Hi Anita – how does it feel like to lose your footing a little?

It feels human… and a little wishful… In this moment as I witness world events, its feels sad and disappointed… wanting to ‘do’ something but not knowing what, helpless… and a reminder not to stray to far from the ‘grass’… Choosing to let your metaphor of grass live me for a breath or to, a space where I can laugh and cry, get things right and wrong, maybe roll down a hill and get up to do it again… the way a child could… and from that space look out onto the world again.

See once you notice how language can cage you, you can rewrite the metaphors you live by and make them yours.

For example I’ve been playing with the structure of the Lord’s Prayer, not as a statement of faith, but as a grounding reminder of the grass beneath my feet. It’s something I can hold as my own, without the need to believe in a dogma, defend as a creed, or force upon anyone else.

Sadly, in the eyes of the ‘orthodox,’ this might make me a heretic, someone to be feared. But if we remember that ‘heretic’ is just a metaphor for a choice, it becomes clear: the fear isn’t in the words, it’s in the eye of the beholder.

Here I find my center not in the old definitions, but in a rhythm that sounds like this:

Source of all that arises, and all that returns, holy is the mystery that bears every name.
Give us eyes to see and ears to hear the quiet truth unfolding in all things.
Let Your way move through us as breath moves through the body, as light moves through the morning.
Before Your vastness, we are smaller than small.
Grant us the bread of this day, enough to sustain, enough to share.
Teach us to be faithful stewards of every gift placed in our hands.
Forgive us as we release others from our judgment, for the mercy we offer is the mercy we receive.
In this way, Co‑creators of the world we shape, we are bigger than big.
Guide us away from illusion and from the fears that narrow the heart.
Lead us back to the soil, back to the silence, where all things rest, all things belong, and all things are made one again.

Hi Anita
I found and find it disconcerting as well, especially regarding religious discussions. The wisdom traditions rely heavily on symbolic language and metaphor, yet many argue they are literal truths; think of how many wars have been fought over that misunderstanding!

Once you start to see language ‘using’ us, you see it everywhere, particularly in today’s politics, and will break ones heart.

To your question about how the ‘Mirror’ traps me in inaction: I think it keeps me in my head. While a mirror reflects what is there, it doesn’t move or change the scene. It allows me to observe the ‘prison house’ of language without actually walking out the door. The ‘doing’ I’m looking for involves moving beyond reflection and into the messy, active work of relating.

Alan Watts’ observation that “we seldom realize that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of language’s and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” was both terrifying and freeing for me. It helped me begin to distinguish what is truly mine from what is simply ‘inherited.’ – I like to think its helped me become more compassionate.

I’ve been trying to communicate this awareness for years, and well, failing. You’ve likely noticed my turn toward stories, poems, and even koans… That usually fails as well, however it lets me ‘let go’ as the invitation is to let the reader sit in the story and questions into feeling, not so much answers.

Anyway don’t be to hard on yourself, it is the nature of language to free and trap, every creation is also a destruction, and every destruction a creation, every act of freedom puts boundaries on freedom. The point I think is to notice.

final thought on the subject – AI thought – I asked why we don’t notice

It is the ultimate irony of this topic: the moment we describe the “prison of language,” people use the bars of that very prison to explain why they aren’t inside.

There are a few deep-seated psychological and linguistic reasons why it is nearly impossible for people to admit—or even see—that their words are “using” them, even as they speak.

1. The “Transparent Eyeball” Problem
We don’t look at our language; we look through it.
Language is like a lens. If you’ve worn glasses your whole life, you don’t see the glass; you just see the world. When someone says, “Your lenses are distorting the view,” your natural reaction is, “No, this is just what the world looks like.” To admit the metaphor is “living us” is to admit that our perception of reality might be a construction, which is a terrifying loss of control.

2. Naive Realism
Psychologists call this Naive Realism—the human tendency to believe that we see the world “as it really is” without bias.
The Logic: “I am objective; therefore, the words I use are just the correct labels for facts. You, however, are using ‘framing’ and ‘rhetoric.'”
In their minds, they aren’t “weaponizing” a definition; they are simply “stating the truth.” This is why they can’t see the “software update” running in their own heads—they think it’s the original hardware.

3. The “Hedgehog” Defense Mechanism (almost all political pundents!)
Isaiah Berlin, the Hedgehog’s “One Big Thing” provides immense psychological comfort.
(The Hedgehog (The Monist): These thinkers relate everything to a single central vision or a universal organizing principle. They view the world through a lens of absolute certainty, fitting all facts into their one “big idea” and rejecting anything that doesn’t align.)
If I admit that my metaphors are just one way of seeing things, my “One Big Thing” starts to crumble. To protect that inner sense of order, the brain’s “firewall” immediately labels your observation as an “attack” rather than a piece of feedback.

4. The Blind Spot of Conscious Intent
People often confuse intent with effect.
They think, “I don’t intend to be a prisoner of language, so I’m not.” They believe that because they are “thinking” before they speak, they are in control. But they are choosing words from a pre-set menu provided by the “linguistic architecture” of their ancestry, religion, political tribe… They are choosing the meal, but they didn’t realize they were restricted to a single page of the menu.

