When something means something else, or when someone means some thing, we are stating that there’s a correspondence between one thing and another thing. In translation, we might ask what amour or Liebe ‘means’ in English, which is to say ‘what word in my language corresponds to that word in yours?”
As I stated a little bit ago, “meaning” is a relational word, and there’s no co-incidence that something “meaningful” to us is often said to give us ‘reason to live.’
From the ancient philosophers, alchemists, astrologers, and magicians we have the search for the key to correspondence between one thing and another. From the modern science, we have the search for the reason for the relationship, the reckoning of something’s being and existence and its correspondence to natural laws.
That is, they both search for the same key—meaning. Not Truth as we think of it, but Meaning. What does it mean when an organism behaves in a certain way to certain stimulae, and why does it do that? What does it mean when planets conjunct or I cast a circle and something appears, and why does it do that?
–Rhyd Wildermuth at The Wild Hunt
Amongst Rhyd’s points, I think he points to the intersection of Truth, Meaning, and Love, but I get the sense that Meaning also requires us to immerse ourselves, to acknowledge our relation to what we’re trying to make meaning about and how we interconnect to what we’re making or discovery meaning about. This kind of act is necessarily one of empathy and sympathetic relationality, or else you reject empathy and work to make the events “meaningless” to you.