I clearly recall my eagerness, as a pre-school boy, to learn to read. It seemed magical that my mother and older cousins could make the lines of letters on the pages of my story books "talk" to me. I also remember the thrill of satisfaction that came later when I myself could look at a printed word like "dog" or "Jack" and know the meaning and how to say it.
Somewhere inside of me there still lives that sense of excitement about words. But now the exhilaration comes when I discover word pictures crafted by gifted writers to express solid truth or understanding or wisdom, and sometimes humor or grief, in ways that no one else has done or could do. By some magic, the ultimate effect often seems greater than the sum of the individual words.
Here on these pages I'm collecting some of the verbal treasures I've discovered, with a faint hope that by combining them with visual images their emotional and spiritual effect might be enhanced. Then, by chance, we might catch a glimpse of a truth or a reality "beyond words."
