Mark My Words

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never could never hurt me? That's a load of bullhonky. I believe in the power of words.

Words have the uncanny ability to slither underneath your skin, get inside your blood and revolutionize. They are more than one-dimensional marks on a page, they are little warriors, championing to change the world with their implications.

List of things that thrills me include, but are not limited to the following:

a. reading other people's words

b. writing my own words

c. (most recently) printing words

On a recent visit to Gordo, AL (of all places), I encountered the most interesting 79 year-old man who shares my enthusiasm. Above is pictured a letterpress project he's been working on. In a plethora of typefaces (and boy do I love typefaces), he has pressed the most peculiar set of words.

When he took me over to show me the display, I could see the glee behind his wrinkled smile as he defined each word. A bibliobibuli, he says, is a person that reads so much that they confuse fiction with reality. Wiktionary says that:

The term was coined in 1957 by H.L. Mencken, who said "There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli". From the Greek "biblio", meaning books, and the Latin "bibulous", from "bibere" (to drink).

"There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing."

I say, that's pretty badass.

I quite like the notion of being lost in the sea of formative words. I've lately been hungering to read a book that changes me - whose message does more than float across my eyeballs. I long to internalize and be moved by a story, by the poetry of someone else's take on this life and living it.

Eugene Peterson, in Eat This Book, talks about reading as an immense gift. He says, "but if only the wods are assimilated, taken into the soul --eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight. Words of men and women long dead, or separated by miles and/or years, come off the page and enter our lives freshly and precisely, conveying truth and beauty and goodness..."

That's what I want to be about. To slow down to feast on words that way. To, again, learn what it means to read because words are my nutrition.

My story, being written line by line, day by day is one of many loves coming together. In a few weeks, I'll go off to learn how to be on the back end of communication. I'll write and then, my friends, I'll put the muscle into pressing my/other's/any words onto paper. I'll mentally wrestle and then I'll physically labor.

All for words. All because I live and breathe them. All because I think there's still a place for them. Blogs, twitter, kindles... they're all fine and good.

But pen and paper.

Ink.

The written word.

I'll crusade for them until I'm expired.