What is life? What is this existence that we so dearly hang on to? What does living, truly living look like? What is death? What goes through one's mind right before they pass over? What is the passing?
What is love? What is hate? Why do we hate, when they deserve love? Why do we love, when they deserve hate? What does loving your neighbor as yourself look like? What does loving your enemy really mean? Why does love make one do crazy things? How is it possible for love to change a person?
What is laughter? Why do we laugh? Why do we cry? What is crying, really? What is sadness? What is happiness? Why do both cause our eyes to leak? What is the difference between happiness and joy? What are emotions, anyway? Why does one thing make Jack feel this, but Jill feel that?
Why do you always want what you can't have? Why are people drawn to things that are bad for them? Why do we remember what we wish to forget, but forget what we need to remember? How are people so alike, yet so vastly different? Why do my questions differ from yours? Why are there so many questions, but so few answers?
Why am I not asleep?
Word
In Hebrew the term dabar means both "word" and "deed." Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something that lay hidden in the heart is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly.
Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.
When God said, "Let there be light," there was light where before there was only darkness. Then I say I love you, there is love where before there was only ambiguous silence. In a sense I do not love you first and then speak it, but only by speaking it give it reality.
-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC
Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.
When God said, "Let there be light," there was light where before there was only darkness. Then I say I love you, there is love where before there was only ambiguous silence. In a sense I do not love you first and then speak it, but only by speaking it give it reality.
-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC
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