Halos. Wholeness. Dragons.

More word-fumblings. And an explanation.

Well, September thoroughly escaped me, as I’m sure it did for many with little ones going back to school. Instead of giving you a half-baked reflection last month, I was away visiting family and hiking in the heart of Oregon, feeling perfectly small on the rim of Mazama’s Crater Lake in the company of jays and nutcrackers (oh, and cousins); feeling perfectly powerless looking down on the churn of the Rogue River in its gorge; somehow both lost and found in the expansive wildness of the place. There’s a part of me that will always feel at home in the PNW.

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

Photo by NaHarai Perez Aguilar on Unsplash

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.

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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.

Triptych of a Cynic—Tyler Rogness

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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.

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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.