What is a beautiful word?
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."
Comments