Thanks for your grace as I took some much-needed time in the whirl of things to breathe.

I now come from those woods refreshed and ready for a walk in these—here in the word-wood with you—and I’d like to circle back a bit, even as we continue forward.

I don’t particularly pride myself on choosing the lesser-used of one of the most easily confused English verb pairings for this newsletter. But then again, I love the name, and it makes great fodder for some word-delving. Pride recovered. I’ve written previously about the name Awaking Dragons and why I chose it, but I think it’s high time for a deep dive.

Awake. Repeat.

Occasionally I’ll have someone mention their appreciation of my latest Awakening Dragons post. Some feel bad if I slip the corrected awaking into my thanks, but I assure them (and you) the fault is entirely mine. After all, I chose the name. I feel like I’m on a regular schedule now of googling these verbs to remind myself, yet again, that Awaking Dragons is not an embarrassment to grammar and the grammar-sensitive everywhere. I did it again just this morning (as of the writing), and so I’d like to put the question to rest, once and for all. Or at least until the next panic sets in. Miriam-Webster tells me the verbs awake and awaken were already being confused in Old English, which means I’m fighting against centuries of linguistic slog by taking this on. I promise this won’t take quite so long to read.

If it needs to be said, these linguistic cousins come to us from the same ancestor: Proto-Indo-European (PIE) weg-, meaning “to be strong or lively.” (Fun fact, this same root—no pun intended—shows up in vegetable, which was an adjective before it was a noun.) It should come as no surprise then that awake and awaken follow a similar path of development linguistically, with usage apparently being the greatest differentiator between the two. Of course, they both mean “to rouse from sleep,” and both can be either be applied to an object or not, but (and herein lies the bane of this newsletter) usage tends to favor awaken when it comes to applying the action to someone or something. Yet I hope for some redemption.

Despite similarities, I find one important difference between these words as their meanings, like streams, have slowly (if only slightly) separated over history’s span. While both maintain the sense of origination, and a springing to life or coming into an understanding, awake alone (Old English awacian) can carry the sense of being or staying attentive, even going so far as to bear connotations of keeping watch. You could have been awaked or awakened, but having been so, you are only ever awake.

Let’s put it this way, if awakening is to spring into being, then awaking is the being itself, an active consciousness intensified by that prefix a- and made present and continuous by the suffix -ing. This is not a one-time thing. The continual flow of the future into the present requires renewing attention: rhythms of reorientation and watch-keeping. You might even say wakefulness.

This is where my own venture into the tangle of these words has left me, but if you find something different let’s talk, and learn from each other. I’m no expert—just a curious observer.

As I use it here, awaking is for that continued revivification, that drinking again (and again) from the well to be refreshed when the world beats us weary. Awaking Dragons is an experiment in divining meaning from the ordinary, questioning that which has become over-familiar in the course of our hectic lives, reorienting our loves toward the one toward whom all the signposts point. I find poetry a standup tool for the job, hence the poetic approach you find here. I’m also a bit of a word nut if you hadn’t gathered, and nothing strikes me as more over-familiar than our language and the way we justify our shallowness with it. If poetic explorations into language and meaning sound like your cup of tea, then I’m happy to pour. This is about learning to live humbly and well together. Awaking is to pursue fullness. Wholeness.

Wassailing

Wholeness. From cynics and skeptics to Christians and atheists and everyone in between, I dare to say wholeness is a hunger we share. Or should I say holiness? This might carry more religious baggage, but it hefts the same meaning.

It would be dangerous, I think, to call it a rule, but similar sounds in our language are often good clues that a relation might exist; and it certainly rings true in this case. Whole, health, holy, hale, and the Christmastide act of wassailing (which has nothing to do with sailing at all) come from a common PIE root for wholeness, wellness, soundness—the state of being untainted or uninjured. These are the pre-Christian meanings leading early translators of the Bible into English to adopt it for Latin sanctus (ultimately a ceremonial word), from which we get all kinds of blessings and consecrated things in Modern English.

