I remember lying in the tub as a child, drifting into warm, fluid thoughts of a newly-learned circulatory system and suddenly realizing the conceptual truth of playing hostess to living organisms with lives of their own. I sat up, startled, and looked at my arm as if it had just been attached. I could imagine the tiny organisms that made up me, and the seemingly independent lives they led. I could feel the blood as it made its way from my heart to my fingers and back again. I knew how it all worked...I could imagine the chemical messengers of my cells trundling along the rivers and tributaries of my veins and arteries, driven by the simple, hydraulic pump of my heart's steady beat. My reaction to this "seeing" was visceral, both physical and exhilaratingly mental. I had what we used to call in the sixties...a "rush."

I was probably all of twelve or thirteen years old, and I remember trying to communicate this experience to my family after my bath. I quickly became frustrated with my effort to explain how important all of this was to me...how miraculous the whole system was...and in turn, how miraculous I suddenly saw myself and every other blood-driven thing to be. My vocabulary was insufficient. For the first time, words failed me. It was not to be the last.

I have spent my whole life since then trying to collect all the words necessary to say what I needed to say...to articulate both the sluggish and the blinding revelations of my insights, dreams, and continuing sense of life's wonder. I delved into encyclopedias, collected dictionaries, and memorized lists of terms from all disciplines. I never let a word I didn't know slip by undefined and unlearned.

I imagined that these words would become tools that would allow me to build bridges between thought and deed...idea and action...myself and others. I pictured torrents of perfectly formed adjectives and adverbs consummately arranged into coherent representations of all I wanted...no...needed to express. I would become a master of words, and I would never again know the frustration of trying to make someone see a picture I didn't have the proper colors to paint. I worked steadily toward the day when words would no longer fail me.

I no longer believe that day will come.

It is 5 a.m. and I've just woken from a dream. It was an important dream. In it, I saw and understood relationships and patterns between things I was once thought unrelated. New interlocking ideas emerged. I saw outside the strictures and boundaries I hem my thoughts into when I am conscious. I awoke knowing something that I still cannot articulate. There aren't enough words...they aren't BIG enough...there is no vocabulary for sensed truth, or at least it seems so to me. I'd almost venture to say that the more important a vision or idea is to me, the less likely I'll be able to convey that idea into verbal form. What a horrible cosmic joke this is...that as I understand more, I become more and more mute. It's almost as if truth doesn't want to be shared...but would rather be realized...by each of us individually. Which brings me to the question of faith.

I used to think that faith was an excuse not to think for yourself...that it was blind, illogical, and perverse. I believed if a thing could not be shown to be true, than it was silly to pretend that it was. Perhaps, in light of what I have discovered about words and communication of deeply-felt concepts, I was a bit hasty in my judgment. After all, does faith mean believing that which cannot be proven? Or could it be, instead, that which we know to be true but simply cannot explain?

Perhaps words were never meant to be enough.

Letter to the Author: