Before she could speak, my daughter taught me the language of silent things: fruits, flowers, an oaken chair.

I came to understand, through my relationship to this small being, why the word adult forms the root of adulteration. Watching her, it became apparent that as we mature we fall from the grace of the whole-seeing beginner's mind that is our birthright. If, as Emily Dickinson says, what awaits us is the "unfurnished eye," then what awaits us are the senses we were born with. She's grown now, but when Lila was six months old she reawakened me to the way in which an orange speaks.

I had noticed one day that the oranges on the tree in our backyard were finally ripe, and it occurred to me that Lila had never tasted an orange. "A new adventure," I thought, smiling, as we headed out the kitchen door, she straddling my left hip. I could see myself pulling an orange off the tree, splitting it open and giving her a slice to suck on. To my mind, the full experience of the orange lay in its taste. That was "the point." Lila showed me just how limited my comprehension was.

As we approached the tree, she began to bounce on my hip, kicking her feet in a wild, dancing rhythm and reaching her hand in nearly desperate delight toward the most amazing thing: a shiny, bright, orange ball hanging in the tree! Did I see it? her astonished glance asked me. I smiled broadly and nodded, sharing in her delight. With my hand now cradling it, the orange, perfectly ripe, fell into my palm. Wide-eyed, Lila touched it, felt its cool skin, at once bumpy and smooth.

We sat down on the patio retaining wall, she in my lap, and I transferred the orange to her. Startled by the weight of it, she rolled it between her small hands, lifted it to her nose and chin and then back toward me, utterly transfixed. When my fingernail pierced the skin and a tiny pearl-like string of droplets arched out to land on her cheek, her mouth opened and her eyes widened further. And when, with skin peeled away, the shiny ball suddenly disappeared from view, bewilderment crossed her face - almost anguish - but only until the new ball caught her eye. A round puzzle with crescent pieces that pull off one by one... !

Finally, when I reached a slice toward her mouth, her brows knitted, unsure what I could mean. Taste it? Really? But it was only the barest moment before she was laughing in pleasure at the surprising sweetness. Lila's love at first sight-touch-taste taught me not only that oranges speak, but that they speak with surpassing eloquence.

* * *

In the beginning was the Word. The meditation of John the Evangelist on the beginning of time and space: the eternal Unspeakable speaks. Which is to say, the universe is language, is a text that speaks. When we hear the speech that is the universe, we are connected to an unseen speaker; a relationship is acknowledged. And yet, because we and the universe are of a piece, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of being a word that reads and hears itself.

How many of the ancient stories of the origin of the universe posit, as the reason that Unity exploded into Multiplicity, the desire of the One for the experience of Other? All uncorrupted language emerges directly from the ultimate, undivided mystery and connects us to it, even while it is a reminder of our existential separation from It: a song of longing and praise between lover and beloved. Like the Word in the beginning, language streams out of no thing into some thing, creating that very some thing in the activity of its own movement. Language is the advancing edge of creation. At the subtlest levels of experience, each word spoken is a weighty matter, in a literal sense. It shatters the fundamental unity of silence, making present what was not at hand.

In implicit recognition of the fundamentally creative nature of words, images of sexuality and procreation are frequently used to described processes of language and cognition. An idea, for example, is conceived; it could be seminal. Conversation may be penetrating, a form of intercourse which generates new thought, thought which may germinate or incubate before being birthed into the light of day. This is how the word becomes flesh, how spirit is materialized and matter spiritualized. Is it possible that there is concealed here, too, a picture of the far future of human sexuality? In the state of fully spiritualized matter and humanity, will the rapture of love-making be found in the meeting of heart-minds, and will such co-mingling itself advance creation? We need only reflect on the occasional moments of profound, light-filled elation we may have felt in the midst of deep conversation with a kindred soul - and the simultaneous arising of creative energy - to glimpse how this could be so.

St. John's insight was voiced thousands of years earlier by Vedic seers who likewise saw the beginningless beginning in sound, the primal word Aum, which breathes being into form. Birdsong, penetrating the silence of dawn, evokes a peculiar joy in the human heart, perhaps because it recapitulates this original breakthrough of sound from silence, through which creation is on-going. To the ear that hears, birdsong is experienced as a living word; and not only birdsong, but the sound of moving water, of rain, of clear belltones, of a young child's laughter. Such sounds have both an expansive and focalizing effect on consciousness. They call us to attend - if only for a moment - to the wholeness of life, and the sudden presence of joy lets us know that a circuit with the world has been completed. In that instant our conditioned alienation is erased. Contrast this with the experience of noise - a chainsaw or a jackhammer, for example. Here attention contracts and concentration is diffused. Where exposure to noise is chronic, as it is in large cities, there is a deepening alienation from the world, as coping strategies of withdrawal and desensitization are brought to bear.

Human language, likewise, may be either birdsong or jackhammer. It may clothe or shroud Wisdom, but for the most part, unfortunately, it enshrouds and obscures. Our voracious appetite for language has us consuming forests in the manufacture of printed materials at a rate that could ultimately kill the biosphere through the undermining of its respiratory and circulatory systems. U.S. newspapers alone are churning out words at a rate of over fifty-eight million per day. But our appetite is not assuaged because these are largely empty calories, words stripped of their vitalizing power through being pressed into the service not of wisdom but ambition.

Wisdom is the creating activity of the universe, both inner and outer. It is always new, and so can never be fully spoken, since to speak it is to freeze it in time. Still, there is language - we've all experienced it - that, like the song of a bird, leaves in its wake a stream of aliveness and engagement with something vast and deep. Such words are living words. They take us to the edge of our knowing and invite us to step off into freedom, into the ineffable Word, into the boundless, creating center of the universe - that place from which oranges come.

* * *

© Anita Doyle, 1995, 2005. This article is slightly modified from the version that appeared in Parabola Magazine as "Verbum Ineffabilis" [sic] in the Fall 1995 issue.

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