my thoughts exactly...

My sister finally convinced me to join the blogging world. She said that her blog was a great way to get her journaling again [last time I checked she had two posts up...you can go encourage her at http://www.kalijohnston.blogspot.com/] So, here I am, after about 20 minutes of trying to come up with a good title for my page. But then I remembered something I had read from the poet/writer Pablo Neruda in one of my writing classes not to long ago. It's entitled The Word, and I find it beautiful and a little haunting-- I find it describing things I have tried to describe. This is where my title came from, words that sing, and so I wanted to share the piece from Neruda. I think it is a fitting first blog post [for me anyway...]:

...you can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop... Vowels I love...They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew...I run after certain words... They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem...I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish,...And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go...Everything exists in the word...An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her....They are very ancient and very new....

And there it is [in part]. After we read that in class my professor asked us to write our own infatuation with words. me:
In the beginning the Word was with God...and I know it is true because something so beautiful had to have a source that flows and gives. Sitting on my father's lap, I would first draw pictures in my little Mead notebook--only 75 pages long. Eventually though, I learned there were symbols for the things I said and I loved to capture these in my notebooks, as if writing down words would help them dance.
Pages 1-10: mostly my name in creative swirls and squiggles, but by page 15 stories were forming and by page 75 I needed more space. I needed an untamed notebook of opportunity.

There was more, but maybe later...
This is enough for now. This is enough to explain my title: words that sing. This is enough to say that maybe this [blog] can be, in part, my untamed notebook of opportunity. Thanks for joining me.

Now it's time for me to eat a few green beans I just made and then head off to the local coffee shop to do a little studying. I have two tests this week [Linguistic Perspectives and Human Anatomy!]. Hopefully a good cup of coffee will provide me a little solace.