the weight of words

"Beware of words. The moment you look away, they will take on a life of their own; they will dazle, mesmerize, terrorize, lead you astray from the reality they represent, lead you to believe they are real. The world you see is not the kingdom seen by children, but a fragmented world broken into a thousand pieces by the word. It is as if each ocean wave were seen to be distinct and separate from the body of the ocean. When words and thoughts are silenced, the universe blossoms forth - real and whole and one - and words become what they were always meant to be..."




for the past few days, i have pondered the weight that words hold. It was mentioned in class that words got in the way of our free will, that they boxed in our imaginations, that they boxed in the world around us.


words give us the power to express ourselves, and yet, if we think about it hard enough, can we truly use words to express those thoughts or emotions that are most significant?


freewill.


determinism.


Do words give us the freedom to express ourselves? or do they determine who we are, what we feel?

now that i think about it, i am beginning to beliee that each of my thoughts is trapped within the parameters of my vocabulary, and that if i see something i have never seen before, that i don't know the word for, that i can truly see it as it is, without any kind of label or connotation. I try to see this world around me in the silence of sight. These words cannot capture the way i truly feel and i can only hope to portray my thoughts and emotions of this subject by the use of familiar language. Yet now that the question has been raised inside myself, i feel as though none of these words are familiar because speech is not one of the five senses, and so it is never as accurate as we intend.