The journey begins

Thanks for joining me!

What are you going to find here?

The musings of a lover of wor(l)ds.

The idea that led to the creation of this blog came during my reading of the ninth volume of the Romanian Filocalia.  Better known under its Greek name of φιλοκαλία (Ancient Greek: “love of the beautiful, the good”) or Philokalia, this is a text about finding or rather restoring meaning, about waking up from the dreariness of our day-to-day robotic existence.  As I was meandering through a forest of heavy-sweet words such as obârșie, închinat, liniștire, trezvie, I noticed that some of the words were resonating with what felt like an ancient part of myself, a part with a distinctive bittersweet aroma of spleen-laced longing, gently sprinkled with dor. The vibrating words were, without exception, old Romanian words, words that even fluent Romanian speakers rarely use nowadays.

And then, there was the melancholy, filling my chest like an expanding sphere of longing and unrequited love. Words usually evoke emotions through their connection to past situations. We know love through its associations with our beloved or lovers. We come to understand hate beyond its dictionary definition after we have had our share of hateful experiences. As my life experience did not include many opportunities for including or associating these old Romanian words, how could I then explain the joyful sorrow they so powerfully evoked?

Joyful sorrow, xαρμολύπη, charmolypê, as it happens, is a state marked by grace, an aspirational yet elusive goal that the Eastern Orthodox Christian monks strive to experience. It is a state that ordinary folk like myself can understand by taking time, petrecând în tăcere, in the presence of a traditional Orthodox icon or while contemplating a sleeping child or a vista of overwhelming beauty. There are other sensorial equivalents, such as a Dolceamero cup of Italian coffee.

I tried to explain this concept to my ten-year-old son. I told him that I want to share my love for words and how words provoke us to be present, awake, and feel and create a place [rather than blog or site] where people can come to better understand, learn, and partake in words. I asked him to give me a name.

And he called it “The Power of Sadness”.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton