When you want to say something, don’t say something which resembles what you want to say but is one step removed. Say exactly what you want to say. Speak the exact words, reach down into your body to find them, into your muscles, lungs, sinews, womb or testicles, fascia, solar plexus and into your gut. Trust that the exact linguistic correlate exists for that feeling, concept, perception, sensation or vision you wish to express. Let your song rise up from through your feet from the dew-soaked earth. Speak the words that wish to come through you, as if by their own volition, and be released and expressed. Speak without shame from your blood sea, from your grief and from your deepest joy. Speak as if you were soon about to die, or as if your words could somehow impossibly deliver the entire world from destruction.

Speak with the intonation, the cadence, the melody, the rhythm, the rhyme that reverberates through your body. Let the earth speak through you. Let the gathering stormclouds, the roar of the wind, the shafts of sunlight cascading from the sky, the nectarine ecstatic voice of the beehive speak through you. Let the gesture of an animal or the tremble of the wind through elder tree leaves speak through you. The right words spoken in the right rhythm, at the right time, in the right place have a numinous power, they have the power to affect the body, they have the power to create community. The earth will reply to them. The Gods will hear your words. Matter is malleable in the face of the word; your words have the power to change reality itself.