Weaver of Words, Liver of Life

I expect a lot from words. Perhaps I expect too much, yet somehow I can never stand to stop squeezing all I can from them. Words have a heavy load to carry. They are used for so many different things. We use them to express the joyful: sunshine after rain, autumn in full spectrum, love between people. We also expect them to help us understand the sorrowful: death, heart-break, depression. We're taught all our life how to place them in an order that might give life to our ideas, birth to what is forming within our minds. Our education teaches us that their possibilities are endless, yet somehow they always hem us in.

Placed in the proper order words can do unthinkable things. They're sharp enough to slice. They can cut, and sting, and destroy. They're strong enough to bring healing, provide comfort, and cause laughter. Yet, somehow, they miss something so necessary.

I'm not sure how old I was when I first began to love words. I think I was five when I decided to write my first book.  I didn't make it very far, and the topic is completely lost to me. I probably made it five double-spaced pages into one of those yellow notepads with the blue lines before I'd moved on. My fascination with the art of words didn't truly begin to bloom until I was quite a bit older, yet I always associate its start with that notebook Granny had given me, marked with large, child hand-writing and blue ink scattered into very miss-spelled words.

Amidst all child-hood dreams, the desire to play with the written word never left, although I still haven't written a book. I was much older before I realized that words helped me see life. Some people understand life best when their fingers are dancing across piano keys; others view it clearest when they are competing athletically.  I know many who only witness life's truest beauty when they are using their hands to create masterpieces, whether it's handling fabric as it hums through a sewing machine, or holding steady a wooden candlestick as it rotates on a lathe. For me, I interpret life best when it's flowing through my fingertips and onto a blank page.

I'm often stumped in my writing because words won't describe what I see. Rarely, do I come to a place where they won't express sorrow. Hate and pain are something words know all too well. No, I get stuck when I'm writing about joy. Words don't understand joy. They don't know what to do with it. Hate is strong, but words can handle it. Joy? Beauty? Love? They are much too strong for any language to express.

Writing helps me breathe. It allows me to process the pain in life. It enables me to find joy in a broken world; to see beauty in the melancholy. I don't truly grasp anything in life until it has first passed through my fingers and squeezed off the tip of a pencil. There is in me a wish to one day learn to wield words with an amazing precision. I want to learn to turn words into sentences that capture, if even a little, the hope we have in this sad and sinful world. We have hope. Words don't quite know how to tell of it, but I want to know just how close they are capable of getting.  And so, I write, not merely because I want to, but because I have to. I call myself a weaver of words, and a liver of life because in order for me to truly live, I must also write.