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Super Powers

A balm to a wounded heart or a verbal lashing to a tender one. Carefully crafted to be both inspiring and intentional they propel us to accomplish the seemingly impossible.  They are equally prideful and powerful. They can be both honorable or hateful. Calculating and cutting, they have the power to shred us. Witty and wonderful, they make our souls laugh and our hearts smile.

Compassionate and carefully woven or quick tempered and flaring, they leave their mark. Quietly uttered or clanging, they are remembered. Poetic and powerful, they nestle in our hearts. Beautiful and buoyant, they are a beckoning beacon of hope.

Words. Spoken by 7 billion people all over the world.

We absorb them in poems. We devour them in prose. We cherish them in songs that we listen to over and over again. We buy them in cards that line the shelves on any given Tuesday. We connect to them even though they were not written by our own hand.

A stranger's thoughts that mirror our own. A stranger's words that translate what our hearts feel into a language that we are still learning to speak clearly.

We have inscribed them on papyrus since biblical times. We have danced with them under the brilliance of a star laced sky. They have been etched in mountain rock and in the tender folds of our mortal hearts. They have been scratched into stone walls to keep track of a grueling punishment. Their initials have been cut into the soft bark of a young tree to define the beginning of a historical love affair.

They fill our minds with memories spoken during quiet times. Memories that hold tender moments of tranquility. They remind us of a time without so many choices. Without so many responsibilities that we call life.

They encourage the discouraged. They give life to the lifeless, and hope to the hopeless.

They fuel emotions of vowels shared in fiery collisions with consonants. They trigger anger with what was left unsaid. The best comeback that was cancelled due to temporary verbal cowardice.

They trigger sadness with sentences silenced by unforeseen outcomes. Silent hopes that will forever go unsaid.

They summon images of people who we love, we loved, and who we lost. We can hear their thoughts as if they just passed their lips. The articulation so clearly resonates in our minds that we turn our heads. For surely they are in our midst somewhere, somehow.

We try to find the perfect match between the silent echos of our hearts and the sounds that utter from our lips. Sometimes they line up perfectly. The verbs conjugate nicely and the prepositions lead us down a path of clear direction.

Yet other days it seems our language is not our own. The words are elusive. There is a loss, which in itself is rather amazing.

Words. Nearly 1,014,000 of them in the English language alone. How do we choose the right ones? How do we use them wisely? We must.

It is our duty with such an arsenal at our disposal. We must not allow our words to be wielded weapons of mass destruction. Rather they must be seeds that will be planted today. Seeds that will encourage the souls of today who will be society's sovereign soldiers of tomorrow.

We must choose words that calm emotions rather than fan them. We must choose words that soothe over those which scathe. Our vernacular must encourage rather than enrage. It should connect rather than condemn. It should buoy rather than bully.
Our words should tightly tether us to a place of safety, rather than isolate each other because of ignorance.

We need to educate our youth that words have power.
A power to encourage change.
A power to give a voice to the voiceless.
A power to give direction to the lost.
A power to show truth.
A power to lead while maintaining integrity.
And like any super power,
it needs to be used for good,
in which to triumph over evil.
                                .








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