Oh Veronika! You are a translator. You open up the spaces around all of these words. “Whether we speak an exotic language, or in our native tongue, we are forever translating between different forms of expression or cognitive phenomena ~ translating feeling into imagining, believing into selective perceiving, thinking into wording. “
“When reducing the spoken medium known as language to a defined number of words and rules, we tend to forget the silences which make speech and communication possible.”
The sounds. The dressed up layered pyjamas of implications. The naked meanings underneath. You are a witch of words. I enter into language. If only to get to the other side of what it shares. In the poetry of sharing an experience you are a bridge across!
Bless your homeopathic poetry of soul! Keep writing. We need you. If only just to catch a glimpse of our own reflection living into this flesh and soul. 🙏❤️
"The dressed up layered pyjamas of implications..." What a great poetic expression.
From now on I'll be seeing words milling around in their pyjamas (as I'm sitting here in my pyjamas writing and thinking of your bathrobe taking a peak with blue-gray eyes) 😉
I am always surprised myself by where the words take me... across bridges of space-time-consciousness into new dawns of knowing
Am smiling in this intersecting dance of posts released the same day. I’ll just say that how you strip off the pyjamas of words helps create the flesh of remembering. A few witches of words are dancing with me right now to help me see through my “self”. I’m not sure if we can ever be truly naked? All I know is that I’m starting to understand what’s underneath this robe of a man. I’m remembering. The way you write is a door to transformation. Thank you for sharing your gift. Translating words into images. Images to dreams. Dreams to reality. 🙏❤️
Your image of layering is very fitting, which of course invites stripping off to see what's underneath ~ the coveted naked truth?
This wordcast is the first of several layers of stripping the construct of language (not sure yet how many will follow, just hinting at the continuation of such glorious conversations)
I am delighted about these meetings of words, posts published in synchrony across the oceans of seeking to understand... with you, and all those dancing word witches and wizards in our orbits
I thoroughly enjoyed this post - what a wonderful walk down the path of language. It is very refreshing. As I read your words I was reminded that “Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.” as attributed to Alfred, Lord Tennyson… only in this case they reveal more of the soul.
I'm glad. (I very much enjoyed your post today too!) And thank you for sharing the lovely quote by Tennyson, which fits right into this stroll through the language and word-scape.
You have ‘the gift of the gab’ (in its most recent use 😁) . I so enjoy further learning about language through your posts. 🙏
“When reducing the spoken medium known as language to a defined number of words and rules, we tend to forget the silences which make speech and communication possible ...”
My stance as a TESOL teacher was to encourage students to play with language — to bring their linguistic expertise into the classroom; their socio-cultural contexts — their jabberwocky and gobbledygook — exploration; to be comfortable with language, to extend their resiliency when grappling with the confining academic discourse communities of schooling, in their second third, fourth language. They taught me about the ways of language and beyond — languaging.
And so much of language is the active mode of silent listening — feeling into what escapes words because it exists beyond words — as you so eloquently point out.
Thank you, my heart is swelling with gratitude for the gift of working with so many students, from around the globe, those who were my teachers. Your post transported me back to those classrooms. 🙏 💜
that's so interesting, Simone. What you describe of your teaching experience reminds me of a book I just read called 'Dancing With Words: Helping Students Love Language' by Judith Rowe Michaels. Very inspiring. She makes language teaching sound like a dream job. The world needs more good language teachers!
