choices. I think I am beginning to really understand Synchronosophy. YIPPEE! I love the feeling of wholesome embodiment- kind of an illusive obvious!
gestalt of language... Eugene Gendlin's work on Focusing was one of my first inspirations for what later emerged as Synchronosophy. I have the feeling you are understanding it quite well, Shannon. 💗🙏
I love your fascination and enthusiasm and am totally on the same page there (as you can probably tell 😉)
beloved and also celebrated by Richard Jeffries. We knew his water meadows that still sang in summer, although post WWII the water was too full to be cleansed downstream from suburbia.
the hydrology of families... what a great analogy!
And this painting of Ophelia's drowning, accentuated by Floriography is particularly haunting. I knew the painting and Ophelia's story, but not the river which posed for the artist. 💗🙏
Before we knew of him I had found a way for our small gang where the small river still ran clean and filled an arch under the railway.
We could get up a concrete pipe to the leet of a disused water mill - the small office conversion could not overlook us and we kept quiet. The secluded paradise included a kingfisher's nest in some old brickwork.
There have been interesting 'mixed' updates this last 10 years, but sufficient to say the picture came in useful and at least the water voles are back I am told.
Veronika, this is incredible, such a beautiful and thought-provoking piece! I really loved how you expanded the whole idea of 'language' way beyond just spoken words. The way you talked about all those unspoken things, like body language, the silence in the Ortheil story, or even how the 'good girl' picked up on unsaid expectations, so much of how you brought together these stories really struck me.
It makes you realize how much communication happens beneath the surface, almost by osmosis, and how vital listening and just being in an environment is. That whole connection with the ear, the shells, and immersing in the 'ocean' was a brilliant way to put it.
And then, the concept of the 'polluted ocean of languaging,' that is powerful. It’s so true how words can be twisted and used to cause harm, and how that can feel overwhelming. But I especially appreciated that you didn't just leave it at that!
The idea that language can also cleanse and renew itself, kind of like nature, and that our own creativity plays a part in that, your Rilke quote about being 'poet enough to call forth its riches' was perfect there. It left me feeling hopeful. Really made me think differently about the words we use and hear every day.
An essay packed with lyrical punches, I have to restrain myself from restacking repeatedly, different quotes.
But this gives me pause, "Any type of washing ~ be it whitewashing, greenwashing, blackwashing, footwashing, cloudwashing, or brainwashing ~ won’t resolve the issue. Because washing is watering. Rivers and oceans can’t be washed. They do the watering." because it's thought provoking, something to meditate on.
Thanks again, Veronika. This is an amazing post of personal story, quotes, and poems. xo
Thank you, Lani! 😊 All this -washing imagery gushed out in one surge, the writing itself proving its point of how fluid words are... and your lovely comment a ripple effect of my words skipping like smooth stones across the lake of our shared language 💙 🙏 🌊˚˖𓍢ִ
I’m blown away nearly speechless by this post, Veronika. One I will sit with for awhile. I am soon publishing a book called “How Shall I Stand Between River and Land? heart questions for uncertain times” by Leni de Mik (who was born in Nazi occupied Holland and that phrase came from her Dad who was in the Dutch resistance) So the River metaphor is flooding into my awareness (whether that’s the algorithm or synchronicity, or both). You’ve given me even more insight.
I rarely spoke as a toddler and even now, I find myself tongue-tied and frozen in my writing with all the flabbergasting events, particularly the lies of gaslighting. (Like burning oil spilled on waters!) Perhaps this is why the idea of “creative flow” or blocked flow resonates.
Thank you for so much imagery and insight! May the waters of your creativity continue to bless us all. 🙏💕
wow, Shelly, what a powerful beautiful synchrony!!
I have been wrestling with the 'language tree' metaphor ever since I started this 'symbiopædia' substack, and when images of the waterscapes (rivers, lakes, springs, aquifers, rain) came to me I instantly knew something 'felt right' about that.
