Words With Impact: Deepen Vocabulary with Ambiguity

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“One is poised on the Threshold of life waiting to be born. It’s an ongoing process. Some of us are not happy unless we are born over and over again, still trying to get it right.” Tim Wynne-Jones

And sometimes we need a sense of ambiguity to discover new possibilities.

Memory gives us the process of choice and decision-making and thresholds. Our understanding grows and our perspectives shift. A right choice made once before has now become a wrong choice. An ordinary day shifts suddenly into the unexpected—sometimes by events—sometimes morally.

Scripture stories, fairy-tales and folk-tales speak this language into our hearts. We’re not left without access to wisdom or experience. Others have taken this journey and we find hints how to find our way through.

The day began on an ordinary walk through the woods with their father searching for food, but this time Hansel and Gretel are abandoned. They step into the unknown. Many of their choices are made without mature knowledge but they rely on instinct. Red Riding Hood travels a familiar path to her grandmother’s house, but comes back from one visit completely different, or is she?

The added beauty from a journey perspective is that the reality of common day-to-day activities can be developed into shadows, as passages from long ago or as foretelling to the future. All also have the potential to tap into echoes and allusions and metaphors. It opens up creativity and new beginnings. “Which way is in and which way is out.”

  

Action Steps:

Although nothing illegal has happened to your protagonist, she begins to notice some discrepancies in the paperwork she is responsible for tracking. When she asks her boss he dismisses it as unimportant. However she realizes that only her signature is on the documents. And she really needs this job.

1. What are her options?

2. What course of action does she choose and why?

3. What effect could each of these possibilities create?

Share: What word best captures her dilemma?

Read deep, marcy

Build a Story World

Thresholds of Ambiguity

Wynne-Jones refers to this as a pulse outside of oneself. “There is about Thresholds this ambiguity of which way is in and which way is out.”

 

Hansel and Gretel are left to find their way in the woods. Red Riding Hood travels a familiar path but comes back from one visit completely different, or is she? The wolf comes calling through the doors of the Three Little Pigs.

“At the door of the house who will come knocking?

An open door, we enter

A closed door, a den

The world pulse beats outside my door.”

                                                            Pierre Albert Birot

(As shared by Tim Wynne-Jones as another quote from Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space.)

The long running series Stargate enfolds this aspect of ambiguity each time the characters step through the pulsing gate to enter a wormhole. Even when they return to a familiar world, life may have dramatically changed. Or at least the possibility always exists making each entrance ambiguous.

Exercise:

1.     Wynne-Jones refers to this as an ongoing process using the image of a life waiting to be born over and over again trying to get it right.

What other images would fit into the concept of a repeated pulse as an ongoing climb towards completion.

Share: What image did you choose?

Memory

“One is poised on the Threshold of life waiting to be born. It’s an ongoing process. Some of us are not happy unless we are born over and over again, still trying to get it right.” Tim Wynne-Jones

Thresholds of Ambiguity

Memory gives us the process of choice and decision-making and thresholds. Our understanding grows and our perspectives shift. A right choice made once before has now become a wrong choice. An ordinary day shifts suddenly into the unexpected—sometimes by events—sometimes morally.

Scripture stories, fairy-tales and folk-tales speak this language into our hearts. We’re not left without access to wisdom or experience. Others have taken this journey and we find hints how to find our way through.

The day began on an ordinary walk through the woods with their father searching for food, but this time Hansel and Gretel are abandoned. They step into the unknown. Many of their choices are made without mature knowledge but they rely on instinct.

Red Riding Hood travels a familiar path to her grandmother’s house, but comes back from one visit completely different, or is she?

The added beauty from a journey perspective is that the reality of common day-to-day activities can be developed into shadows, as passages from long ago or as foretelling to the future. All also have the potential to tap into echoes and allusions and metaphors. It opens up creativity and new beginnings. “Which way is in and which way is out.”

In the movie Avatar, new arrival Jake Sully has no qualms about gathering intelligence on the Na’vi and their world. Jaded by his twin brother’s death and his own injuries, he just wants to walk again. And then he begins a dual life living among the Na’vi and reporting on them. Gradually his values change as he recognizes the threshold he is aiming for has moral consequences far greater than he imagined.

Will the journey chosen to find shelter bring death or freedom?

Journal Prompt:

Although nothing illegal has happened to your protagonist, she begins to notice some discrepancies in the paperwork. When she asks her boss he dismisses it as unimportant. However she realizes that only her signature is on the documents. And she really needs a job. What are her options? What course of action does she choose and why?