Yes, there is an unnecessary divide in the language teaching ranks in Australia, unfortunately not driven by: what is in the best interests of student learning? Balance, according to the needs of the student to be the driver. So many variables impact on teaching and learning, as you would well know. Indeed, we need good language teachers 😊🙏🏼💜
I know. Especially with language teaching and learning. All the theories about 'superlearning' etc. were already trending when I was a language student but not implied in the teachings (we had one or two great teachers and there was always the abysmal one). But when my kids went to school, a generation later, those great theories were still not applied... and I'm not sure it's gotten any better now, for the generation of our grandchildren... sadly
No, it hasn’t really got any better because every level of the system has unfortunately remained the same, the political football that education is. Those teachers who want to learn can be thwarted by the limitations of time and exceedingly demanding tasks taking them away from their core business, others simply don’t know enough about language to deviate from the text books, some just aren’t motivated to do the work, and then you have the good ones 🤦♀️😊. I took a contextualised and functional approach to teaching form - with an emphasis on building coherence and cohesion in spoken language, beyond the curriculum (the fun stuff) before brining it back to academic demands of reading and writing. Lots of experimentation, and play - a safe learning environment. 😊🙏💚
Isn't it unfortunate how the 'education system' is structured in such a way that it tends to kill off the joy of learning and teaching with excessive bureaucracy?
Yep, l really don’t think it will change until there is a global collapse of how we are currently being governed - all the major institutions and industries, it is all linked of course. The over quantification as a measurement of bloody everything 🤦🏼♀️. Despite the systemic challenges, l have been blessed and remain grateful to have worked with such a diversity of young adults, l always came back to the classroom - my purpose 😊🙏🏼💜
Veronika, it feels like you’re peeling back the layers of language itself to uncover its essence. That final line, “She isn’t becoming silent. She is becoming love,” stopped me in my tracks, taking me straight back to childhood. Back then, I often chose not to speak, and when I did, I had a speech impediment. While working with a speech therapist for several years, written words became my ‘sanctuary’. And old words like ‘murmur’ and ‘whisper’, ancient and magical, always seem to find their way into my poems and stories.
Kimberly’s words about speechlessness as love tie it all together. For sometimes, in the absence of speech, the deepest truths emerge. And now, as I sit with your words, the child in me stirs the one who once clung to written words as a lifeline, discovering their magic and weight. Your reflection feels like a call to honour that journey, to embrace language as both solace and revelation, and to celebrate the endless ways we can find and share our voice. Thank you so much, Veronika, for gifting me this moment of rediscovery. ❤️🔤🙏
How very beautiful. This makes me happy beyond words! 🎶 ✨
Isn't it magical and miraculous how language and words, often chosen intuitively, can connect us beyond their form ~ beyond the etymons and phrases themselves ~ carrying meaning, stirring memories (and so personal ones) across silence and speechlessness?
"a call to honour that journey, to embrace language as both solace and revelation, and to celebrate the endless ways we can find and share our voice." sums up my intention in a most befitting and eloquent way, beyond what I would have dared to hope, let alone express. Thank you so much for this recognition ♥️ 🙏 🎈
I gobbled this up Veronika, every word, even “gobbledegook!” First, thank you for generously nodding to my recent essay. I’m glad it sparked something in you; it’s so fun to feel my own words reaching into you and then you, branching them into ever-expanding potential. I spoke with a dear human this morning (our conversation will post in a few weeks) but we kept circling back to this strange and wonderful phenomenon of how words can take us into the wordless. While reading your essay and the list of the “purpose of language” I first misread #1 as Communion, not Communication. And while communication is obvious, I think you’re absolutely right in saying that we lose something when language becomes static and out of its environment. Languaging instead allows for that process of communion, the words inspiring wordlessness, and wordlessness inspiring words…and everything in between!
Well, communion sounds very fitting. That should really be #1 (instead of communication, or at least an integral part of it)... which reminds me of a quote by J.B. Priestley "The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."
Each word may have the quality of metaphor if we think about it as you have so beautifully done: "Whether we speak an exotic language, or in our native tongue, we are forever translating between different forms of expression or cognitive phenomena ~ translating feeling into imagining, believing into selective perceiving, thinking into wording."
I'm reminded of this as I quote from Emerson: We all have language and consider this: the “word” as Emerson said, “if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight,” “wrong” means twisted. “spirit” primarily means wind … the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind,” he explains in Nature, Chapter IV, “Language.”
