I’m in my room, I can hear my alarm clock ticking. My bed is warm but my feet feel cold. My ears are ringing. I hear a car door outside, and a low rumble of city traffic. My shoulders feel uncomfortable as I hunch them writing this, but as I bring my awareness to them, they lower and the discomfort goes.
I’ve was recommended to read Robin Wall Kimmerer, in particular a chapter on language and the natural world. By addressing hills, rivers, mountains as verbs, not nouns, they immediately become alive. Ways of using language separate us (humans) from it (nature). Imagine, says Robin Wall Kimmerer, if all nature was addressed like this. It could be revolutionary. How would we extract stone from the middle of tiny island if the island was addressed as a living thing? We would have to say thank you, we would have to ask permission before we started. And the island’s life and vitality would remain in those stones after they were taken.
This is a way of shifting attention, and therefore partly slowing it down, redirecting the focus of our attention to be able to connect more. So, attention can be form of connection, from me to a thing, but now I think about be to another living entity, and therefore, the possibility of conversation exists. You can talk to a living thing, you can’t talk to dead one. Conversations with (the) living.
Thinking about this, my whole language system seems deficient. I have heard the term ecolinguistics and I realise this is a whole area of investigation, with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words on indigenous language are part of an important way of thinking about biodiversity. There are so many languages, systems of belief of worship, understanding and relationship to the land and nature that are wiped out by colonisers.
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