Like you, I am also very much in the 'speaking our truth' camp (and even 'truth' has been appropriated and twisted by a certain megalomaniac wannabe pope) – and gaslighting! I know... I mean I don't know... I struggle to get my head around the concept. But having been at the receiving end of this last year, I discovered that my response to it is no response. We walked away from those 'gaslighters' with a sense of deep disturbance, distress, and pity on behalf of them.
So, in my limited experience with such things is that our creativity (including precision with language) helps to cleanse the pollution of the ocean of language.
Hey, you write “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me’, l must admit I never heard the saying, but a very closely saying that I have heard a number of times is that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can tear my heart apart” 🙌
The osmosis of language is fascinating. I love how you describe this process, like allowing ourselves to be swallowed into the mouth of the ocean. If aphasia can be passed down , it makes me wonder how many other modes of communication are being shared and adopted all day every day, without us even knowing? (Eyes wander to Kitty Nova as she makes biscuits and I gladly receive the message.)
Hi Veronika,
'Wow ... wow ... wow, this is brilliant', was repeatedly in my thoughts and on my lips as I read this. So beautifully written, it just flows. 🌀
The story, the poem, your family’s example of how communication is so much more than what is spoken. How your mother felt to make the choices she did, the power of the unspoken. How we take that to adulthood, “What makes humans fulfil the wishes of autocrats without spoken command or order?” I have been sitting with that for a bit today, in light of my current post.
Music — I remember when I started learning classical piano, I was taken by the emotion in the music and as a ten year old kid I was wrapped that I could play a language understood by everyone. Music does elevate us to other places. And then, as a beginning EAL teacher, I used music to help a Turkish boy read. We recited -sang rhymes as we played them on a keyboard. His language processing was delayed though he would gravitate to the instruments. Our English class was in the music room.
Learning a language, “jumping in the river where the mouth meets the open sea”, I can relate to this from an observational and teacher perspective, of the CALD communities we worked with.
And then there are the many contexts of silence, “so silence can, according to circumstance, speak.” And Orwell’s point you highlight, the power language yields.
And that language is culture and identity, so important in the too many examples of people being forbidden aspects of themselves. Too many languages lost.
The fluidity and evolution of language. Just a beautiful exploration Veronika, with much for us to think about.
“Water cleanses itself through movement, generating its own spiralling flow, regenerating itself through currents and waves, ebbs and tides, springing from the source, filtering through aquifers, winding through riverbeds, quickening along rapids, gushing back into the ocean, leaving the flotsam and jetsam on banks and shores.”
Beautiful
Thank you 🙏 🌱 💙
Thank you so much Simone, for such beautiful, reflective feedback! 💙 🙏 𓍢🌊˚˖𓍢ִ
I love your story of teaching the Turkish boy to read through music!
In Hanns Josef Ortheil's story his father taught him to read and write by going into nature and drawing trees. Interestingly, he recalls 'thinking in images' before he was able to express himself in words, and his brilliant dad must have picked up on that intuitively. Seeing the world in images rather than words and stories... (which casts a new light on the whole theory of 'language instinct', in my mind)
It is also intriguing to me how writing on a certain topic (any topic really) develops its own momentum and reveals its essence through the way the words take over and flow (as you have picked up so perceptively here in your resonant comment ('It just flows')
I am always puzzled when I hear someone 'blame language' for whatever... As if it was the fault of language herself (or any particular language) when humans use her in adverse, hostile or manipulative ways. This bewilderment was partly my motivation for this wordcast.
I wondered about how nature helped the boy, what a wonderful father. Yes, interesting point re language acquisition and the theories that suggest the brain is wired for oral language, though not for reading. Yes, the flow of the language as it appears in its symbolic form is more than words, more than thought — when are immersed. Part of something more than language?
The Turkish boy, unfortunately they closed the school at the end of his first year at high school, and I was shipped off to a school in a neighbouring suburb, I never saw Babas again, that was way back in 1992.