First up, respect to Michael Ende walking through the landscape of Hieronymus Bosch. And he was only 15.
Argot takes me back to Tom Keating the painter and his 'Sexton Blakes'. The old rogue described a reality, not the paranormal as people commented back then.
Thx for restacking my text on “Mimematon” and also for this journey in to the etymology of words. The history and development of the use of our words really can tell us a lot of what we have been thru. I once took a deeper look into our souls, our spirits and found, well what do you think? I think you might enjoy this particular text that I posted a week ago and Take Care! Looking forward reading your texts. https://maxkern.substack.com/p/help-me-i-think-ive-lost-my-soul?r=3bp1hq
Sorry for taking so long to reply. Ironically, just after reading and engaging with your post on Mimematon, we had a blackout all over the Iberian peninsula lasting the whole rest of the day yesterday (I live in Portugal)... and of course when the electricity goes, the Mimematon goes down with it!
Well ”long” is something that is very relative to what to expect. From my point of view you were quick 😀 so Portugal, yes I follow the news, actually quite scary that ee are so dependant on big scemes, how did we get there? Who makes all the bad decissions for us 😑
Of course, scary too because part of me worries about all those 'precious texts' written which get lost in the cyber ether. At the same time I found it hilarious that it happened while I was commenting on Mimematon, proving exactly the point you'd made about 'living human intelligence' versus 'dead machine intelligence'
No electricity for the rest of the day, so we went out into the garden and planted blueberries 😅
This was like unwrapping a beautiful gift Veronika.
My work often necessitates the reworking of words into signs, eyes, hands, mouth. even body, so yes, I agree often the meanings of hat we express are captured in the silences too...
As always a thoroughly captivating read - thank you 💚🍃
This brings forth for me that language is alive ~ even a "dead" or "dying" language like Hawaiian, that folks are trying to bring back, still breathes. I'm also gobsmacked over how many new words are added to languages, like English, every year. And, on top of that, many Asian languages like Thai and Khmer use English words, so languages grow and continue to, even though we may not think of languages as breathing living beings.
Welcome back Lani! Hope you had (or are still enjoying) a beautiful, restorative holiday.
Well, some folks (perhaps mostly linguists) think of languages (and words) as living beings, creatures in close symbiosis with humans. Perhaps that sheds some light into the mystery?
Thank you, Veronica, for your discussion of language as process, or languaging!
I've encountered languaging in a different context, within critical disability studies. When introducing upper year linguistics students to the research and practice of speech-language pathology (SLP), I teach them about "languaging" as a way to question what we take for granted about "normal" speech and language. Critical perspectives of SLP include the idea of languaging – language as a verb, a doing – rather than a set structure that we can measure and assess. Languaging in this sense is taken from Humberto Maturana's work, exploring how language occurs through social interactions with other humans and the natural world. His ideas help explain the way non-speaking autistic people interact with the world and allows for a more flexible understanding of language as being co-constructed, constantly transforming with each interaction. It's a much broader understanding of the process of language than that attributed to hegemonic spoken and written language and has been taken up within "Crip Linguistics".
Thank you so much for these additional thoughts and information, Tracey. Thanks for drawing my attention to this important topic. I'll definitely look more deeply into this, esp. since I don't think this applies only to SLP, and 'Crip linguistics'. I expect there is much we can learn from these studies of language and communication disabilities for languaging in general. 💙 🙏
I love your observation on how silence exists above all sound, and yet has its own meaning. In Judaism, the sages and rabbis talk of the "small, still voice of God."
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, wrote, ". . .when the Prophet Elijah stood at the same mountain after his confrontation with the prophets of Baal, he encountered God not in the whirlwind or the fire or the earthquake but in the kol demamah dakah, the still, small voice, literally 'the sound of a slender silence” (1 Kings 19:9-12).' I define this as the sound you can only hear if you are listening. In the silence of the midbar, the desert, you can hear the Medaber, the Speaker, and the medubar, that which is spoken. To hear the voice of God you need a listening silence in the soul."
