When Words Tell Me a Story
As words tell me a story I cherish them with my hands. I wrap my thoughts around them to keep them safe so that they have a person to talk to who’s not too busy to appreciate them. It is my way of allowing a dream to dream of dreaming. An often forgotten art of the world. Where the imagination is freed among the atmospheres of becoming something other than a fact of existing. Excusing itself from the plights of ambition only to exist as possibility, to befriend the breath of life and give itself the pleasure of still being alive among human minds that are more often than not eliminated from its presence with the dire issues of the world and the corporate ladders that shrink beneath feet.
It is a friend to us all if allowed to be. Those engrossing visitations of other worldly experiences where a phrase writes in multiple extensive instances outside of needed concentrations where focus is forced into distractive comparisons and derogatory dimensions. Characters take their time to introduce themselves, never rushing a partaker of the wording to a complete caption of ‘by now you must know’ while erasing definitions of definements and peeling back layers of probabilities to the presumptions of livings unknown. Words are most neutral in the appearance they hold in structures. They are multifaceted truths able to combine themselves to everything or nothing. They invoke readers to plunder through page after page dispelling ignorance and assumptions, encouraging the absorption of megalithic monuments built upon thousands of generations composed from ideologies brought into existence by those who welcomed them being. We meet kings and warriors, we meet henchmen and heroes, we are faced with decisions of uncouth personalities and those opposed to the detriment of the living. We do not become the words, the words become themselves. They will to live among us as something other than facts so that we may accept the possibilities of existence forever encouraging our emotions and daily thinking skills to perceive and accept if they should exist at all. Even those who use them for destructive behaviors reach for those irreplaceable beings of communications to entice us into their thinking. And while the world pushes our minds to the brink of extinction as mono-opinionated apparatuses, some of us prayerfully wish for miraculous intervention. The moments of creation between writer and word where the world around us takes a vacation from our thinking and we are transported into the freedoms of viewing an age of intriguing beginnings which apply to our thoughts a place, a time, a people we have never imagined. We are asked both to question and accept their decisions, believe in their abilities, postpone all our rationality, and allow them to compel us into their telling in order that we will understand what was so wanting.
It is a freedom of visitation to accept such things as they are. How else would we travel to other spaces of the heavens to imagine a master race of aliens who can, with a touch of their hand, cure such frail human beings? How would we begin to believe that any such thing called ‘greatness’ is possible if not for those telling us that it is? What would we consider as important or a feat of achievement, unless we had been exposed to the ideas of what to compare to as great? Could we even consider such a thing as fear? When the happenings of a world explains all the reasons we shouldn’t. Would our minds be open enough to explain colors if it were not already appreciated to be defined? The clarity of water, the ripeness of fruits, the eagerness of morning light, the stillness of darkened night, the frost of winter’s chill, the warmth of hearty meals; how would we know them? How we would we know our needs if someone did not explain the comforts given from all these things? How would they explain them without words? How would all our knowledges have been obtained unless we had not been introduced to those magnificent creators of words? Those endless explorations for truth, those countless explorers of word written records that were compiled from the questions of what can become of this? What would we conclude from all of the times we were introduced to virtues demanded from us by those who govern us in need of our obedience so that they might prosper to fulfill their own ambition of their learned imperial prides? Our histories would be blank. Our minds imprisoned in ignorance. Our lives undictated by the vice of voices. Reason would be unreasonable. Greatness destroyed by lack of definement. Explanation denied. Science defied. Ingenuity erased from humanity’s minds. All from a lack of imaginations who boldly visited the unknown exercises of living to learn the key notes of life and offered to others their own understanding. Encouraging them to remember and pursue the precepts of our own earth providing our needs of imaginations to rationalize such concepts as time. Explaining to us the growth of edible foods, the necessity of water, the appreciations of floral scents, the companionship of understanding a soft touch through our hair from a cooling wind on a sweaty face. Otherwise, words would have no value. No place for existence in any form. No agreement or disagreement. No imagination to explore the world around us, no matter how finite it may be. As words tell me their secrets, I cradle them close to me. So that they might find comfort and acceptance, a safe place to be. A friend in a world where so many are unfriendly and shun them. Shooing them away from having the freedoms they have known to teach and explain the inventions of airplanes, the breeds of animals, the genus of flowers, the curse of anger, the blessings of gentleness, the meals of cultural explorations, the values of humaneness, the benefits of effort, the warnings of danger. I make them a place to remind me of reposes needed to rest weary bodies from daily gruels. I allow them to speak freely to offer me their ideas no matter how great or how small. I never assume to know if any of them are correct for I can only give them time to whisper of their making as they deliver me into the womb of their imagination. Handing my mind a passport to an unknown era of past or distant destinations to introduce me to people they have met along the way. The lessons they learned, the tragedies they prevented, the loves they have fostered, the disappointments they’ve wept.
When words tell me they wish to speak for a time, I console them with a place to take form. In friendship as a friend, in relationship as a student, in moments of eternity, in loneliness understanding they too are alone without the willing hands of another to give them a home. A place to visit, welcomed. I often chuckle at their silliness as they attempt to recite a quirky phrase. I’m sometimes taken aback by the images that they raise of militant type attitudes or violent unwanted events. Yet they always assure me that it isn’t the story’s end. Only a small fragment, only to relate, what they have known and learned of others they passed before today. They tell of a jilted fling where lives were used then discarded. They tell me of naive lovers who were dismantled for profit. They encourage me to believe that among the millions of lives that there is someone, somewhere, who loves with a love like mine. That has suffered through the loss of it's reality and decided to patiently revise all the concepts of what love had to be. Giving time my hands to destroy all the cheap valentine day hearts that sell ideals of relationships to fill up shopping carts. And in the million journeys of the steps we walk in life we all encounter moments of a lost faith in the divine. We all must choose what’s right for life, we all must face the throngs to care, or not, for other creatures as we live each day.
When words present themselves to me I wish them well the time. To understand the moments of a writer’s hands like mine. Who admires moments of a day where behind a closed, locked door give them all the space they need to become what they are for. A taught skill, learned and remembered, respected and cherished for the continuation of they’re divine gifting to a living imaginations existence.
Jade Jaspers
