WORDS

I find myself wondering, on days like today, when the winds are blowing so strongly that trees bow before their might and branches break and fall down around my camp. The thoughts come quicker, when I find myself huddled under blankets against the cold. What is it that brings the human race to turn words that were once used to describe things of great beauty into insults or inflammatory rhetoric toward one another?

To call someone a snowflake as individual and unduplicated as they are, with each being unique in form and grace and pattern, is now used to describe someone easily offended or so overly empathetic that they are considered weak for their very delicate nature. And yet, while each flake of snow can be harmed or destroyed by the merest breath, melted by the heat from a single word spoken, human beings berate one another with many heated words that are meant as insults to be used in order to destroy anyone who might be sensitive to a view or perception that opposes their own.

And what of children, the girls born and given the name Karen, who grow to adulthood in a world where their very name is used to describe the insufferable and those who view themselves as entitled beyond what is their lot? Would their fathers and mothers have named them such knowing that the day would come where the name they bear would be used as a curse word, belittling those whose arrogance would embarrass themselves in the eyes of the world around them?

Human beings are so confusing and yet confuse themselves from what I see some days, when they all share the need to be physically intimate, in making love or simply having sex for the pleasure that it brings. But then turn the phrases or words called fuck into violent insults or demeaning phrases. Get fucked has come to mean a terrible insult, where it ought to be a well wishing and gentle encouragement for another to find both love and physical pleasure wherever they might. Fuck you is meant as a violent rejection among humanity now and not an offer of the sharing of bodies and minds and souls and spirits. Where fuck once was meant as a hope for sharing it has become a cursing word, self inflicted when someone states “well, I’ll be fucked.”

The lists of words and meanings that have changed grow ever away from beauty and grace, becoming more common, ugly and of violent use.

And as I sit here, in the cold, watching gentle snowflakes fall upon my outstretched hand, melting almost too quickly to witness the pattern each one displays, I cannot help but wonder why?

Not why do snowflakes melt, that to me seems as nature had intended for their perfection to exist in only an single instant, but why do human beings take that which is beautiful and use it now for harm? I hope that I may never understand the answer to that why.