The "sound of a slendor silence" speaks above language, above words. It is the meaning heard in our own inner voice, available to any who can hear it, anyone who will listen.
thank you for this, Robin. I am familiar with the 'still small voice of God' from Christianity too. But the 'sound of slender silence' is new to me. This is beautiful. A listening silence in the soul.
"In the silence of the midbar, the desert, you can hear the Medaber, the Speaker, and the medubar, that which is spoken."
Desert, speaker and spoken related by the same logos-family. Wow!
"The meaning heard in our own inner voice." This is precious!! 💛 🙏 ✨
You are the master of words. I love reading all your posted bits of education.
I find it more and more difficult to find proper words for many new ideas and concepts I have discovered. There is a definite vocabulary for spiritual issues but it takes a long time to learn even the basics of this language of the spirit or soul.
I was raised in the south of the US and by uneducated religious parents who mixed biblical words with common southern expressions as well as many mispronounced words. I learned a chimley was actually a chimney only after I was in high school and began to read books I chose. It’s funny now to think of how limited our language was but we all understood one another and could chatter away, without the birds.
Thank you for another lovely piece to ponder over.
Oh Veronika! You are a translator. You open up the spaces around all of these words. “Whether we speak an exotic language, or in our native tongue, we are forever translating between different forms of expression or cognitive phenomena ~ translating feeling into imagining, believing into selective perceiving, thinking into wording. “
“When reducing the spoken medium known as language to a defined number of words and rules, we tend to forget the silences which make speech and communication possible.”
The sounds. The dressed up layered pyjamas of implications. The naked meanings underneath. You are a witch of words. I enter into language. If only to get to the other side of what it shares. In the poetry of sharing an experience you are a bridge across!
Bless your homeopathic poetry of soul! Keep writing. We need you. If only just to catch a glimpse of our own reflection living into this flesh and soul. 🙏❤️
"The dressed up layered pyjamas of implications..." What a great poetic expression.
From now on I'll be seeing words milling around in their pyjamas (as I'm sitting here in my pyjamas writing and thinking of your bathrobe taking a peak with blue-gray eyes) 😉
I am always surprised myself by where the words take me... across bridges of space-time-consciousness into new dawns of knowing
Am smiling in this intersecting dance of posts released the same day. I’ll just say that how you strip off the pyjamas of words helps create the flesh of remembering. A few witches of words are dancing with me right now to help me see through my “self”. I’m not sure if we can ever be truly naked? All I know is that I’m starting to understand what’s underneath this robe of a man. I’m remembering. The way you write is a door to transformation. Thank you for sharing your gift. Translating words into images. Images to dreams. Dreams to reality. 🙏❤️
Your image of layering is very fitting, which of course invites stripping off to see what's underneath ~ the coveted naked truth?
This wordcast is the first of several layers of stripping the construct of language (not sure yet how many will follow, just hinting at the continuation of such glorious conversations)
I am delighted about these meetings of words, posts published in synchrony across the oceans of seeking to understand... with you, and all those dancing word witches and wizards in our orbits
This is wind beneath the wings of my soul 💗🙏
I thoroughly enjoyed this post - what a wonderful walk down the path of language. It is very refreshing. As I read your words I was reminded that “Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.” as attributed to Alfred, Lord Tennyson… only in this case they reveal more of the soul.
I'm glad. (I very much enjoyed your post today too!) And thank you for sharing the lovely quote by Tennyson, which fits right into this stroll through the language and word-scape.
Hi Veronika,
You have ‘the gift of the gab’ (in its most recent use 😁) . I so enjoy further learning about language through your posts. 🙏
“When reducing the spoken medium known as language to a defined number of words and rules, we tend to forget the silences which make speech and communication possible ...”
