Good Morning Friends & Digital Neighbors across Local's! Most of this week I posted something on fun words from the Little Book of Lost Words. At Triggernometry I tend to just do the Daily Far and comment on what others post.

Words are fun, words are interesting, words are dangerous. They are not so dangerous that words can really hurt you when that is the only thing that they are, words. The real danger of words is the power to grab minds & hearts towards action. Once enraged or emboldened people can act heroically or horribly. In the Era of the Perpetually Offended & Pre-offended you never know what is going to break the fragile. Today's fragile are unlike the fragile of yore who would just go sit in a dark room and cry and wrestle with dark emotions once they were wounded or offended. Today's Fragile will gather the mob, light the torches and storm the castle or chase you to the old windmill. You know how the story ends. Your words made you the monster or the oppressor.

Words use to convey ideas, communicate experience, ask questions and chase after meaning. I am still an old school sticks & stones type of person, one cannot really be harmed by words unless you let them. I wish it were that easy all the time. Exhaustion, personal issues, just a bad day can make one unexpectedly sensitive to a statement you would laugh at on a good or normal day.

@bridgetphetasy made a comment in a recent podcast (She has done so many in the last week) I can't remember where, I think it was on You are here. Something to the effect of if your skeletons are in your front yard, you can't be harmed. There is a lot to mine in that statement. If you softest spots, your most embarrassing moment or your greatest shame is known and you no longer feel the pain of them, you possess an unreal level of freedom.

I don't know how many of us can do that on a personal level, one or one. You hopefully confide in your spouse, your closest friend, your therapist or sponsor. To articulate that to someone gives you a level of freedom in confronting the difficult chapters of your story. Words actually take away the pain, reframe the issue, and transform the experience. One on one it can be liberating, there is a power to acceptance that is amazing.

Your tribe - Know its weaknesses, know its history, know the worst behaviors it has permitted and the best it is responsible for bringing to humanity. Everyone belongs to some group - only someone completely isolated out in the wilderness might be able to claim no membership in a group or tribe as it were. Seek wisdom in shifting what are the fair criticisms of your tribe and the attacks by the haters. No tribe is perfect, nor or any of its members. Discourse, debate, the world of words should be a fair exchange, if they can cheap-shot your tribe, you can return the favor. One ought to be able to laugh at oneself, and even at one's own tribe. The absence of laughter is one of the signs of an unhealthy sense of self. Not everything is funny, but almost anything can be a cause for laughter.

Words - We create them, others respond to them, even the wonderful non-humans in our life that learn their meaning. Words - charged with meaning and filled with more wonder than we give them credit for possessing since they are so commonplace and superficially ordinary yet extraordinarily powerful. Thanks for indulging my words today. Off to autumn beauty!

Mt Shuksan from the trail - Washington state