Some of my favourite letters

Photo: Eramosa River Park, leftover from September, because I forgot to bring my camera to Toronto.

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This afternoon I drove down to the ghetto. Toronto is under a drizzle. I sat down in Timothy's and started to write, listening to the sounds around me. A group of Hispanic men gossiped noisily at the next table. Outside in the street, the tires of a van licked slowly down to a stop at the corner of Church and Alexander. Wet sounds from outside were strangely calming. Then the lights changed, the vehicle pulled away, and the traffic started hissing again.

It's time to go down into the words and let them heal. Kindness to self is the prerogative. Something I read in vaysha's journal a few days ago has stayed with me, the way writing can take us on long journeys, become a meditation of visualization. It's not just the visuals, but all the senses that come into play. Living in our senses is the best way to escape from our minds when they start to turn against themselves.

Words can be a great pleasure. Try to think of some of your favourites. I have certain sounds that feel good to me. My favourite letter is F. Now I know what some of your are thinking, but F is the sound of cars passing in the rainy city, or of leaves rustling. Or even quieter still, leaves settling on the water. It's no wonder we call it a leaf; the word itself sounds out the rich, fragrant sensations of an autumn walk.

My second favourite letter is V as in valiant, volatile, vortex. It's just a coincidence, a fine coincidence, that I have a V and two Fs in my name. It's the breath of nature on the face of the deep, the sound a sun makes when it sets a forest vibrating with summer warmth, smells rising from rich earth.

One of my favourite words is numinous, but it doesn't have any Vs or Fs. Maybe because it rhymes with luminous. I like Ls, too. It's hard not to appreciate the way a tongue curls preparing to lick flesh full of nerve endings. I imagine my inner ear curling with pleasure when I hear steaks sizzling on the grill. S's and Zs are good, too.

Now how did you read it when you saw that Z. Some of us said one thing our heads, and it rhymes with head. Others said something that rhymes with flea, and what does that tell us about our collective psyches? Not much, really, but it would be interesting to see, since our inner lives are shaped by our environments.

How does it affect the way we think, whether we spell our lives like colour and valour versus neighbor and pallor? This wasn't supposed to turn into an essay on comparative linguistics. I wanted to talk about the beauty and meditative qualities of words.

But I can't help worrying; it's an underlying thought as we walk about our lives these days. There's an election coming up, and we don't know whether the world is going to get better or worse, whether we'll keep on making the same mistakes or try to learn from what is past. We're living in a time where a few words might make a difference, or they might make no difference at all.