My stance as a TESOL teacher was to encourage students to play with language — to bring their linguistic expertise into the classroom; their socio-cultural contexts — their jabberwocky and gobbledygook — exploration; to be comfortable with language, to extend their resiliency when grappling with the confining academic discourse communities of schooling, in their second third, fourth language. They taught me about the ways of language and beyond — languaging.
And so much of language is the active mode of silent listening — feeling into what escapes words because it exists beyond words — as you so eloquently point out.
Thank you, my heart is swelling with gratitude for the gift of working with so many students, from around the globe, those who were my teachers. Your post transported me back to those classrooms. 🙏 💜
that's so interesting, Simone. What you describe of your teaching experience reminds me of a book I just read called 'Dancing With Words: Helping Students Love Language' by Judith Rowe Michaels. Very inspiring. She makes language teaching sound like a dream job. The world needs more good language teachers!
Yes, there is an unnecessary divide in the language teaching ranks in Australia, unfortunately not driven by: what is in the best interests of student learning? Balance, according to the needs of the student to be the driver. So many variables impact on teaching and learning, as you would well know. Indeed, we need good language teachers 😊🙏🏼💜
I know. Especially with language teaching and learning. All the theories about 'superlearning' etc. were already trending when I was a language student but not implied in the teachings (we had one or two great teachers and there was always the abysmal one). But when my kids went to school, a generation later, those great theories were still not applied... and I'm not sure it's gotten any better now, for the generation of our grandchildren... sadly
No, it hasn’t really got any better because every level of the system has unfortunately remained the same, the political football that education is. Those teachers who want to learn can be thwarted by the limitations of time and exceedingly demanding tasks taking them away from their core business, others simply don’t know enough about language to deviate from the text books, some just aren’t motivated to do the work, and then you have the good ones 🤦♀️😊. I took a contextualised and functional approach to teaching form - with an emphasis on building coherence and cohesion in spoken language, beyond the curriculum (the fun stuff) before brining it back to academic demands of reading and writing. Lots of experimentation, and play - a safe learning environment. 😊🙏💚
Isn't it unfortunate how the 'education system' is structured in such a way that it tends to kill off the joy of learning and teaching with excessive bureaucracy?
Yep, l really don’t think it will change until there is a global collapse of how we are currently being governed - all the major institutions and industries, it is all linked of course. The over quantification as a measurement of bloody everything 🤦🏼♀️. Despite the systemic challenges, l have been blessed and remain grateful to have worked with such a diversity of young adults, l always came back to the classroom - my purpose 😊🙏🏼💜
🙏🏼😊💜
Veronika, it feels like you’re peeling back the layers of language itself to uncover its essence. That final line, “She isn’t becoming silent. She is becoming love,” stopped me in my tracks, taking me straight back to childhood. Back then, I often chose not to speak, and when I did, I had a speech impediment. While working with a speech therapist for several years, written words became my ‘sanctuary’. And old words like ‘murmur’ and ‘whisper’, ancient and magical, always seem to find their way into my poems and stories.
Kimberly’s words about speechlessness as love tie it all together. For sometimes, in the absence of speech, the deepest truths emerge. And now, as I sit with your words, the child in me stirs the one who once clung to written words as a lifeline, discovering their magic and weight. Your reflection feels like a call to honour that journey, to embrace language as both solace and revelation, and to celebrate the endless ways we can find and share our voice. Thank you so much, Veronika, for gifting me this moment of rediscovery. ❤️🔤🙏
How very beautiful. This makes me happy beyond words! 🎶 ✨
Isn't it magical and miraculous how language and words, often chosen intuitively, can connect us beyond their form ~ beyond the etymons and phrases themselves ~ carrying meaning, stirring memories (and so personal ones) across silence and speechlessness?