Yes, I agree that it is people who weaponise language — we put the meaning in it in how we use it, then it can be cultural assumptions etc, that underpin it to be used to manipulate, as you point out — the mindset. We always bring ourselves to a text, as a user and participant, this is what gives the language meaning? 😊🙏
Language & communication has always fascinated me. I immersed myself in ASL in college and was mesmerized by the culture, the language, the subtle cues they share.
This is beautifully written, thank you for sharing it. Music as a 1st language, just that concept you wrote about has me curious. Humans are capable of so much.
Thank you Maryellen for this beautiful feedback.
Yes, Music as a 1st language.
when I read H J Ortheil's autobiographic novel a few years ago, it stuck with me, and I always wanted to share his extraordinary story... esp. since his work is not (yet) available in English. For such a small child to instinctively understand is that music was a way he could communicate (and show the world that he was anything but an 'idiot')
I love stories like this, Helen Keller was the same. Sign Language gave her a voice & she was amazing. Thank you!
“There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself.” ~ Meister Eckhart
Wow! What a breath-taking exploration of language, its fluidity and its power as both a vessel for connection and a tool of distortion. I love how you've woven the poetic, philosophical and personal together in a way that feels like water itself, moving seamlessly through music, art and histories.
The imagery of language as an ocean, regenerating through currents, tides and movement, is particularly striking - inviting me to see words not as fixed structures, but as living, evolving forces. I admire the way you gently encourage your readers to be more conscious of the ways in which they use and receive language, to listen beyond what is spoken, and to recognise the deeper currents.
As a child who stopped talking for what I’m told was a couple of years, I’m deeply fascinated by this topic so much. My school nurse (speech and language therapist) persisted though and eventually I started talking again and correcting the speech defect I had. But still I seldom spoke until I was around nine years old and had spectacularly fallen in love with the alphabet and wanted to sound out the words and emerged from that huge silence.
Which story called me out I wonder and wonder? Which line, poem? I can’t remember which one it was exactly but I do remember reading “The Water Babies” at least two hundred times, once a day for a whole school year when I began to reading stories. I was obsessed with it and here I am, an aging mermaid, living beside the sea in this old fishing town. You couldn’t make it up.
All so interesting, given my pre-birth memories and not communicating with words and how in my early thirties I began my training to become a psychotherapist. A talking therapist where words along with body language mattered greatly. It felt like putting my feet in a pair of comfy slippers and coming home such was my ability to read beyond words. I better stop here as I'll ramble on!
Thank you so much Veronika for sharing your words, they’re beautiful and thought-provoking. I loved all the stories and all the ways you explored language. What a gift you are to the world! ✨
Oh Deborah, your comment feels like a big warm hug! 💗🙏
This particular exploration grew out of a need to move out of the language = tree imagery. Something about that has felt 'off' for me for some time, and somehow the 'Messages in Water' by Emoto and an inner image of language(s) as a network of waterways kept nudging me along.
'An aging mermaid, living beside the sea in this old fishing town...' 😊 this is sweet.
H.C. Andersen's The Little Mermaid has been 'my archetype' for many years...
One of my younger brothers completely stopped speaking when our family moved back from the Middle East (where he was born) to Germany. It was a reaction to the culture shock. Language shock? Is that a thing?
Your responses just make me realise how much I love writing for you!!
Veronika! I loved this! Thank you!!
Language
Sounds performed by voice and tongue and expelled through parted lips are only part of the production. Sound. Tongue. Vibration. The shell of the outer ear. The spiral of the inner ear. An anvil. A hammer. Nose. Throat. Fluid. Hairs. Waves. Where the mouth meets the mermaid of the sea.
The ghost that is speechlessness. Like Hildegard of Bingen I was given what only recently I have come to know as a gift. An ancestral form of migraine accompanied by an neurological-lingual orchestra of aura that demands a different kind of listening. It brings a different kind of seeing. It is an hour of psychedelic oneness mushroom free! For maybe 20 minutes of it - always in the poetic middle- I am aphasic. An odd sensation of oneness in connection yet my faculties cannot link up to speak what I think. I can only feel through it. I wait. Time is not felt in minutes.
