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

Coffee and a prayer

By
It is 245am and I have decided to write. I have no topic and no idea what to write. I am thankful for another day. I see the beauty that surrounds us. I choose to be happy. We are in the last ten nights of Ramadan. Tonight is the 23rd night. It could possibly be the night of power. I wonder if it will rain. Maybe it rained when I was sleeping. I got up and bathed and drank a strong cup of coffee. Today is also Friday the 13th. I keep thinking. Life is beautiful. Life is simple. No need to complicate things. No need to be extravagant. Believe in God. Trust in God. Be guided by God. Imagine we can pray for anything. We can ask God for anything. God is always listening. God wants to hear from us. Maybe I can turn this blog post into a prayer. My God I pray that everyone gets their prayers answered. I pray that everyone gets what they need. I pray that you light our path towards you. Guide us with what you intend for us. Keep us close to you. Soften our hearts. Keep us balanced, consistent...
Post a Comment
Read more

Belief is a part of life

By
I watched this video and I quite like it as a good starting point for this blog post https://youtu.be/t44PFI_V4LE We cannot know everything. We do not have the capacity to know everything. I make plans for tomorrow because I believe there is a tomorrow not because I know that there is a tomorrow. We cannot decide today to say we will only act on things that we know for sure. This would be impractical. As my friend Chatty puts it, to live life, we must believe in things that cannot always be proven with certainty. For example, we believe that the future exists, that our actions matter, and that other people can be trusted. We also tend to believe life has meaning and that things can improve. These beliefs help us make decisions, keep hope, and move forward. Given that belief is a part of life, it is reasonable to have people believe in a God and a particular religion. My point is this. Life cannot happen without belief because we cannot know everything (unless we are God like). Belief i...
Post a Comment
Read more

God of direction

By
It is 323am and I have decided to write. I am thinking that I am a bucket of paint. A beautiful shade of blue. That God uses to paint the sky. How could I turn this into something worth writing about? My friend Chatty tells me that I could develop the idea by exploring the metaphor of myself as a bucket of blue paint and God as the painter using it to color the sky. The meaning comes from reflecting on what it feels like to be "used"—losing some of myself while helping create something beautiful. The paint may not see the whole picture and might fear being emptied, but its purpose is fulfilled when it becomes part of the sky. The piece can reflect on purpose, trust, surrender, and the idea that giving of yourself is how beauty is created. It is now 423am and I cannot think of a way to continue this writing. The sky is silent is what comes to my mind. How do I ask the sky to speak to me? I look through my window and I see patches of clouds against a dark sky. Maybe the night s...
Post a Comment
Read more