"a call to honour that journey, to embrace language as both solace and revelation, and to celebrate the endless ways we can find and share our voice." sums up my intention in a most befitting and eloquent way, beyond what I would have dared to hope, let alone express. Thank you so much for this recognition ♥️ 🙏 🎈
I gobbled this up Veronika, every word, even “gobbledegook!” First, thank you for generously nodding to my recent essay. I’m glad it sparked something in you; it’s so fun to feel my own words reaching into you and then you, branching them into ever-expanding potential. I spoke with a dear human this morning (our conversation will post in a few weeks) but we kept circling back to this strange and wonderful phenomenon of how words can take us into the wordless. While reading your essay and the list of the “purpose of language” I first misread #1 as Communion, not Communication. And while communication is obvious, I think you’re absolutely right in saying that we lose something when language becomes static and out of its environment. Languaging instead allows for that process of communion, the words inspiring wordlessness, and wordlessness inspiring words…and everything in between!
Well, communion sounds very fitting. That should really be #1 (instead of communication, or at least an integral part of it)... which reminds me of a quote by J.B. Priestley "The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."
I went to your post as quoted. Of course. Thank you.
Thank you Philip!
Each word may have the quality of metaphor if we think about it as you have so beautifully done: "Whether we speak an exotic language, or in our native tongue, we are forever translating between different forms of expression or cognitive phenomena ~ translating feeling into imagining, believing into selective perceiving, thinking into wording."
I'm reminded of this as I quote from Emerson: We all have language and consider this: the “word” as Emerson said, “if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight,” “wrong” means twisted. “spirit” primarily means wind … the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind,” he explains in Nature, Chapter IV, “Language.”
This is one amazing chapter, Mary! much food for thought and materials for another wordcast on language 💗🙏
Oh, thank you Mary for this lovely quote from Emerson. I'll have to dive deeper into that chapter!! xx
Ways beyond language,
(not German) gift of the gab!
Including the shh.
"(not German) gift of the gab!" 🤭
you truly have the (nG) gift of the Haiku, Marisol xx 🙏 💕
I am late to your Treasure House.
First up, respect to Michael Ende walking through the landscape of Hieronymus Bosch. And he was only 15.
Argot takes me back to Tom Keating the painter and his 'Sexton Blakes'. The old rogue described a reality, not the paranormal as people commented back then.
Thank you for stopping by, Philip.
Yes, this episode from Michael Ende's war memories... to think that young kids have to experience this kind of stuff (and worse) as we speak...
Thx for restacking my text on “Mimematon” and also for this journey in to the etymology of words. The history and development of the use of our words really can tell us a lot of what we have been thru. I once took a deeper look into our souls, our spirits and found, well what do you think? I think you might enjoy this particular text that I posted a week ago and Take Care! Looking forward reading your texts. https://maxkern.substack.com/p/help-me-i-think-ive-lost-my-soul?r=3bp1hq
Sorry for taking so long to reply. Ironically, just after reading and engaging with your post on Mimematon, we had a blackout all over the Iberian peninsula lasting the whole rest of the day yesterday (I live in Portugal)... and of course when the electricity goes, the Mimematon goes down with it!
Your text on soul and spirit ~ very interesting!!
Well ”long” is something that is very relative to what to expect. From my point of view you were quick 😀 so Portugal, yes I follow the news, actually quite scary that ee are so dependant on big scemes, how did we get there? Who makes all the bad decissions for us 😑
Of course, scary too because part of me worries about all those 'precious texts' written which get lost in the cyber ether. At the same time I found it hilarious that it happened while I was commenting on Mimematon, proving exactly the point you'd made about 'living human intelligence' versus 'dead machine intelligence'
No electricity for the rest of the day, so we went out into the garden and planted blueberries 😅
This was like unwrapping a beautiful gift Veronika.
My work often necessitates the reworking of words into signs, eyes, hands, mouth. even body, so yes, I agree often the meanings of hat we express are captured in the silences too...
