WORDS

I was thinking about how personal words are. They're common currency among us all but their meanings, their resonance, is particular to each of us. For instance, I say "surrender" and think freedom, letting go of something that is blocking me, something I cling to, demand, expect. But many other people hear surrender as defeat or resignation, accepting you'll get less than you want, be less than you want to be. The way I understand surrender comes out of direct experience. When I'm rigid, insistent, controlling, surrender - letting go - comes as a relief, a lightening of the rock I've been carrying around with me. To accept things as they are isn't to resign myself; it's to free myself so that I can be free from distortion, free to act not out of ego but with equanimity. 
    Another word that resonates is for me is "austerity." I know for many people this word means less than should be: tighten your belt, do without, go on an enforced diet. It means bare, without ornamentation. But that's exactly what makes the word significant for me. For some reason I see water dripping on grey stone, zen-like, something very plain and simple. Something without adornment, something pure. Oceanic art, Bauhaus design, Teco pottery - their beauty comes from simplicity. So austerity for me means simplicity. I don't know why a word that suggests a negative for most people is a positive for me.
     There are many other words that resonate in me. Humility, gratitude, kindness...No one else can know exactly what I feel when I hear or think of those words. All of my experience, my thinking, my temperament has created certain connotations; they're completely my own, private and even if I wanted to say in detail what I hear, why it resonates, I couldn't. They're unique to me. Personal.
     Each of us has certain resonant words, the ones that put us in touch with something very deep inside us. We have many of those words in common; we agree on their meanings in a general way. But we can't know the particulars, the pathways through our being these words travel. 
     There is a universe inside us, a universe made up of what we inherit from our culture, what we've learned from our experience, our own connotations and random connections that are formed paradoxically in the vast part of that universe that exists in the place beyond words. We never come to the end of ourselves and the more we open ourselves the more the resonances come.