Magic

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words
and if you know the words that the world is made of,
you can make of it whatever you wish.

                                     Terence McKenna

 

 

 

 

 

Rapture

Once I knew only darkness and stillness...
my life was without past or future...
but a little word from the fingers of another
fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness,
and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

                            Helen Keller

 

 

 

 

 

Possessions

Speech is our second possession, after the soul –
and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

                            Gabriela Mistral

 

 

 

 

 

Belonging

We human beings belong to language.
In language we love and hate,
we admire and despise.
We interpret our crises as individual and social.
We suffer, and exalt, and despair.
In language, we receive the gift of being human.
All the feeling, the thinking, the action,
and the things of the world as we know it
are given to us in language.

                          Fernando Flores

 

 

 

 

 

In the beginning

Man does not exist prior to language,
either as a species or as an individual.

              Roland Barthes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diversity

Think of the tools in a tool-box:
there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver,
a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.
The function of words are as diverse
as the functions of these objects.

                  Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred space

I am in love with every church
and mosque and temple
and any kind of shrine
because I know it is there
that people say the
different names of the one God.
 
            Hafez, 12th Century Persian Mystic poet