russian

i just got off of skype with my russian friend, alla, so as to catch up and practice my russian. for those of you new to me, i spent nearly four years in moscow. it's amazing how fast the words fade into the clouds of distant memory if you're not using them. the same can even happen in your native language, if you're not using your full vocabulary regularly. it happened to me when i came back to the u.s. after those four years. i was stumbling and bumbling over even the simplest of thoughts. occasionally, i could pull out the russian word before the english one. weird.
language holds an enormous fascination for me - the way our brains can turn thoughts into sounds and syllables and tempos. but even more fascinating than that, is how many languages there are, both spoken and not. and each one carries a multitude of possibilities for communicating a single thought. however...
there's one eskimo language that has 32 different words for our one english word 'love' (i read that in "the secret lives of bees"). think about that for a minute. it reveals to me that even if i could communicate in every language of the world, including the non-verbals like sign, dance, mime, etc., there still wouldn't be enough language to fully express our experience of life. our 'beingness' is so beyond language, that i suppose sometimes we have to just be content to 'be', rather than talk about it. but i must say that i'm extremely glad to have language to put around some of life, so that we can express with each other in this world.
i challenge you to explore language. look for subtleties, look for connections, look for beauty, buy a dictionary, buy a thesauraus, pass me a word i don't know so i can grow in my talk-life.