Am I my Words?

Learning to speak is learning to act. Verbal communication is reading the lines and putting them into character. That is, taking a text and giving it context: putting it with something else, making a connection (to something others will understand). The face, the gestures of the body: these are the instruments of meaning. It is the body that conveys our metaphors. Writing is a silent art. I type and these letters appear before me. Are they my letters, or are they God’s letters? What’s the difference? My letters are my ego’s letters; the story I tell to identify myself (both to others and to my own self-consciousness). I own them, I create them, and I speak them freely. God’s letters are the voice of a prophet. They are the words written for all time, the eternal scripts, the sacred scrolls. They are the foundational texts supporting our understanding of the value we attribute to life. They move us not because they describe a reality, but because they create a possibility. They manifest the impossible in our lives, keeping it alive even amidst the powerful surge of secularism. After nature was exposed to rational investigation, disenchanted by inductive reasoning, and sickened with industrial revolution, human beings began to demand their rights. Their rights included life, liberty, and happiness. They also included freedom of speech and property. “I am the blacksmith who bends these lines into shape and sends them to battle in the field. I own what I say!” But does this imply that one is what one says? Am I, at my very roots, nothing but a complex assortment of words? It cannot be so. Words are the world. I am the reader of the words… the liver in the world… the my in mystery. I cannot say what I am because I am a who. Who am I? I cannot say. I can only be who I am. I cannot say… I cannot become who I am. Who I become is not me. Who I am is me—who I am eternally. The who is what we see. The what is what we say. The how is what we draw. The where is where we are. The when is when we are. The why is that we are.