Writing requires a lot of pacing, in both senses of the word. I end up getting up and walking back and forth often as I write, searching, and even sometimes praying, for the next small group of words to come. Some intimation or hint of the next sentence.

I’m writing lots again lately, and trying to remember how to write well-to steward words authentically in and into love intentionality again. Farming language in kindness. Thinking of Aristotle’s challenge not not just make good art, but understand what makes it good. So you can repeat it, and teach it, and make it better than how it arrived. (“Poetics”)

Stewarding language, how we use and listen to it, is fun and a needed discipline in our times. To read the times well is aided by a love or words themselves. Love discerns the inner tone of words.

To plant excellence in others-words of life not death. To plant the seeds of the words you carry well, has always been a high value for me. For the words to match and carry the life of the content–ie that the language is not prostituted for the message, but actually reflects and carries it. I hate propaganda. It’s the use of art to get across your message. I think the art should contain the message. As Paul Tillich put it, “The symbol, to be true” should participate in the Reality to which it points. That still feels true to me.

The church hasn’t always been great at using its creative symbolic expressions in this way. Often, she used her art as propaganda instead. This mis-represents God really. We do use language, but it’s not meant to be used, it’s meant to be overflow of expression, and flow from our ongoing conversation with God. Something which is connected with core identity. The medium should express and be formed by the content of our heart’s relationship with God. Language in this way becomes the tip or surface of an enormous iceberg.

To amplify the best parts, or where the light is already settled or present in conversation or writing, to throw a spotlight on the gold, so it shines in full effulgence of understanding is how we learn communicate well. To listen to words as we speak and write them, is one way to match our inner content with our outer expressions. It’s part of becoming one really, or more integrated. So it’s a type of spiritual practice to write, really.

To find where God is already having a conversation and enter and expand there. Writing feels like a practice like that to me. It starts with listening, and expands into having overheard, and moves on to edit into clarity so others can see or hear also. It’s a very humble and humbling activity really.

So much happens simultaneously, without us there. Yet, word is always speaking, even in Silence. In that sense, you are tracing the unseen or unheard conversations beneath and in the midst of things daily. It’s a form of recording the background of life, and bringing it into the foreground for a moment or two.

Language is also fun to carve in, swim in, and play with, and to listen through into understanding. Just the urge to speak and express alone is a miracle of life. Then to consider how it works, is just a joy for me. Having fun writing again!

Fun writing and studying the art process at the same time anyways.

In college, i used to help international students in English composition. Then taught English in Jerusalem to children. I’ve got a collection of word books: etymologies or word stories, and then tons of grammar and composition books. My mom was a British Literature major, and we used to have to memorized lots of poetry, especially Shakespeare, but also most of the Romantics. I think i got the point, that words matter, they carry a certain density, when composed well.

And at times, language can even transcend itself, and form other worlds worth walking around in, and getting to know. Word-smithing is a lost art, in our times of millions of words a minute, all with equal attention; to use and discern which words matter most daily, becomes a sort of spiritual practice for me. I still find language fascinating, and a nuanced en-toned medium. What you say, and how you say it, can be life or death on a given day.

That we like to symbolize and shape our thoughts in words, still interest me. That words can still be used authentically is a small miracle.

Most people find that boring, but as I get to bore into words and writing again, I get excited by the nature of how to shape thoughts well in word, into art expressions, and greater clarity of communication. Little words which form their own constellations or spheres of meaning. Language itself is a symbolic activity. And I love symbolic communication. We write in dream talk, we make symbols even when asleep. Anyway, fun getting back into writing this season. As my California friends say, right on! I think i will.

//
I remember my life as a series of dreams really. God spoke to Daniel in both dreams and visions. In dream, i was told to do all the major things in my life. In a dream, i was told where to go to college, what to study there, when to live on the road, when to go to Austin, Prague, Antwerp…dreams have been the most consistent form of communication outside of art for me. IN dreams, things occur symbolically—symbol to symbol. Symbols always feel like the most direct metaphor and form of communication. Metaphor as Aristotle defined it: as the ability to see the inner relationships between things, to see their implied narratives. I love dreams anyways. Just thinking how strange it is, they occur when we are asleep like little hidden sayings we can ponder all day.