Beginnings…

Reading The Miracle Worker this month has made me think about how words seep into consciousness and create meaning.  Helen Keller’s dark, silent world must have been a swirl of vague sensory impressions, wordless, confusing.  When that first glimmer of understanding that things have names, and that the names are the things, swam into comprehension, did she know that words would save her?  How did she understand through the power of words those feelings she had never had?  Know sights she could never see? Form the sounds she would never hear?  To think that words are so powerful that they unlock a universe, even when signed in a palm, even when translated to dots of raised paper, is food for thought…is a feast too rich to digest quickly. Around us, within us, our perceptions are inexorably tied to words.