Before the pandemic, I drove to the Atlanta area. In Alpharetta, Georgia, which is part of Metro Atlanta, I attended a writers’ workshop at the public library. At the library, I saw the sculpture pictured here–a lion emerging from the pages of a book–and I photographed it. It captures an idea I had expressed when I wrote the following performance piece, “Your Words.” The piece is a “poem,” of sorts. I have posted it below:

Your Words

Words are powerful

Your words are powerful–because they create and shape

Reality.

What you say matters.

It matters to you.

And it matters to people around you, the ones who inhabit your experience.

Thoughts you create are emitted, as words, from the factory of your mind.

They filter through your mouth, your pen, your device

Into the Manifest.

Consider this:

What are you releasing into the world?

Smoke and ash? Are your words like smoldering trash?

Or do you speak fragrance and flow? Like honey and gardenias and gentle flakes of snow?

Know this:

What you release is what you increase.

Look around you.

Where are you in life?

Are you covered with soot? Buried beneath a heap of cold, gray rubble-trouble?

Or are you dancing a top a golden sea-swell of glittering angel dust?

If you don’t like where you are, change your words.

Call your Highest and best into being.

You create your own environment, within and without.

What comes out spells what you’re all about.

“Your Words” by Tina Murray / copyright Tina Murray, Ph. D. 2014. First performed (read aloud) by the author at the Co-Creators Coffeehouse Open Mic, Center for Spiritual Living, Nashville, Tennessee, on Friday, 04/04/2014. Photo credit: Tina Murray, Ph. D.