Play with words - Empower Words

Dear Ima Diary,

How difficult it is to sit down and just write, reflect about what happened, sometimes should be better to do it with fresh feelings but, here I am writing these, 3 weeks after the time I knew was the time (insert here lough in voice over). The funny thing is that I decided to called this a “diary” and is everything but a “diary”.

I have to confess that I waste most of the time in shock, thinking about all the homework I have repressed than actually taking action. I have multiple voices in my head trying to help without any success. Exactly that! The voices in my head, a narrator of the story, the way to tell it, the way to show it!

Last November 9th we (Imagineering students) had a lecture with Danielle Zandee. How powerful meeting about the power of words! I believe that nobody thought that after lunch and a shelling of tasks I was not prepared for that, well, I am never prepared anyway.

POETIC ACTIVISM

I started this talking about taking actions, and Danielle started talking about put words into action, - activism-: Take action for a cause. Have you ever think that using the right words in the right context can change the way people act or see the world? Have you ever think that we live our lifes following a story well or badly tolled? I am not sure when I started to realized that, provably moving abroad and discovering that my bubble, my traditions even my language had no sense; provably when I started to feel uncomfortable with the history through the stories that teachers, politicians, priests and system of power thought me; provably just now sitting in front a woman who is trying to share years of years of research in a couple of hours in front of a tiered audience.

Danielle started her speech asking, because a conversation becomes a conversation when someone is giving and some other is receiving, like now (I like to think that somebody someday is gonna read what I am writing, and this is not just a chat with my head and the voices in it). And there in a classroom we started a conversation.

“words create worlds” … The question now is what kind of world we want to create or re-create. Language is a powerful weapon which allows positive change, transform slow and filling with meaning realities and trigger evolution, it is not about behavior it is about mindsets, and a way to deconstruct them is with language: stories, metaphors and imagery.

In organizations, after understanding that they are conformed by people and people are the key for moving forward, improve and even innovate, conduct a dialogue in what matter most is the way to drive them into a new reality. Danielle invites us to think that for a just and sustainable society organizations need to be sensible, using appreciative inquiry (looking for positive paths and questioning the hidden clues into the obvious) and understanding that poetic language can be imaginative (stirs and stretch imagination), ambiguous (open to multiple perspective), touching (close to the emotions) and holistic (about interconnections, having in mind that the most important are relationships), therefore, poetic language is a tool to shake emotions and give space to dialogue and dream in different and complex levels.

Resignify was probably the word that pushed me to change my reality, first through the word itself knowing that I was comfortable enough to be uncomfortable, second taking actions moving into a different path and telling a new story, here from the attic of a Dutch house, drinking coffee and trying to give purpose to the mandatory homework request.

P.s. Did you notice that going in circles is my passion?

P.s. 2. I would like to think that I am not the only one who finds difficult to take action.

P.s. 3. One day I will tell this story feeling more proud than hurry.

P.s. 4. It is really hard to talk about language with a language that I don’t know completly, limiting my speech with my poor vocabulary.

With love,

My curious soul,

Laura