If you’re interested, my “Triptych of a Cynic” hinges on the interplay between these Christian and pre-Christian meanings of wholeness & holiness. Thanks again to the Rabbit Room for publishing.

Rabbit Room Poetry

Triptych of a Cynic—Tyler Rogness

Triptych of a Cynic…

Read more

2 years ago · 25 likes · 5 comments · The Rabbit Room

But there’s another adjacent word I’ve taken an interest in and that’s giving me some trouble: halo, that circular miracle of refraction around the sun or moon and thrown over the head of a saint in religious art. I was asked once where this word came from, and of course my mind went immediately to hal, that root of all those words relating to wholeness. It is a circle, after all; but strangely enough these words aren’t related.

Purportedly.

Multiple sources cite halo from the early Greek for a disk or something shaped like it (e.g. the sun, the moon, a shield, etc.), originally referring to the shape of or path around a threshing floor where oxen or slaves would thresh grain. But that’s where the thread stops, as far as I can find. “Probably” is used in numerous places to guess at where this word came from, but even those probablys go no further than the early Greek threshing floor, assuming the meaning for sanctity came later through its religious use.

I’m here to boldly offer another thought: Is it not possible the original sense of even the Greek word for a disk came from the early PIE root which also gives us holy, hale, and whole? We do share a language family, after all. Could the development not have happened the other way around, and heavenly bodies and threshing floors alike named by it because their shape resonated with the beating heard of the word? If this were true it wouldn’t matter whether halo’s first application to the thing backdropping a saint’s noggin was intentionally named for wholeness or simply its shape—the meaning would be there all along, waiting like stars in light-polluted skies to be seen again.

And then there were dragons…

So, what do halos have to do with Awaking Dragons? I’m glad you asked.

I’m certain your first thought when you saw the Awaking Dragons logo was, “That looks like a threshing floor.” Don’t try to convince me otherwise. Not much of a visual artist myself, Substack helped me through a few rounds of image generation before the right one showed up, completely unlooked for in a very real sense: I didn’t change much of my prompting, but suddenly I’d found it. Just to give you a sense of how different and truly unexpected this was, take a gander at a couple of the earliest images that nearly became the face of this here newsletter:

And of course, here’s where we are today:

I did not have halos and wholeness in mind when I began searching for a logo, but now I see how central it all is: The halo-esque backdrop acts as a boundary to the whirl at the center of which something dragon-like starts to take shape. What better visualization of poesy could there be than a becoming in the midst of a bounded chaos? And not just any becoming, but one of far grander and more terrifying and more beautiful significance than we always know what to do with. As we interrogate the pains and joys and wonders and mysteries of this world, should we expect to find anything less than that which is beyond ourselves?

I’ve gone on for some time now, so I’ll close for now with a nod both to the early West Saxons and to the rich legacy of that word holy.

Wes þu hāl, wes hāl, wassail, friends. Be whole.

Over to you, dear reader. What questions or thoughts does this stir in you? What is something you’ve seen, read, or experienced recently that jarred your attention loose from its slog, and awoke you again to wonder? If you’re needing such a “jarring loose,” check out the Clayjar Review’s newest issue on toil. I’m honored to have a piece featured there, which I hope you’ll enjoy; but I think you’ll find the whole work enriching.

Chasing a Curiosity

Before being voted “most likely to join the military” at my pacifist, Mennonite high school (read into that what you will), I had the opportunity to visit the truly peaceful grounds of a Benedictine monastery. I wish I could tell you about the deep, spiritual experience it was to be there, how the stillness of the place struck a chord in me that’s resonated since. In actuality, great student that I was, I remember only two things about our time: the communion-flavored grape juice we had at lunch and the following conversation.

A few of the monks had graciously lent their time, showing us around and teaching us about the monastic life. “Ora et labora,” we were told, was the sum of it all: prayer and work, balanced. They went on to describe their practices for deepening the faith and interceding for their surrounding community, but I was already stuck, left in the dust with a curiosity. I raised my hand.

