Creating a New Language
When ecologists talk about the great web of life, they speak about how each thread in that web is connected. That if we tug on one end, we are really pulling on them all. We might do better in these troubled times if we could see ourselves as just one thread in the living web. We are no more its master than the birds and butterflies that now visit me daily. Each of us is a string, even if from our vantage point we believe that we are the only significant one.
It would seem to me that we need a whole new vocabulary to speak about nature and about us in general. It is not "us" and "them" like we are playing on two separate sports teams. That kind of thinking has robbed us of our ability to see that it is not a sport at all. There are no winners and losers when all of us are playing on the same team - and we are, of course.
Our forefathers, and some of our contemporaries still, argue about the uniqueness of humankind like our creation is more meaningful than the rest of it and that our "humanhood", therefore, comes with unique qualities that could never be present in the rest of the living world. I've often wondered why we believe that we are the only form of life capable of embracing it. Are other lifeforms really incapable of acknowledging their existence and sharing joy because they are alive?
When we work to reconnect ourselves to the rest of the living world by creating a living landscape it seems we often believe we are doing so like a good parent would give a gift to their child; like our actions are especially gracious because they were given with free will. I wish it weren't so. I want us to do it out of selfishness; to rip out our lifeless landscapes and recreate them because it is the only way that we, as a species, will ever find our way home again. It is, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about in Braiding Sweetgrass, a life given over to the concept of reciprocity. We give and we expect to get back. Our gifts are bound to come back to us if we don't create and give them with strings attached. Our connection to nature has largely been severed with the development of a different kind of economy - one where we take without gratitude because it is mine alone when I've paid for it. Nature and its bounty are an intrinsic part of what makes us natural, but we too often fail to recognize that in this crazy frenetic culture of ours. We do not own what gifts we've been given and each of them comes with a responsibility to make the most of it and to give thanks by doing so.
I realize that I am actually creating this new landscape of mine more for me than for anything else. I hope to recapture some of the connectivity that I've lost over the years and be able to position myself just a bit deeper inside this fishbowl I've been staring into these past years; not knowing that I'm actually pressing my nose against the glass instead of being fully immersed as I imagined myself to be. It would seem that we have to find a way back to our real seat at the table of life or we will be doomed to watch it shrivel and die - or maybe worse, find our noses at ever-greater distances away from the glass. I once thought that I reveled in the successes of my landscape because of the creatures that began visiting me, but I believe now that I have discovered that I am really reveling in the fact that I am, once again, being accepted back into the fabric of the world.
Your post today really resonated with me, especially since I just read the Goldenrod and Aster chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass. BTW - thank you for introducing this book in one of your online posts. I borrowed a library copy - which can now stay with me for the duration of our shelter-in-place.
ReplyDeleteDuring our morning feeding-and-communing with nature time, I was sharing some of what I remembered of that chapter with my husband. We talked a god bit about colors and how humans see differently from bees and birds. And about how the English language and scientific discourse affect our view of not-us. Like you, I am trying to view myself as part of that great web instead of an observer and manipulator of it. We do need a new language, or at least we need to add some new verbs to English - like a word that means "water who is being a bay."
Lovely, Craig. I am inspired again, to continue to reconnect with the natural world too. In my own exploration I am often perplexed about our role in the world. Sometimes I wonder if we who live in a metropolis really are doing the thing. Sometimes I think that I am luring wildlife to a place that overall is not healthy for them... once they leave my little postage stamp of a yard and venture next door where pesticides are used.
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