“Can’t you use your swifter wings
And answer the call?”
–Rumi
We humans, we’re a funny bunch. We like to think we’ve got some divine spark tucked away in the honeycomb of our souls. A little slice of god, wrapped up in flesh and bone. But do we really believe that? Or is it just another bedtime story we tell ourselves to keep the dark at bay?
Truth is, we don’t know jack. Not really. Everything we think we know about the inner worlds of others is circumstantial at best, a house of cards built on the shaky foundation of our own primal emotions. That gut feeling, that ineffable tug near your solar plexus? That’s the last frontier, folks. The final uncharted territory on the map of ultimate wisdom.
But here’s where it gets interesting. When we take those wordless, fleeting sensations and wrestle them into language, something magical happens. It’s like catching lightning in a bottle, if the lightning was made of pure thought and the bottle was made of words. We’ve got to be careful, though. This linguistic alchemy isn’t the only path to understanding, but it’s one hell of a scenic route.
Poetry? That’s the suspension bridge between the world of words and the world of not-words. It’s the quantum tunnel that lets us be in two places at once – fully immersed in language while somehow transcending it.
Language itself is a real mind-bender. It’s a benevolent jailer (most of the time, anyway) that somehow manages to capture the essence of a thing while letting its flavor seep through the bars. It’s a collective hallucination we all agree to believe in, a set of doors leading to rooms we haven’t built yet. And here’s the kicker – even as it confines us, it sets us free. It lets us grab hold of ideas too slippery to catch bare-handed, lets us share the unsharable. Welcome to the linguistic consciousness, baby. Population: everyone.
So where does this all lead? Who knows! Maybe we’re on the brink of some new evolutionary leap, our brains and cultures shaped by the words we use to describe them. Or maybe we’re just spinning our wheels, telling ourselves pretty stories while the universe moves on without us.
Could be that all of this – every word, every thought, every fleeting feeling – is just an illusion. A cosmic blip, here and gone in the blink of the universe’s eye. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re inching closer to some fundamental truth, seeing through that glass darkly, as old Paul put it.
But here’s the beautiful part: we don’t know. And that not-knowing? That’s where the wonder lives. So spread those swift wings, answer that call, and dive into the mystery. After all, the journey’s the thing, even if we’re not sure where we’re going or if we even exist.
Now that’s a trip worth taking.