“The roots are the same,” I pointed out.

“What?” said the good friar.

“The word ‘ora’ meaning ‘prayer’ is the suffix of ‘labora’ meaning ‘work,’” I said. “Why is that?”

Silence. Then a stutter. “It’s just—” he began. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just ‘ora et labora’: prayer and work.”

I didn’t buy it. Still don’t as a matter of fact. I’ll go so far as to say I wouldn’t believe the holy man even if these Latin sound-a-likes were only so by sheer chance.

What I mean is this: I don’t agree with the statement, “it doesn’t mean anything.” Words have depth to them, entire worlds holed up in their cores, and I’d rather break the shell to see what’s inside than take them for granted.

Words matter.

In Owen Barfield’s History in English Words, the Inkling chronicles the tendency toward “internalization” in Western language and thought. It’s fascinating to see, in words alone, shifts in consciousness over time toward the individual and away from community; away from integration and into the arms of reductionism; praising comprehension, foregoing apprehension.

All this is to say again that words matter. They shape the way we think. Remember. Live. And it doesn’t take a long look around to see the ways that “internalization” has shaped our perception of the meaning of our comings and goings.

I don’t mean to level any blame at the good monks we visited that day. I simply had to look elsewhere to find the answers I sought. And while ora et labora may not have any special significance for my life today (I never did join the Benedictines, Mennonites, or military), what does is whether I go about slinging worlds of meaning left and right without a second thought. Someone might just get hurt; or maybe worse, kept from seeing what’s shining beneath the surface of things: distracted by the rote of our busy lives and language.

“Utter words,” says philosopher Martin Buber, “as though heaven were opened in them and…as though you had entered the word.”1 If there are worlds in our words, their each and every utterance is an unfolding meaning we step into, co-creating it as we do.

If we are to realize — in the fullest sense of the word — that “all matter is radiant of spiritual meaning,”2 we’ll often need new language for the task, which is to say new and renewing perspective. This is a driving reason I’ve come to appreciate poetry more in the last handful of years (thanks for the kickstart, Malcolm Guite) and find even dead languages fascinating. There’s nothing wrong (and a lot of good) in having my assumptions challenged and the ground under my feet shaken a bit from time to time. The more the better, I say.

Come to think of it, these Latinates — courtesy of our kind, Benedictine hosts — may have plenty of significance for my life today after all.

Breaking the Shell

Interestingly enough, I haven’t found any indication these words are truly connected. Following an etymology of labora back to Proto-Indo-European ultimately accounts only for the “lab” in the word: something taken or gained.3 This might just leave room for a potential combination of roots — perhaps with one such as, oh, I don’t know…ora: of the mouth.4

Please note: there may not be a relation here. I’m not trained for this arena by any stretch of the imagination. I’m an amateur through and through. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Ora refers to the mouth (or in the case of our Benedictine slogan, what comes from it),5 and lab-ora refers to what is taken for the mouth, or the means to take for the mouth: exempli gratia, to labor.6 Food for thought.

For those bearing with this etymology, then, one could interpret the roots of ora et labora as “what the mouth produces, and what it consumes.” And that has plenty to bear on my life, especially considering Barfield and Buber. While “prayer and work” can be watered down to dry practice (been there), I think there’s something deeper going on here with these words.

First, what is taken for the mouth; consumed. What narratives do I give credence to? Are they centered on my own navel-gazing realities, meanings, desires, and perspective? Or are they stories of mystery and connection with others, the world, and the Reality that surrounds me and of which I am only a part and player?

And then there’s ora: what is produced. Are my language and living subtle and deep, rich and dangerous, pregnant and healing to those in my life? And what about to myself, who must step into the meanings that come from my mouth? Will I be known as trite, precise, and busy, my words as reduced and empty? Meaningless? Shallow?

