Words, Words, Words

Life happens when we plan to go one direction

and are surprised to discover ourselves

going some other unimagined direction.



As far back as I can remember, I have lived in a world of words. I do not have memories of my mother reading or my father reading anything besides the weekly local paper. My family owned only a few books. But they must have thought books were important, because they took me to the library, even before I was in school.

I would come home with armfuls of books. The armfuls became a box of books, always returned just before their due date. I poured over each one. Somehow I knew the letters on pages were important and were related to the stories in some mysterious fashion. I was so excited when I went to first grade. Now I would learn to read words.

Later in my teens, books were an escape from a less than happy childhood. Books brought me places where I thought girls could never go. I solved mysteries and became an adventurer in my heart. College meant textbooks and a much larger library filled with books on many subjects — though the bookstores we take for granted today meant I did not own any books yet, other than texts for classes.

I became an adult and moved to Washington DC, where my love affair with books grew.  Book purchases were proudly lined up in a parade on long bookshelves in our first apartment. Literature I never knew existed became part of my life. When my children were born, the tradition of boxes of library books was my legacy to them.

There was an underside to the ways I related to books. My education and work in the hard sciences taught me to think sequentially — a typical left-brain approach to reading words. Reasoning in a logical and rational manner was how I was trained to make sense of the world.

For me, words marched across pages — from left to right. Sequences of words had a particular order to them, dictated by rules about correct grammar. A person did not read words in random fashion or begin the the middle of a book. The idea of beginning on the right or at the bottom of the page was ludicrous. And it never occurred to me that I could write any of the books I loved so much!

My Protestant heritage was word-centered and nurtured by the earlier creation of the Guttenberg press — when books became available beyond monasteries' carefully preserved texts. Growing up, I knew nothing of powerful visual imagery from the first three-quarters of Christian history, portrayed in the statuary and stained glass of great European cathedrals. And earlier times, when knowledge was passed on through oral stories, cave paintings, and pictographs — and incorporation of pictorial images in the symbols of the first written languages.

When I was in Weimer, Germany, I visited a castle where Martin Luther took refuge for a time in his life. The reunification of eastern and western Germany had happened just the year before – and our tour guide through this elaborate castle spoke only German. We passed a room where Martin Luther had stood at a desk by a window, working on his translation of the Bible into German. In the hallway, under glass in a case, were some of his translated pages. I lingered there, wondering what Luther’s world was like. I thought about the momentous and radical steps he had taken with his translation. Now the Bible could be read by ordinary people, rather than hidden away the rarified world of monastery scriptoriums. 

My inner transformation took years — shifting from my left-brained perspective regarding the purpose of words and the structure of language. Old habits are hard to change! Like gardening. A person does not step into their backyard onto grass that has grown there for decades, toss some seeds across the lawn, and expect a beautiful garden of flowers and vegetables to emerge overnight. If the person believes that will happen, the person will be very, very disappointed!

A new garden needs imagination. When we moved into the house where we now live, there was no garden. The previous owners believed that “landscaping attracted mosquitoes” and the family had destroyed all of the first owner’s gardening efforts. Such an environment was a gardener’s gift to us, because this clean slate meant we could design to our hearts content. Visual images from other gardens, nursery centers, and garden catalogs fed our imaginations.

Next a “new” garden requires the hard work of digging up sod. Compacted ground needs to be dug deep and compost added. Just like my compacted soul in which latent visual gifts had been relegated to forgotten corners, in the service of cognitive, sequential reasoning.  

When (unknown to me) my interior environment was ready, I was at the point when I realized I had three loves and one of them had to go. I loved the work I did as a psychologist for over three decades. I had began writing poetry and essays. But writing in an available hour here and there did not work. And I was yearning to “play” with my camera and experiment with photography. There simply were not enough hours in a week!

After much careful consideration, I closed my private practice.  A month later I went to a week-long photography workshop, taught by Craig Blacklock, one of Minnesota’s premier nature photographers. It was a great time, However, my left brain had specific writing goals and I went home to write — not to experiment with my camera.

Instead, I wrote nothing for nine months. Photography took over my life. It was my first lesson in how I was not in charge of creative effort. Now, I realize it was about far more than discovering the depth of my love for the visual. I needed to live in a nonverbal, visual world long enough for me to learn a new way to live in my world of words.

Now, I have learned about myself that I am a highly visual person who “thinks” first in images. But my love affair with words limited me to words streaming across pages. I could write poetry only when my computer allowed me to move lines and words around on a page — or start in the middle of writing something. For me, the visual white space surrounding a poem is as important as the words themselves.  Poetry is where what is not expressed inwords may be more important — the words may be only an approximation of something much deeper.

In my garden, nothing is in rows!