<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/tag.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-121" title="tag" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/tag-300x216.jpg" alt="" width="342" height="247" /></a>

I love words. Always have. When words are combined in surprising and quirky ways, I love them even more. When they're used in highly visual ways, I get really excited.

It's probably not surprising that I love tag clouds, too. When Dorie and I were recently redesigning my blog and thinking about which widgets to keep or add and which ones to do away with (or at least to move down in the hierarchy), my tag cloud was the one thing I refused to let go of.

My attachment to tag clouds has a lot to do with my fundamental love for words—loving how they look and sound, their textures and shapes, their potential to be funny, witty and heart-wrenching. But I also love tag clouds because they somehow define the undefinable. They establish and give definition to that in-between space that might otherwise feel like Nowheresville. Take this string of words from my tag cloud:

Facebook  fear  forgiveness  freelancing  God  grandma  guilt  harvest  hope  humor

What does it mean, exactly? Who knows? Who cares? It's not about what it means, it's about how it feels and how it makes you feel. It says something very clearly, without <em>meaning</em> anything at all. I like that. It moves the emphasis away from meaning, which is what we tend to cling to when we're dealing with words, and it refocuses us on feeling, something we more commonly reserve for art and photography.

As a visual person with pretty much no artistic talents, I've often felt more limited by words than I'd like to be. As a person living a life somewhere in between many societal norms, labels tend to make me feel claustrophobic. I don't want to be pegged as simply The Christian, or just The Divorcee. I don't want to be The Political Blogger or The Foodie or The Sentimental Sappy One (which was what has been worrying me since I wrote two posts in a row about my grandmothers).

Maybe tag clouds just provide an easy way for me to wiggle my way out of being pegged or defined, and maybe that's OK. Because I don't think it's a shift to a place that's more abstract and vague. Tag clouds bring clarity and restore balance, by putting divorce and church, hope and guilt, anger and forgiveness, and even Grandma and Barack Obama all into the same picture. And that, to me, is an accurate picture of life.

(Btw, I created the tag cloud at the top of my post at <a href="http://wordle.net/">Wordle</a>. If you have a blog and feel like creating a Wordle tag cloud for it, please leave a link here. I'd love to see a tag cloud image of whatever it is you're about.)