Chameleon words

Today in my email I read a quote by Learned Hand, who was an American judge. He said "Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment". Not only did that make me learn how to spell chameleon, I had to decide why that was important enough to regurgitate here. And in my first post, no less.

Words are something that I have spent most of my life hiding in and behind. I am only just now realizing how inadequate words are in expressing the real and true things in life. That sentence would once have been the equivalent of heresy to me. There are so many words, how can they possibly fail in expressing something? That is their whole purpose, and as you can see, I can claim mastery over a vast army of them. But there are things that my mind cannot put into words, and where once I would have then written those things off as worthless, I am now finding out that those are the things that make some of the most profound differences in my life.

I am an aspiring actress. I am learning so much in my search to become a whole artist and a whole person and words fail me with astounding regularity. My body, movement and emotion, are becoming a recognized tool in expression and I don't know how to use them yet. It scares me because I have lived in this body for so many years and yet I have never just let it move before. And even now I only have moments of being able to let it move. Most of the time my brain, with its words and intelligence - the source I have relied on all my life - interupts my primal instinct and screws everything up.

And now I have to let go of my mind and stop thinking so much in order to succeed. That is the anathema of all I have ever been.

It is frightening and exhilerating all at once.