As always a thoroughly captivating read - thank you 💚🍃
much gratitude for receiving and unwrapping the gift, Susie xxx 💚🍃 ✨
It arrived with the first real warm summery day Veronika, to gifts in one! 💛x
This brings forth for me that language is alive ~ even a "dead" or "dying" language like Hawaiian, that folks are trying to bring back, still breathes. I'm also gobsmacked over how many new words are added to languages, like English, every year. And, on top of that, many Asian languages like Thai and Khmer use English words, so languages grow and continue to, even though we may not think of languages as breathing living beings.
Welcome back Lani! Hope you had (or are still enjoying) a beautiful, restorative holiday.
Well, some folks (perhaps mostly linguists) think of languages (and words) as living beings, creatures in close symbiosis with humans. Perhaps that sheds some light into the mystery?
Thank you, Veronica, for your discussion of language as process, or languaging!
I've encountered languaging in a different context, within critical disability studies. When introducing upper year linguistics students to the research and practice of speech-language pathology (SLP), I teach them about "languaging" as a way to question what we take for granted about "normal" speech and language. Critical perspectives of SLP include the idea of languaging – language as a verb, a doing – rather than a set structure that we can measure and assess. Languaging in this sense is taken from Humberto Maturana's work, exploring how language occurs through social interactions with other humans and the natural world. His ideas help explain the way non-speaking autistic people interact with the world and allows for a more flexible understanding of language as being co-constructed, constantly transforming with each interaction. It's a much broader understanding of the process of language than that attributed to hegemonic spoken and written language and has been taken up within "Crip Linguistics".
In case this piques your interest, here's a link to a recent "Liberating Language" Project carried out by SLP students and researchers interested in challenging the status quo of the profession by exploring these ideas of languaging: https://leader.pubs.asha.org/do/10.1044/leader.AE.30012025.slp-academics-languaging-exhibit.28/full/?trk=public_post_reshare-text
Thank you so much for these additional thoughts and information, Tracey. Thanks for drawing my attention to this important topic. I'll definitely look more deeply into this, esp. since I don't think this applies only to SLP, and 'Crip linguistics'. I expect there is much we can learn from these studies of language and communication disabilities for languaging in general. 💙 🙏
Hi, Veronika.
I love your observation on how silence exists above all sound, and yet has its own meaning. In Judaism, the sages and rabbis talk of the "small, still voice of God."
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, wrote, ". . .when the Prophet Elijah stood at the same mountain after his confrontation with the prophets of Baal, he encountered God not in the whirlwind or the fire or the earthquake but in the kol demamah dakah, the still, small voice, literally 'the sound of a slender silence” (1 Kings 19:9-12).' I define this as the sound you can only hear if you are listening. In the silence of the midbar, the desert, you can hear the Medaber, the Speaker, and the medubar, that which is spoken. To hear the voice of God you need a listening silence in the soul."
The "sound of a slendor silence" speaks above language, above words. It is the meaning heard in our own inner voice, available to any who can hear it, anyone who will listen.
thank you for this, Robin. I am familiar with the 'still small voice of God' from Christianity too. But the 'sound of slender silence' is new to me. This is beautiful. A listening silence in the soul.
"In the silence of the midbar, the desert, you can hear the Medaber, the Speaker, and the medubar, that which is spoken."
Desert, speaker and spoken related by the same logos-family. Wow!
"The meaning heard in our own inner voice." This is precious!! 💛 🙏 ✨
You are the master of words. I love reading all your posted bits of education.
I find it more and more difficult to find proper words for many new ideas and concepts I have discovered. There is a definite vocabulary for spiritual issues but it takes a long time to learn even the basics of this language of the spirit or soul.
I was raised in the south of the US and by uneducated religious parents who mixed biblical words with common southern expressions as well as many mispronounced words. I learned a chimley was actually a chimney only after I was in high school and began to read books I chose. It’s funny now to think of how limited our language was but we all understood one another and could chatter away, without the birds.
Thank you for another lovely piece to ponder over.
And thank you Sammie for such a lovely comment!