Sound is a formative force: we are shaped by what we hear. Our ancient primate ancestors lived bathed in sounds, the language of a vibrant fecund new earth busy with love’s work of evolution. Humans first learned to speak by listening to the musical language that surrounded them, the living intelligence it conveyed. The whistling of wind through red rock canyons, the call and response of crashing waves and sand susurration, the intricately accurate newscasting systems of bird language. We also heard stones speak silently as they broadcast their electromagnetic fields into soil and water. Their minerals still speak in our bloodstream as health and vibrancy: our well-being falters without mineral language. Plant dialogue tells of nutrition, medicine, pleasure.
We grew up in this river of language, and out of this our human speech arose to naturally imitate and reflect the life-force that sounded all about us. Our original languages were expressive of broad sense perception, wide expanses of movement, of nuanced felt-experiences in this sensuous earth; they were languages of verbs. The native Potawatomi language even today contains seventy percent verbs. As we live further removed from the wild, living earth we recede further into mental conceptions of the world. More and more removed from our wild and sensuous selves, we find our language today composed of seventy percent nouns. Verbs tell us about the activities of beings; nouns name things. Having devalued the being-ness of earth ancestors, we now live in a small perceptual prison this narrowing of language both reflects and perpetuates.
Other voices speak of other kinds of intelligences. Enter into these invocations and listen. Let’s allow these other ways of knowing to rise up through the bottom of our feet and send mycelial networks’ delicate strands of mind through our pores. Allow earth-knowing to percolate up through our strata; it is fresh groundwater bringing life to barren thought. Perhaps our moistened words will grow wings and spiral upward on warm currents or grow foliated and plentiful, reaching into arid regions of mind to seed the clouds of thought and call sweet rain.
From my book of Earth Poems, A Litany of Wild Graces ~ Meditations on Sacred Ecology
And From David Abram
“The written word carries a pivotal magic – the same magic that once sparkled for us in the eye of an owl or the glide of an otter. Let us release the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things and beings themselves, to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. Let us find phrases that place us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland. Let us plant words like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs, letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.”
Forward Wild Graces to a friend
There they’ll find Nesting Circles of Belonging ~ Family, Nature and Cosmos.
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Photo: Stephen Crane