borrowed words – Page 2

One of my favourite winter words is apricity.

a-PRIS-uh-tee

Simply, it means the warmth of the sun in the winter.

A bright sun blots out the silhouette of someone walking through snow covered trees.

It is a poetic word, in a way.

The word apricity has an ineffable quality in that it is difficult to articulate what it means to someone who has never gone for a long winter walk under a brisk blue sky and felt the radiant heat of the sun on your cheeks contrasting with the frozen air.

Apricity is the tangible tingling that pat your on the shoulders when you break from the shadows of snow-covered trees and step out into a ray of sunlight.

The feeling of the sun crawling over the horizon late in the morning of a deep winter run and warming the bits of exposed flesh chilled by the pre-dawn trails is apricity.

I live in a climate where apricity is less rare, but still a cherished moment in which to pause and let it all wrap around you like a wool blanket no matter where you are or what you are doing.

The warmth of the sun in the winter. Apricity.

I’ve been using the name Bardo as a username for a few years, and it turns out that this is a word that I inadvertently borrowed from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.

I write “borrowed” because in real life my name is Brad.

Brad becomes Bard becomes Bardo just so easily.

Yet, having used it for a while and then thinking about it a lot since, there is a significant degree of existential overlap between what I intend towrite about on this site, and what the metaphorical expression of the original term loosely means.

Used loosely, “bardo” is the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one’s next birth, when one’s consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. Metaphorically, bardo can describe times when our usual way of life becomes suspended, as, for example, during a period of illness or during a meditation retreat.
– Wikipedia on “Bardo”

Given that Buddhism is a religious philosophy and not a culture, per se, I’m going to make a huge assumption and say that I don’t really view co-opting philosophical ideas and constructs as appropriation any more than trying to learn a foreign language might be cultural appropriation. It’s about communication and understanding.

And if I think about the overlap of the idea of bardo (as much as my undertrained mind can process it) as a kind of transitional purgatory between everyday life on one hand and a kind of idealized state of existence on the other…

… well, that seems a bit like a campout in the woods to me.