words matter

The body became something one had , not something one was . And language followed. It turned into a tool - but for what? We learned to separate professional words from private ones, rational words from emotional ones, legitimate words from the ones that felt too charged. In that split, something was lost: our ability to speak with our whole selves,

while trivializing soul-destroying health problems, the metaphor inflates the significance of trivial ones.

To live is to be implicated.

I take the language of implication, with its rich connotations, from Steven Garber, who writes about work and vocation from a religious perspective. Drawing on Wendell Berry and Václav Havel, Garber argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to

mientierra – from the Spanish miente (she/he lies) and tierra (land). It means "a false sense of solid ground beneath us", says Escott, to describe the experience of not being able to trust the land near a retreating coastline. It could also be applied as a metaphor for contemporary structures and systems that seem robust, but are not

We’ve lost vocabulary for the complex, the not-yet-formed, the things that aren’t yes or no. The things that are both grief and relief. Love and frustration. Our modern language rewards clarity, speed, unambiguity. But life is rarely binary. It’s contradictory, uneven, full of in-betweens. The things that matter most are hard to say - and even

In each of these projects I regularly found myself trying to convince friends, family, and potential future participants on the merits of these ideas. It was an uphill search for the words, frames, themes, and execution that would help others see it the way I or we did.

The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.

to author more beautiful futures, we must imagine and express what a fundamentally different possibility might be. As the award-winning poet and author Ocean Vuong described with stunning clarity: We often tell our students, “The future is in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to