I look for the lacunæ. I sense that space. I feel into it with communication. Body first. Below the gold trimmed words thoughts dress up in clothes. Naked if the last skin of silk can ever be stripped away. You speak to it well. It is real. It slows down to find us if we let it.
Everything that cleanses maybe is a spiral. Energy. Flow. It gets block in the collective. Stuck many places. We still are flesh and soul. Always a foot in both. Spirits having a human experience.
Beautiful poem you wrote here. Sandburg’s too. “Sing—and singing—remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind “
Love is a language beyond words. Lets keep it alive. In words. In spaces. In the heArt of all we do. Speaking. Connecting. Being. Born in the great truth of silence. The first sound is no sound. Listening through a shell. Til the sound finds our skin. 🙏❤️
Oh Jamie, what an extraordinary experience,
"an hour of psychedelic oneness mushroom free! For maybe 20 minutes of it - always in the poetic middle- I am aphasic. An odd sensation of oneness in connection yet my faculties cannot link up to speak what I think."
Language, words, metaphors, sentences, silences, poetry, poiesis [poiesis (/pɔɪˈiːsɪs/; from Ancient Greek: ποίησις) the process of emergence of something that did not previously exist] ~ this happens to be our creative medium (and here I mean 'our' = yours and mine, and all other word-wizards and -witches/ you know who you are)
I had to smile when you wrote in a recent comment about 'language as rivers' while I was working on this essay. When learning a new language we aspire to fluency. (This is not a random choices of wording)
When we are speechless the flow of the river of language is not blocked. It filters through the aquifers of the inner wilderness, either seeping underground or evaporating into the clouds.
"Born in the great truth of silence. The first sound is no sound. Listening through a shell. Til the sound finds our skin." beautifully said.
And when the sound finds our skin, perhaps the our breath finds its voice.
I am fascinated by gestalt of language. Rudolf Steiner used his practice Eurythmy to help students connect to feelings of the movement of Phonetics and language. Eugene Gendlin created a practice called Focusing where one learns to refine/discern the expressed word which comes from a felt sense behind word choices. I think I am beginning to really understand Synchronosophy. YIPPEE! I love the feeling of wholesome embodiment- kind of an illusive obvious!
gestalt of language... Eugene Gendlin's work on Focusing was one of my first inspirations for what later emerged as Synchronosophy. I have the feeling you are understanding it quite well, Shannon. 💗🙏
I love your fascination and enthusiasm and am totally on the same page there (as you can probably tell 😉)
I agree. 👍😊
I am almost left wordless from the stories. The Brethren story is unblinking exact like a painting of an era. I am amazed as usual by the hydrology of families. A small thought. I was born near the source of a chalk stream with a history. It had been this... https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/ophelia-sir-john-everett-millais/-wGU6cT4JixtPA?hl=en
beloved and also celebrated by Richard Jeffries. We knew his water meadows that still sang in summer, although post WWII the water was too full to be cleansed downstream from suburbia.
the hydrology of families... what a great analogy!
And this painting of Ophelia's drowning, accentuated by Floriography is particularly haunting. I knew the painting and Ophelia's story, but not the river which posed for the artist. 💗🙏
I mis-spelled his name but here is the writer we somehow inherited.
https://www.richardjefferiessociety.org/p/the-life-of-richard-jefferies-with.html
His story from just before our time.
Before we knew of him I had found a way for our small gang where the small river still ran clean and filled an arch under the railway.
We could get up a concrete pipe to the leet of a disused water mill - the small office conversion could not overlook us and we kept quiet. The secluded paradise included a kingfisher's nest in some old brickwork.
There have been interesting 'mixed' updates this last 10 years, but sufficient to say the picture came in useful and at least the water voles are back I am told.
Veronika, this is incredible, such a beautiful and thought-provoking piece! I really loved how you expanded the whole idea of 'language' way beyond just spoken words. The way you talked about all those unspoken things, like body language, the silence in the Ortheil story, or even how the 'good girl' picked up on unsaid expectations, so much of how you brought together these stories really struck me.
