The Word: Living In Language
A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Terri Long, author of In Leah's Wake invited me to participate in a short essay extravaganza on her blog site entitled For the Love of Love. Forty authors were asked to write short essays of various types on the topic of love including passionate love, the love of family. the love of animals and the love of language. I chose to write on the subject of the love of language. Below you will find my short essay The Word that was featured on Terri's site on February 20, 2012. You can see the essays submitted by the other writers that participated in the event at Terri's site.
The Word
by D. M. Kenyon
At the beginning of things, there is the word. At the beginning of a house there is a humble prayer for shelter, be it whispered, sung or shouted, an idea, a design. Without the word, there is no home, no hearth, no comfy chair.
At the beginning of life, there is the word. When disentangled and laid flat, the word that makes all life on Earth is two yards long, spoken in parallel sentences, couplets of verse, billions of characters in length though separated by a space that is a mere ten atoms wide. In the beginning of life, nature speaks in double helixes, a tongue that is understood by all species, plant or animal.
At the beginning of love, there is the word. There is the idea of her, a beauty indescribable, that must be spoken of, if only to myself, so that I may grant her being in my world. And I so earnestly want her being in my world that I would speak of her in a thousand sonnets before God so that this love so well known to me might inspire the transformation of mortal clay into divine creation, and hence, grant me the pleasure of her touch.
At the end of everything, there is no word. Its disappearance is the end of luminosity. A darkness not even known by the absence of what can no longer be seen. A silence that knows not even empty space, for there is no word to grant dimension. There is only a nothing so profound that it cannot be known, for there is no vessel to carry any knowledge of it. For if we form a single word to describe it, we defile its true emptiness with talk of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
So sing your love into our ears. Sing loudly so that we may know it and rise up in a chorus of beautiful things that are first whispered of in our dreaming and then carried upon our breath so that we may come to know them in all intimacy.
DMK, February, 2012
[Post Graphic: The Tibetan script for "Om Mani Pema Hung", one of the most commonly used mantras chanted to bring benefit into the world.]