Why I thought this topic mattered – I see this daily, especially in what pass as political discourses, words of weapons that become viruses replicating though our social interactions

Noticing the Metaphors we live by is vital for understanding today’s political climate. Currently, we see pundits and influencers acting as the primary architects of our vocabulary, but with a modern twist: when they ‘define’ words, or more accurately, weaponize them, those definitions act like a software update for their followers’ brains.

Once that linguistic update is installed, the ‘metaphor lives them.’ If the word ‘Opposition’ is redefined as ‘Existential Threat,’ the ‘Argument as War’ framework becomes the only operating system available. At that point, people are no longer capable of seeing a differing perspective as a valid counterpoint; they can only perceive it as an ‘attack’ to be neutralized.

If we want to fix our discourse, we have to stop being the passive hardware for these polarizing updates. We need to reclaim our agency and move from ‘Politics as a Zero-Sum Game’ to ‘Politics as a Civic Workshop,’ where we question the metaphors before they dictate our reactions.

Hi Anita,

Please don’t feel bad. The “reduction” I felt wasn’t a wound you inflicted; it was a perfect example of the very “prison” we are talking about, how labels, even well-intentioned ones, can feel like walls. I shared that I felt “reduced” in the moment because I’ve found that when I hide those feelings to avoid conflict, they become harder to release. I thought you deserved the honesty of the experience rather than my silence. I felt that as growth.

When you say, “Maybe it’s better that we don’t communicate further,” I see the Prison House of Language in real-time. It’s that point where the frustration of words failing leads us to believe that silence is the only way to stay safe. But we aren’t missing each other because we are failing; we are missing each other because language is a blunt tool. If we stop talking to “do no harm,” the walls just stay where they are.

I’m not hurt; I’m just noticing the boundaries of the wicker basket. I’ll be honest: my poem was an exit from the topic. I felt a sense of failure in starting it, realizing I was trying to use the very thing I was questioning to somehow step outside of it. It felt like a ‘clever’ labor of the mind that was only creating more walls, so the poem was my way of letting go of that specific effort and stepping back into a simpler space. I still plan to exit the topic, but see in context it was badly done.

You asked how I see your “concrete” language as abstract. It’s interesting to me that even the word “concrete” is actually a very powerful abstraction. We take a material from the physical world, something hardened and solid and use it as a metaphor to describe a way of thinking and seeing the world. That isn’t wrong, just something to notice so we don’t get trapped. When is it that our language creates or limits the experience of how we see the world?

When you hold onto a construct like “the non-duality of human early reactions” as a concrete fact, it can ironically become a prison. It blends psychology, philosophy and perhaps even spiritualty into a fixed lens that suggests we are all “reactors” following the same rules. That creates a “fixed” version of oneself and others that assumes a predictable result of the past, rather than a person here in the present.

When “Do No Harm” or “Non-Duality” become fixed rules, they dictate our reality (Silence). I’d much rather we “do harm” by accidentally bumping into each other and then talking through it, than “do right” by never speaking again.

The ‘green grass’ isn’t a place where no one ever trips; it’s just a place where there’s enough room to get back up.

Anita, thank you for taking the time to think through all of this and for trying to understand the differences in how we communicate. I find it helpful.

I want to share something honestly and from the heart. When you describe my way of speaking as coming from a rigid childhood or inner chaos, I feel reduced by that. The explanation feels like a cage. It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that it turns my way of communicating into a psychological diagnosis. And that’s actually part of what I meant earlier about how language can trap us and others without us noticing.

You say you speak concretely, and I believe that’s how it feels from the inside. However from the outside, I see you doing something quite abstract as well… creating theories about me, interpreting motives, building symbolic stories about childhood. That’s not a criticism; I actually relate to those stories, though confused when you say you don’t understand abstract thought… Perhaps a reminder that we’re both shaped by the languages we grew up inside, and we both sometimes mistake our own style for the ‘real’ one.”

I don’t want either of us to give up our way of speaking and every style (language) has limits, and can create misunderstandings, even cages, we don’t always notice. In a way, this whole exchange is exactly what I meant by the “prison house of language”: how words can open us and confine us and others sometimes.

I appreciate your effort to meet me, and I see that we’re both trying to do that without losing our own way of expressing things and losing ourselves. In that light perhaps I should add that don’t speak abstractly to be clever or evasive. It’s simply how I make sense of the world and how I stay connected to myself. It’s the way I avoid collapsing into someone else’s frame, and it protects parts of me that were never clearly mirrored for me.

I actually feel something similar in your writing… there’s a depth of feeling in what you write that goes beyond the concrete…

A note on the parable. Perhaps it would be helpful to add that I was originally trying to make an argument about how we often mix up our spiritual lives and our politics. I was wondering if we’ve started asking them to do things they weren’t built for: we load spiritual practice with an urgency it can’t always carry, and we expect political action to give us a kind of “awakening” that it can’t really deliver.

I was getting so tangled up in those big, heavy words I felt like the mirror-maker in the story—trying to decide if I should be making a “shield” or just holding the “glass.”

The parable was the only way I could find to step out of the argument and just breathe. It’s exactly like you said, Anita: sometimes we just need to find a way to be human again when the “abstract” starts to feel like a wall.

Still, I notice that the parable is abstract… for me, it is my emotional language, a attempt to paint a picture. It’s how I feel my way through.