There are only two feelings.
Love and fear.
There are only two languages.
Love and fear.
There are only two activities.
Love and fear.
There are only two motives,
two procedures, two frameworks,
two results.
Love and fear.
Love and fear.

~Michael Leunig~

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

In the end, I’m not interested
in that which I fully understand.
The words I have written over the years
are just a veneer.
There are truths that lie
beneath the surface of the words…
truths that rise up without warning,
like the humps of a sea monster
and then disappear.
What performance and song is to me
is finding a way to tempt the monster
to the surface,
to create a space,
where the creature can break through
what is real and what is known to us.
This shimmering space,
where imagination and reality intersect…
…this is where all love
and tears and joy exist.
This is the place.
This is where we live.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong.

We say bread and it means according to which nation.

French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure.

A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not.

When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records.

But what if they are poems or psalms?

My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.

My love is a hundred pitchers of honey.

Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body.

Giraffes are this desire in the dark.

Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map.

What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Dance like the photo’s not tagged, love like you‘ve never been unfriended, and tweet like nobody’s following

God bless our contradictions, those parts of us which seem out of character. Let us be boldly and gladly out of character. Let us be creatures of paradox and variety, creators of contrast, of light and shade, creatures of faith. God be our constant. Let us step out of character into the unknown, to struggle and love and do what we will. Amen. – Leunig