I land on different sides of these questions every day, but I hope and strive to know the worlds I create with my words leave a little room for wondering and the wondrous, for re-humanization and community and being known, and for more grace in my language and living, which is to say in my ora et labora. Perhaps this is the heart of its Benedictine sister-phrase, laborare est orare: work become prayer. Our rote become poetry. Life become living.

Here’s to more of it for all of us.

Goings

As a dad, one of my all-time favorite things in the world is the old “fee fi fo fum” routine, which sends the heebie-jeebies up my kids’ spines and sets them squealing and scurrying across the room. Coming in close second are the funny or unexpected things my kids say.

My four-year-old, wont to describe things in such words as gem-ish and who isn’t convinced there’s a difference between penguins and pangolins, recently whipped out the word cornucopia. A couple weeks ago, in asking for some tea in the “Caribou cup” (let’s hear it from my Caribou Coffee fans) he politely requested with a searching stutter the “caboose mug.” Even more common than these endearing foibles (and just as fun) is his excited use of go’ed to tell a tale of some exciting happening he attended. Usually I don’t correct his sweet mispronunciations because it just feels wrong to spoil such wonderful naivety. In the last case, it’s not just a feeling. Went, after all, isn’t the past tense of go.

Sure, went has thoroughly taken root in this particular place — donned this grammatical role — but it’s an invasive species so to speak, having slithered and, well, went its way over from its native wend. Digging a little deeper, the Scots gaed comes up as the closest modern thing we have to the “indigenous” past tense of go.1 My son, relying on all the linguistic instincts he’s been able to scavenge in four years, and in the face of all the times he’s actually heard the rest of the family say went, was able to more or less appropriately inflect the word go to tell us something cool about his day.

I, for one, think that’s pretty neat.

Subscribe now

Comings

Something new from Awaking Dragons

In mid-most of the word-wood is a path
That leads back to the springs of truth in speech.

— Malcom Guite, from “De Magistro”2

I think I’ve always been a bit of a word nut, to some extent. I don’t pretend to have some kind of mind-shattering vocabulary (that facade would soon fail), but I like taking the mile plunge with the inch I have and pulling on dangling threads like a child with a sweater. I’ve always liked stumbling on a new word and have learned to love their unraveling as well.

As a poet, finding the right word to convey a meaning can pull a flailing piece off its face, make a decent piece good, and might even bring a good piece into the realm of the “not too shabby.” At the very least (and more importantly) it can set things back on track, back to saying something the heart can hear. The right word can soothe an ache, plant seeds in the heart, heal.

As a person, this can be the difference between fostering connection or misunderstanding, clinging to reality or apprehending Reality, praising knowledge or courting wisdom. You might think I exaggerate, but consider the serpent’s words to Eve, and the twisted meanings that have since shaped our world.

We create worlds with our words, too.

There’s a mystery at play when we speak, a process inside us that, over in a flash, doesn’t tend to strike us for the wonder it is. An experience, a feeling, a meaning translated by the imagination into sound or symbol, this somehow intelligible to another who attempts (and that’s key) to un-translate back into the realm of ideas and meaning: that is a word. And there are webs and webs and oceans more of these words that have crashed over one another, usurped and killed and carried and loved one another over the centuries to make up what we’d now like to think is our static language and superior, modern ideas. I wish I’d have come across the term “chronological snobbery” sooner than I did.3

I’d have previously told you words have one meaning, and only one. What are dictionaries for, after all? And laws? Textbooks? I think I was wrong. I may have been right to a certain degree, but I’ve come to think I was still off the mark.

I’m not an expert in this field, not a linguist. I have no credentials to share with you. But I have questions, curiosities, and the gumption to pursue them. I believe that when questions are asked, answers turn up, if slowly.

By heading Into the Word Wood, a child and focused branch (though still very much a part) of Awaking Dragons, I hope to spend some time intermittently meandering, wending along the “path / That leads back to the springs of truth in speech,” exploring words and their depths with what tools I have and connections I can make.

I hope you’ll come along with me. Let’s see where this path goes.

What are some of your favorite words, and why? How about your least favorite?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now