Magic Beyond Words

by

Osho Rose

PUBLISHED BY:

Osho Rose on Smashwords

Magic Beyond Words

Copyright © 2011 by Osho Rose

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The magic of words begins early as innocents develop a language brain. We have to name the world, or so we are told. As children in our first year of school, we learn our basic alphabet, the “ABCs,” as building blocks to reading, writing, and communication.

As a very young girl, I loved learning the alphabets and building words from them. Language was a thrilling companion to me. Words became numinous, like sacred objects. In my early years of school, I looked at words backwards, forwards, upside-down, like sculptures made of black wire. I noticed words within words; for example, when I learned to spell “office” I noticed it combined, commandingly, OFF and ICE, which had no relationship whatsoever to an office but it made me look for one. My

six-year-old mind wondered about the person who invented the word off-ice, and what conditions that word arose in, possibly a winter’s day where the sidewalk was covered in ice, and someone needed a shelter to get “off the ice.” Running through a deep green park that day and spinning at top speed, I remember passionately drinking in the smeared world through my eyes. I suddenly realized through my dizzy state there was a word that matched each thing. It seemed unbelievably exciting and challenging to my young self, stirring up a huge passion for learning. As a child, I wanted to seize the world and make it “mine” by capturing it with language and labels. The more words I knew, the more powerful and fluid I felt. As a child, I collected words the way some people collect gold coins.

In my twenties, I loved curling up with the sacred Oxford English Dictionary and luxuriating in the origins of words. In quiet study of etymologies, I felt a rich connection with all who came before me. Whoever wrote those careful definitions felt innately kind. The OED became my trusted friend, the keeper of secrets. I could have stayed in that plush chair forever.

My love of words flowered even more with a study of poetry. It seemed strange that the words used in poetry were also used in the million little lies we learn to tell as a way to navigate through the world with social grace. Indeed, words are magic, either additive or subtractive. Ultimately, a good poem is similar to a good lie. Less is way more. Let your audience fill in the blank.

Later in my thirties as a writer/editor, I burned-out on language and started seeing through words like “prevaricating” bosses. The superficiality of language became heavy, and caused uneasy feelings. Only the best poets--Neruda and Kabir and Tagore and Rumi and Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver-- were adept enough to touch the soul with a mysterious creative power that could not be explained or reduced. Poetic geniuses viscerally stretch words to command experiences that are somehow soul-stirring and even life-giving to the spirit. The white space in poems was equally, if not more important than words. Something was happening in those white spaces. (Am I paraphrasing Osho?) The reader was happening in those white spaces. Self was transformed! Amazing to feel this collaboration with another soul! Art is an invitation from the artist to share being.

These profound poets had awakened a new depth of feeling. Reading so many poems had crystallized my aesthetic sensibility in a surprising way. After many classes in literary criticism and just living life, I realized that aesthetics, the evaluation criteria for art and poetry, is not intellectually-driven, but springs from deepest feeling. If we are not sensitive to nuances of feeling, we can’t participate in beauty or truth. If we are not well-traveled on the inner planes, we can’t bring that much to an experience of poetry, nature, or another human being. A poem, the moon, a lover can all be mirrored infinitely, not from the rational left brain, but from a poetic, feeling heart. Beloved Bhagwan wrote on the pervasiveness of poetry as:

“When I use the word 'poetry' it not only includes poetry, it includes all that is poetic: music, dance, sculpture, painting. Painting is poetry with colour. Dance is poetry with body gestures. Music is poetry with sound, just as poetry is poetry with words. Poetry is all-inclusive. It is equivalent to the world of aesthetics, beauty.” Osho

During a transformational shift ten years ago, I stopped reading for several years. My soul simply refused. Limitations exposed, written or spoken, words became a turn-off to my psyche. It seemed the whole world was saying just one thing: “Blah Blah Blah.” At night, my dreams were coaching me to “Turn right! Turn right!” Many dreams featured other friends, unlikely candidates, as painters holding paint brushes to blank canvas. My caring soul was insistently directing me towards a new relationship with my imagistic right brain. Frustrated with words as gross approximations of this impenetrable world, I finally picked up the paintbrush and began to paint. I now paint as a pure exploration of the present moment in an ecstatic way. Expressing with color and movement brings me joy upon joy. Best of all, painting helps me to stop thinking, freeing the mind that was once so hungry to name everything! I am so grateful the Soul insistently guides the dreamer.

My lifelong inner journey as a creative being has been a natural progression, navigated from deep within: Learning my ABCs brought me naturally to words, from words to poetry, from poetry to painting. Today, painting carries me full circle, back into the richest silence, to the world of awe, the world before words.