Words

Today I am feeling a little lonesome, a little deflated--though neither in the way of needing anyone to fix either, just a naming of a Sunday morning mix of feelings that will slide away and turn into different feelings once I get my day on a certain track.

What I'm thinking of this morning is how good it is to have a lot of words, good words, many of which are in the vintage dictionary I bought for a dollar to cut up and use in collages.

"What's a dictionary?" Elena asked yesterday.

I showed her how to find words and read their meanings.  She loved it--as she loves everything new that she gets to learn about.

So I woke up thinking about words.  Trump, in spite of his claim to having "the best words" shocks us all with the paucity of his vocabulary every time he speaks or tweets.

I find good company, when I'm lonesome and when I'm not, in reading pages of writing by those who have rivers of complex and nuanced words at their disposal, like Ross Gay this week, and the ways they are able to convey layers of thoughts and feeling.

It's like music really--good writing is.  The ways words are connected into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into stories, reminds me of complex compositions--while the Trump style of discourse reminds me of a child's wooden piano played with someone's one finger.

In music, there are rises and falls, phrases and pops of color, poetic surprises, plunges into bass notes and flights into trills, lyrical meanderings and strong definitive statements of arrival.

I stopped there and went back to sleep and woke up to this on Brainpickings, ironically on the subject of loneliness and belonging, also my every Sunday morning feast of good words.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/03/07/over-the-rooftops-under-the-moon/?mc_cid=1d875ee9e9&mc_eid=7940cd5ca2