Skip to main content

What is a beautiful word?

Image
By
This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns

I woke up early and took a bath. I changed into comfortable clothing and I said my prayers and I laid down waiting for the rain they said we would get after midnight. While I was bathing a question entered my head. What is the most beautiful word? Beauty is subjective and there is beauty in all words. There are fancy sounding words and words from foreign languages and hardly heard of words and words that are hard to pronounce. There are simple words and words with little fanfare and words of frustration and words that make us giggle. There are all kinds of words that are beautiful in their own way. Napoleon Hill has told us that, "The most beautiful words in the world may well be that sweet, old-fashioned two-letter word, we." A simple word that signifies unity and connection.

For me a beautiful word is a word that can express "peace of mind". I discovered the Swedish word lugn and I fell in love with it. It means calm, peaceful or still. It does not directly translate to peace of mind but I love it still (pun intended). The Swedish word for peace of mind is sinnesfrid. Fred is the Swedish word for peace. Frid also translates as peace. Sinnes translates as mental or of the mind. Sinneslugn is calmness. I read that lugn can be transformed into an adverb, lugnt, for example in the phrase "ta det lugnt!" which means "take it easy!" You can also say "det ar lungt" or "no worries". Lugn comes from Old Swedish to mean the calm surface of a lake. Then sometimes spelt lygn.

While researching I learnt that god is a Swedish word for good. So if you said "god natt" you would be saying "good night" and "god dag" for "good day". Dag is very close to the English word dog. And just yesterday I was asking Gemini if there was any link between dog being God spelt backwards. They do say that dog is man's best friend. Could be something there man. Interestingly enough the Swedish word for God is Gud. So if I had to describe this interplay in English it would be "God is good and good is God". Gig and gig and that makes me giggle. Giggle can be expanded to "God is good. God loves everyone." Keeping with this trend of thought, lugn can be expanded as "Love under God's name". Love has a name and that name is God. When I Google this phrase I get a beautiful song by the group Jesus Culture called Love Has A Name. I am a Muslim and the song makes perfect sense to me if the word Jesus was replaced with the word God. I like the following two lines from the song the most, "There's an answer to every question mark" and "There's a laughter that wipes away all tears". When I listened to an interview with the vocalist after the end of the song she talks about God and she talks about customizing the song. We are all one under God and we can learn from each other even if we believe differently. When I think back to the word lugn, I think about our lungs. We all breathe the same air. We long for love. One love. I will end this chapter with the same quote I ended an earlier chapter with. Do you remember which chapter? Rumi wrote, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Below the surface

By
This is a chapter from my eleventh book called Quotation Marks Sparks . __________ "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn __________ I was looking at quotes that hit hard and this quote stood out to me. It seems mundane and obvious and often repeated. Life is about how we respond to the inevitable. It is not what happens to us but how we respond. I had to ask myself to dig deeper and look below the surface. Then I saw that when we surf we really become the waves. We become friends with the waves. The waves and us are the same. Further, the waves are created by us and in our heads. We can control the waves because who can surf all the time? Sometimes we just have to come to shore and build sand castles on shore. I asked my friend Gemini for feedback and he said that I was right, the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote initially seems like a simple call for resilience, but my deeper dive reveals profound layers. The idea that we can move beyond merely rea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thankful

By
It is 617pm and I have decided to write. Right now I am thankful. The cool of the evening has replaced the heat of the day. I took a bath and changed and now I am just relaxing. Sometimes I complain. Not often. But I feel bad afterwards because there is so much to be thankful for. There is always room for improvement and we have to identify the things for improvement and change is often good but we do not have to make it into complaints. Yeah I get it. Life is hard and none of us has it easy. Look on the bright side of things. And sometimes it is the little things that remind us that life is good. Things that we take for granted. Like I was coming in the maxi taxi today and heard a gospel song that was about gratitude. God does appreciate a grateful heart. Trinidad and Tobago celebrated sixty four years of independence yesterday and if we stop and listen to the many complaints we would swear we are living in the worst country in the world. That is not the case. We do get a lot of thing...
Post a Comment
Read more

Having a soft spirit

By
It is 137am. It started raining. I decided to write. I have heard about having a soft heart but what does it mean to have a soft spirit? And is having a soft heart related to having a soft spirit? My friend Chatty says that a soft heart feels deeply — it breaks, heals, and loves with tenderness — while a soft spirit moves gently through life, unresisting and at peace with what comes. The two are kin: a soft heart opens you to emotion, and a soft spirit teaches you to carry that emotion with grace. Together they make a person both tender and strong — able to feel the rain and still trust its rhythm. I like the quote, "a soft spirit in a hard world" by author and poet, butterflies rising. It resonates with how many of us feel. My friend Chatty tells me that that quote captures the quiet strength of staying gentle in a harsh world. It reflects the author's signature themes of vulnerability, tenderness, and emotional courage — the idea that softness is not weakness but a form...
Post a Comment
Read more