Hidden messages have a funny way of revealing themselves.

I see hidden messages wherever I look — in the lessons I learn through my mistakes and successes, in the many serendipitous events that happen (all the damn time) in my life, and even in the more obvious place: in the words I read around me.

I decided to highlight a few of the hidden messages in the cloud wordle created from the most frequently used words on my site.

Since Google kindly provided me with a list of my most frequently used words here on Joyful to Hear, I amused myself by pasting it into http://www.wordle.net/ and building a pretty word picture out of the list. And I made the image my desktop…

And after a while I started to notice that some of the words seemed to naturally pair with those they abutted – the most notable being rediscovering summer, the name of one of my more recent posts.

Hidden messages have a funny way of revealing themselves – some hide until close scrutiny reveals them, while others can’t be found except by lucky glance. And so it was that I saw these – each time I looked at the original image, a new phrase popped out.

It took only a few minutes of work in Photoshop to highlight the phrases I saw, and the image above is the result – most of them describe my recent life, but two of them seem to offer some advice on how to move forward, a simple and easy mantra:

Name truth & speak hope.

I like it.