She is...

Regarding her nature, many things have been said. Many a man has tried to capture her; none of them could. They just twisted her, shaped her, and turned her into an art. You can hear her clamor wherever you are, at any time –silence only strengthens her-. You can see her moving up and down, in whites and blacks. But mostly you can feel her, don’t try to understand her, or explain her; it’s of no use. She longs to be felt. She’s got shape. She’s wavy and robust, but she’s delicate and elusive. She is intense. Sublime. She gets you on your nerves. She eases your pain or makes it flourish as sorrow. She buries your body and lifts your soul. Don’t look for her, you won’t find her. She’s everywhere, in words and numbers, in the water and in the air, in the Earth and in the Space. What would we do without her?

They call her MUSIC.

This is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, piece of classical music. Aria by Johann Sebastian Bach. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6WZmsDtyYo. I lack the words to describe it, but I can tell you that it produces in me a strange feeling of happiness and sadness. Nostalgia?

What kind of music lifts your soul?

Haiku to Our Words

The restlessness of not finding the precise words for expressing that feeling that creeps up on your guts as the desperation of the man who is underwater struggling for a gasp for breath. The inability to convey a corporeal existence to a wide range of inner and outer experiences due to a rather limited set of words. Doubts, misunderstandings, anger, forgiveness, all feelings bound to our capacity of making ourselves understood.

The leaf that falls down

The words that will not come out

The world passes by.

Even though it’s true that every so often we run out of words, some other times we are seized by an unstoppable flood of words that need to find their way out of our bodies –at least it happens to me- and it is then when we have to let our hand be guided through the sheet of paper whichever be the result. And every now and then I wonder what my relationship with them is, are they mine? What words define me? Do English words belong to me? To us? What about Spanish words?

Sensations nab us

Our hearts start weeping out loud

I hear you no more.

Words are at our service; they can’t limit us, or at least they shouldn’t. We produce them and forget them.

The above short poems are called haiku. Haikus are originally from Japan. A characteristic is that they use a very simple grammar and they should have 5 sound units in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the last one. In Japanese, most of the times, if not always, they have a word that refers to the seasons, in English it’s been changed. I challenge you to write one as a comment in which you express how words make you feel. If you cannot think of one, just share a word you like because of its sound or because of its meaning.