It makes you realize how much communication happens beneath the surface, almost by osmosis, and how vital listening and just being in an environment is. That whole connection with the ear, the shells, and immersing in the 'ocean' was a brilliant way to put it.
And then, the concept of the 'polluted ocean of languaging,' that is powerful. It’s so true how words can be twisted and used to cause harm, and how that can feel overwhelming. But I especially appreciated that you didn't just leave it at that!
The idea that language can also cleanse and renew itself, kind of like nature, and that our own creativity plays a part in that, your Rilke quote about being 'poet enough to call forth its riches' was perfect there. It left me feeling hopeful. Really made me think differently about the words we use and hear every day.
A fantastic essay!
thank you so much, Colin! 💗🙏
Sychronosophy…..oooooooh
An essay packed with lyrical punches, I have to restrain myself from restacking repeatedly, different quotes.
But this gives me pause, "Any type of washing ~ be it whitewashing, greenwashing, blackwashing, footwashing, cloudwashing, or brainwashing ~ won’t resolve the issue. Because washing is watering. Rivers and oceans can’t be washed. They do the watering." because it's thought provoking, something to meditate on.
Thanks again, Veronika. This is an amazing post of personal story, quotes, and poems. xo
Thank you, Lani! 😊 All this -washing imagery gushed out in one surge, the writing itself proving its point of how fluid words are... and your lovely comment a ripple effect of my words skipping like smooth stones across the lake of our shared language 💙 🙏 🌊˚˖𓍢ִ
Some wield word weapons,
some weave worthy word world webs.
And then, there’s silence.
...
Words, water, wows, woes.
Language liberates, and lies.
Language lives, and dies.
I’m blown away nearly speechless by this post, Veronika. One I will sit with for awhile. I am soon publishing a book called “How Shall I Stand Between River and Land? heart questions for uncertain times” by Leni de Mik (who was born in Nazi occupied Holland and that phrase came from her Dad who was in the Dutch resistance) So the River metaphor is flooding into my awareness (whether that’s the algorithm or synchronicity, or both). You’ve given me even more insight.
I rarely spoke as a toddler and even now, I find myself tongue-tied and frozen in my writing with all the flabbergasting events, particularly the lies of gaslighting. (Like burning oil spilled on waters!) Perhaps this is why the idea of “creative flow” or blocked flow resonates.
Thank you for so much imagery and insight! May the waters of your creativity continue to bless us all. 🙏💕
wow, Shelly, what a powerful beautiful synchrony!!
I have been wrestling with the 'language tree' metaphor ever since I started this 'symbiopædia' substack, and when images of the waterscapes (rivers, lakes, springs, aquifers, rain) came to me I instantly knew something 'felt right' about that.
Like you, I am also very much in the 'speaking our truth' camp (and even 'truth' has been appropriated and twisted by a certain megalomaniac wannabe pope) – and gaslighting! I know... I mean I don't know... I struggle to get my head around the concept. But having been at the receiving end of this last year, I discovered that my response to it is no response. We walked away from those 'gaslighters' with a sense of deep disturbance, distress, and pity on behalf of them.
So, in my limited experience with such things is that our creativity (including precision with language) helps to cleanse the pollution of the ocean of language.
Thank you so much for popping in 💗🙏 🎶 𓍢ִִ໋🌊🦈˚˖𓍢ִ
“Unkind words …” that is
Hey, you write “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me’, l must admit I never heard the saying, but a very closely saying that I have heard a number of times is that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can tear my heart apart” 🙌
this is a new one to me, and seems more accurate.
The version "... words can never hurt (or harm) me" is an old children's rhyme from the 19th century: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones.html
The osmosis of language is fascinating. I love how you describe this process, like allowing ourselves to be swallowed into the mouth of the ocean. If aphasia can be passed down , it makes me wonder how many other modes of communication are being shared and adopted all day every day, without us even knowing? (Eyes wander to Kitty Nova as she makes biscuits and I gladly receive the message.)
great question! the answer is probably 'a whole waterfall of currents' of communication in which we are fluent (beyond words) xx