The Speaking Earth

In the last hundreds of years, we humans have separated ourselves from the animate beings with whom we share our earthly home.  We have stripped consciousness, purpose and agency from these beings, our ancestors and teachers.  Imagining humans alone have the gift of language, we deafen ourselves to the wisdom they offer.

Yet, other voices speak of other kinds of intelligences.  Enter into these invocations; come walk and listen   with me.  Let’s allow these other ways of knowing to rise up through the bottom of our feet and send mycellial 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.

And here is a bit more on the power of language from David Abram, Becoming Animal.

“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.”

David Abram