Poets & Seers

Some of the most amazing things in life are invisible, or microscopically internal. For instance, our ability to taste the amazing culinary delights of the world’s best chefs. I know I have taste buds in there. But my ability to taste, well, is invisible to me.

Where I am experiencing the taste (it feels like all over) is a fabulous mystery to me. Take, for instance, the carefully crafted and long-awaited words of a friend or loved one after a conflict. Where do words that bring the message of reconciliation and hope hit?

Words like that, almost edible, are still ultimately invisible. We can’t see words. Now of course, you are reading this right now because words can be printed and language can be read. But the words themselves are not stuck on this screen or a piece of paper.

It’s like they dislodge from the screen when you read them and actually enter inside you in some mysterious way. There is a transference. While I am sure there is some fancy scientific word for it, ultimately the consumption of words is a mystery to me.

Yet we all have experienced the devastating power of words. We know intuitively the weight of words. Jesus confirms, “By your words you will be acquitted or condemned.”  We have felt the gut-punch of words, or had to deliver them ourselves.

Words can shatter worlds.

And the more we think about it, words are everywhere—enlightening, defining, explaining, translating; they help us dive into the mystery of the world around us. Without words, the universe remains an elusive, dark, and forboding mystery.

With words ability to articulate knowledge, the universe expands; its mystery lightens and deepens with value and purpose. It doesn’t mean we know everything, but what remains a mystery does so with more depth, clarity, and vivid awareness.

And there is something good about that.

Being able to articulate our longings and the longings of the universe is a powerful thing. It stabilizes us, places us in the right universe. Even though we may feel so awefully isolated at times, we can share that isolation through words.

Now words go to wordsmiths. Not everyone translates the world into words. For some, images fill the world to give it meaning, nuance, and texture. For them the Word has become visibly incarnate, articulate in images which can bring them to life.

While the poet uses phrases and metaphors to shape the created world, the visual artist uses design, color, and shape. Both “see” incarnated in the very existence of things, in its many shapes, sizes, and innate realities, the evidence of something more in creation.

Things unseen now given for us to see.

Artists and poets see in a different way. In a particular way. In a more vivid way. Their eyes work better than ours. They help us see. Artists help us see what is around us, what has always been around us. Though visible to all, they remain invisible to most of us.

Until now.