A wide range of meaning
belongs generally to the nature of every word.
This fact, again, arises rom the mystery of language.
Language admits of two things:

One, that it be reduced to a mere system of signs,
uniformly available to everybody,
and in this form be enforced as binding;

And two, that language at one great moment
says one unique thing, for one time only,
which remains inexhaustible
because it is always originary,
and thus beyond the reach of any kind of leveling.

The two possibilities of language are so far removed from each other
that we should not be doing justice to their disparity
even if we were to call them extreme opposites…

Why this reference to language?
In order to stress once again that we are moving within language,
which means moving on shifting ground or, still better,
on the billowing waters of an ocean.

What Is Called Thinking? by Martin Heidegger, Part II, Lecture VII, published 1968

There is a story told in three of the four Gospel texts that makes my mind spin like a top. The Gospel of Luke is the sole account that omits this miracle story. I refer to the ” Jesus walks on water” which is relayed with some variation in Matthew, Mark, and John’s Gospel. If I allow myself to consider in a common sense mode the scene of an adult male balancing, one foot in front of the other, erect and striding upon a heaving liquid surface, I simply give up, – the notion collapses under the weight of the absurd. Water in liquid form, as it stands, shows nothing of such a property, for anyone.

On the other hand, I cannot elude the sense that depending on the quality of a shared relationship, what obtains between myself and another individual, or myself and to certain pieces of music, or maybe to a photograph or to a painting – I feel a numinous, transforming effect, and I cannot be the person that I formerly was, as consequence of that relationship. Such transformative experience happens to me seldom or at times, very often. I am not in control in any way, I simply encounter and am encountered. Without any of the common cause and effect expectations: BOOM! beauty and meaning sneaks up on me. 

It’s as if I am walking on water, present and involved with a cosmic excellence, a will to increased articulated fineness of beauty, such as an elegance of movement, etc., etc..

Maybe you are in a position, have an angle of view to “see” what I mean to say.

Martin Heidegger writes that the second of the two features of language, is as unaccounted, as “ex nihilo”, as a walking-on-water.

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This morning a few minutes were spent remembering Annie Dillard. She passed away on September 15th. Her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “set my hair on fire”. In life, I am better grounded, since I read what she wrote in 1976