And in the Beginning Was the Word

Two comments recently made me stop and contemplate something I have encountered many times before.

“Talk is noise. Cut off the internal dialogue.”

“Too much thinking and analyzing. The mind will not bring us where Nature will.”

There is truth in both statements. The mind can become a place where we hide from direct experience. We can analyze the forest instead of entering it, speak endlessly about the body without inhabiting it, construct elaborate maps of life while never touching the living thing itself.

But somewhere along the way, particularly in spiritual culture, this insight seems to have hardened into another division: mind against body, thought against experience, language against silence, human consciousness against Nature.

And I no longer understand why we would need another separation.

Why can’t the mind be beautiful?

Why would thought be outside Nature if the human being is not outside Nature? Why would language be less natural than birdsong?

I know silence intimately. I have sat in silent meditation for days. I spend vast amounts of my life alone, listening, sensing, walking, touching, watching, allowing experience to remain completely unnamed.

Silence is sacred to me.

But I refuse to make a religion out of silence.

There are things that reveal themselves when language stops, and there are things I discover only when I begin searching for words. Language does not necessarily take me away from experience. It can take me deeper into it.

Words are one of my senses.

A painter reaches for colour, a musician reaches for sound, I reach for language. I love following an experience until it becomes an image, the image until it becomes a symbol, the symbol until there is suddenly a sentence where a moment ago there was only something invisible moving inside me.

This is my medium.

And the more deeply I contemplate language, the stranger it seems to dismiss words as mere noise.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

The opening of the Gospel of John has echoed through humanity for two thousand years: the Logos at the beginning, with God and as God.

Logos is larger than the English word “word.” It carries within it ideas of reason, order, expression and principle. Yet I am drawn to something even more elemental within it: the word as sound, breath and vibration. Before a spoken word becomes meaning in another mind, breath moves through a body, vocal cords vibrate and sound enters the world.

The written word takes another form, but it too enters material reality. A hand moves, a mark appears, light from a screen reaches another pair of eyes. A pattern formed within one consciousness crosses the space between two human beings and begins moving inside another.

How could this be separate from reality?

The words I speak are happening here. The words I write are happening here. They are not hovering somewhere outside Nature, commenting upon life from another universe. They are events within life, movements of this human animal, as inseparable from my nature as breath, touch, tears, laughter and song.

If we understand existence as vibration, relationship and movement, then language belongs inside that mystery too.

This has become increasingly tangible to me because during this past year I have felt a profound need to declare. Not merely to describe what I believe, but to speak things into clarity: this is what I see, this is what I choose, this is what I no longer consent to, this is what I release, this is what I call sacred.

Declaration has begun to feel like clearing a forest with words.

I have inherited paths I did not make and signs pointing toward destinations I never consciously chose. I inherited definitions of love, womanhood, work, worth, success, safety, belonging, power and God. Language gives me a way to walk through that forest and distinguish what is actually mine.

I can name something and question the name it was given, separate what has been tangled together, withdraw my allegiance from an old meaning, give language to something that has remained invisible. I can decide what I believe. I can say, this ends here, this I choose to carry forward.

There is liberation in that.

And there is something ancient in it too.

I come from the northern lands of sung poetry, laments, incantations and words of origin. In that world, words were never merely decorative descriptions laid over reality. Words remembered, invoked, blessed, mourned, protected and carried knowledge from one generation to another.

Language participated in life.

I understand that instinctively.

A promise changes something, a name changes something, “no” changes something, “yes” changes something, “I love you” changes something, “I forgive you” changes something. “I will no longer live this way” can change the course of a life.

Words can imprison us inside inherited stories, but words can also open the door.

I have been contemplating the liberation of love, releasing it from possession, transaction, projection and the structures that have become entangled around something originally wild and innocent.

Now I feel a similar movement happening with the mind.

I want to free the mind from the role we have given it, not so it can return to its throne and dominate the body, the Earth or the mystery of existence, but so it can return to relationship.

A mind in coherence with the heart, listening to the body, in service to the soul, capable of reason without losing wonder, capable of discernment without severing itself from love.

We have already seen what intelligence becomes when severed from feeling, relationship and the living world. The answer cannot be another severing. It cannot be the exile of intelligence itself.

I want the reunion.

I want the whole instrument: the silence through which I listen, the body through which I sense, the heart through which I love, the mind through which I recognize patterns and make meaning, the language through which the invisible becomes shareable.

None of these need to defeat the others for one of them to be sacred. Their beauty is in their coherence.

Because I need to be able to sing my songs of praise to this absolutely fucking beautiful experience of being alive.

There is too much beauty here not to.

When I stand beneath a tree in silence, nothing is missing. And when I later spend three hours trying to find the exact words for what the light did between its branches, nothing has been corrupted.

The words are not a failure to remain present to the experience. They are the experience continuing through me.

Life entered through my senses and came out as language.

The forest became a sentence.

And I find that unbearably beautiful.

This reaches beyond my own relationship with words, because one of the great questions before humanity is how we learn to live together. For that, silence alone will not be enough.

We need to learn how to listen beyond language, but we also need to become extraordinarily skillful at creating language through which our inner worlds can meet.

Language makes the invisible shareable.

Someone finds words for an experience that thousands of people have carried silently, and suddenly another person can say, yes, that, I know that place too.

A bridge has appeared where there was none before.

And if the inherited language cannot carry the world we are trying to create, then part of our work is to weave new language, new metaphors, new stories, words capable of describing relationships that old categories cannot hold, language that reconnects rather than divides and remembers our belonging to each other and to the living world.

This, too, is a form of creation.

So no, I do not want to transcend my mind. I want to restore it to its rightful place within the ecology of my being, in relationship with the body, guided by the heart, listening to the soul, touching the world rather than standing outside it. I want a mind that can think without needing to dominate, discern without dividing everything into opposites, and meet mystery without reducing it to something manageable.

And this is where I keep returning to the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word.

Whatever mystery we place behind those words, I cannot read them and imagine a universe in which expression is somehow an unfortunate departure from purity. I see creation overflowing into form, the invisible becoming perceptible, something moving from silence into vibration, from vibration into pattern, from pattern into worlds.

I recognize that movement in myself.

Something touches me before I have language for it. I live with it, feel it move through my body, listen until its shape becomes clearer, and then, at some mysterious threshold, it becomes words.

The forest becomes a sentence, grief becomes a lament, love becomes a declaration, wonder becomes a song of praise.

Something that existed silently within one human being enters the shared world, where another person can meet it.

That is not a movement away from Nature.

That is Nature continuing to create.

So I will keep going into the forest, and I will keep returning with words. I will keep entering silence deeply enough to hear what wants to be spoken, naming what I love, questioning the language I inherited, clearing old paths, weaving new ones and giving form to what I can feel moving beneath the surface of things.

Not because everything must be explained, but because some things want to be sung.

And when life gives me something so unbearably beautiful that it begins turning into language inside me, I have no desire to silence it.

I want to hear what it has come here to say.