As a little girl, I clutched a treasured picture book. I still remember the bright yellow background and the red ink outline of a chicken and an egg on its cover. The tattered corners betrayed my selfish possession of it. I loved this story without words. Though many other books crowded the shelf in my room, I retrieved this one most often. And despite the lure of Dick and Jane and Dr. Seuss and all the Little Golden Books, I preferred to narrate the illustrations myself. I didn't need my mom or dad to make time to share it with me. I could "read" this book all by myself!
As I grew older my verbal capabilities matured, but because I could not yet write, this little tale became my very best friend. Soon, I mastered my letters, and in time written words and sentences emerged. One day, I grabbed the book and wrote my own story, marking up those pages filled with promise with a beginning, middle, and end all my own. The mystery and the magic faded as I directed the plot's outcome. But a new story unfolded--one I had created and could now share with anyone willing to open the book and find what I had already discovered and recorded.
Even now, I love words. I love how they have the ability to inform, influence, and inspire. A series of sounds strung together describe events, arouse desire, and foster encouragement or dismantle it. They shape our thoughts. They wrap us in warmth. At the same time, we discover things about the world that chill us to the bone. What power they hold!
Nathaniel Hawthorne was exactly right when he said, "Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
As I grew older my verbal capabilities matured, but because I could not yet write, this little tale became my very best friend. Soon, I mastered my letters, and in time written words and sentences emerged. One day, I grabbed the book and wrote my own story, marking up those pages filled with promise with a beginning, middle, and end all my own. The mystery and the magic faded as I directed the plot's outcome. But a new story unfolded--one I had created and could now share with anyone willing to open the book and find what I had already discovered and recorded.
Even now, I love words. I love how they have the ability to inform, influence, and inspire. A series of sounds strung together describe events, arouse desire, and foster encouragement or dismantle it. They shape our thoughts. They wrap us in warmth. At the same time, we discover things about the world that chill us to the bone. What power they hold!
Nathaniel Hawthorne was exactly right when he said, "Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
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