"Verticle Oracle card Capricorn (December 22-January 19)
The language we use has a tremendous power to shape our experience. This is especially true for you right now. The words you choose to describe your feelings and adventures will tip the balance of your energy toward delight and vigor or else toward discouragement and apathy. The fewer negative perspectives you formulate, the better your health will be. To spur yourself in the right direction, make frequent use of beautiful words like the following (or create your own list): mellifluous, thrive, melody, luminous, undulate, freshening, reverence, primordial, shimmer. "

do words really change anything? do they really mean anything? someone I care about (whom I believe cares for me) said to me recently, "you think there has to be a word for everything....."

and yes this is a karmic challenge, because I'm a word fetishist. I've fallen in love with someone before simply on the basis of how they use language to manipulate my vision of reality.

I've fallen in love with the words themselves. I have a deep, meaningful and frustrating relationship with words.

Lyrics to songs, poems, fragments of conversation fingered over and over again like rosary beads. Sound bites arranged like zen garden stones.

Song lyrics are especially powerful, because they fall out of the ether and into my life by complete random chance. Does it make any more sense to see meaning in the stars or in the entrails of some poor Roman chicken? To believe in divination and synchronicity is to believe that there is some order to things that I cannot see. To believe in magic is to believe that I can use words (spells, incantations) to change reality. To move the universe. I believe in the Tao that I cannot see, I can only feel underneath me and all around me like a primeval forest, like a wave of vastness and awe.

I keep going back to the "Vagina Monologues". It's an amazing show, and it really is just an examination of words. Reclaiming "Cunt" and reclaiming ourselves. The performance last night at the Crowne Plaza was amazing. My mad-hag poet-actress dark genius friend Ruth going over-the-top as the narrator. I am so glad I invited her to last year's performance.

Why is a vagina something men are willing to appreciate, but not willing to talk about? How has this become such a huge movement, such a ritual of bonding between women? And it is all about words .... Women talking to each other, generations to generations, transcending social status. I don't know why some people don't get it. It's not at all about hating men. It's not a trivial piece of hype. It's a celebration I look forward to every year. It's a good cause, raising money and raising awareness.

We bring tissues, prepared to laugh, prepared to cry, prepared to feel. To be moved to deep reverance and awe. To scream "Cunt" in public, to feel surrounded, enclosed, mothered, embraced and made whole. To drink from this sacred well ourselves. To honor ourselves.

Maybe there doesn't have to be a word for everything. Maybe words are just the shadows on the wall of the cave. Maybe words can't possibly live up to everything we expect them to do. Maybe there are no "magic words". We can't shove a song down the barrel of a shotgun like some idealistic hippie with a daisy. Poems can't bring about world peace. They can't mend wounds or soothe the broken soul.

Or can they?

I wake up on a Sunday morning, can't sleep in because the sun is in my eyes. The first day in a week that I don't have to work and all I can feel is dread. It makes me wonder am I a "workaholic". And what does that really mean? Can someone be addicted to work? In morbid terror of leisure hours with nothing to provide structure to the chaos and silence, nothing to order the inner voices of the mind? Nothing to take away the lonliness.

I find myself thinking things like: I'll move down to Virginia and live in my mother's basement apartment. There will always be movement and familiar disruptions above me. I'll be free to relish my solitude because once again I'll have someone to ignore. Sometimes I miss having that luxury. I think that's why I got married.

This May, it will have been 10 years since my wedding. That seems unreal to me, to have been married, to be divorced. In some ways I feel I am still I kid scribbling stories in my room with my earphones plugged in to the radio. I was alone then, and it didn't frighten me. There was always someone else living in my mind. My characters with their dramatic emotions and inner demons. Now there is no one in here but me and I have never felt so hollow, so haunted, so empty.

Words and images. It's all how you spin it, at least that's what they say. Do words really change anything, or is it all smoke and mirrors? Is everything a definition. Lonliness versus solitude. A luminous shimmer of candlelight. Solitude is luminous, has depth, at least that's what the book "Anam Cara" has to say about it.

Ruined churches, green chapels, places that draw out and in. Vaginal space, dignity and quietness. Quiet. That word kept getting repeated in the Vagina Monologues. Silence. Somehow we are looking for the liquid silence of the womb. A place of perfect floating peace where the only sound is a heartbeat.

A world that doesn't need words.

My list?

tactile
tangible
shell pink
marizpan
oatmeal and honey
cornsilk
hair
watercolors
Monet
mosaic
lucid
green
dreamskin
silk-blue
shudder
trust
trees
treasure
tremble
belly
beauty
dance
danger
delight
flicker
mother
feather
home