The Language of Animacy

In the beginning was the Word . . . Although I don’t identify as Christian so much as Multi-faith or ‘Faith embracing’, that phrase has always resonated at some deep level within me.

Words, language, and the way in which we use them hold such power. Today, savouring my reading of the wonderful Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer gifted me with one of those precious moments of illumination that shift the world on its axis.

A language of things

I had never particularly thought about how the distribution of a particular type of word in a language may mediate our relationship with the world. English is a noun-based language, a language of things. We make that which is not human an ‘it’, an object. Potentially, in so doing, we create a barrier between the human and everything else that makes it much easier to disrespect, despoil and destroy. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, the words of being and doing.

Winter Lake Illumination
Winter Lake Illumination

A language of being

Learning her ancestral language, Potawatomi, Robin Wall Kimmerer was initially bewildered to discover that 70 percent of its words are verbs and that, whilst there is no dividing the world into masculine and feminine, the use of language is shaped by whether something is perceived as animate or inanimate.

It was the word for ‘bay’, which reads more like ‘to be a bay’, that provided that vital spark of understanding.

In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. . . But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
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This ‘grammar of animacy’ extends not just to plants and animals. It includes rocks and mountains, water and fire, places, sacred medicines, songs, drums, stories – anything that is imbued with spirit. The inanimate forms of language are largely reserved for objects made by people. It strikes me that, in our English speaking and many other Western cultures, our art, our music, our poetry is often an attempt to reclaim animacy.

Animate or inanimate?

I remember my daughter at a very young age fascinated by making the distinction between male and female, boy and girl. Today I find myself looking around me with the same fascination, trying to distinguish between animate and inanimate.

I hold up a small candle, burning in a glass jar. The glass and the candle itself feel inanimate, though the changing state of the wax gives me pause for thought. But the flame is so obviously animate.

Looking at my nightstand, made from reclaimed wood, I address it as something inanimate, but which has also once been animate. I wonder, though, if a table imbued with love, with a reverence for the tree from which it is hewn, built with artistry and skill, is animate or inanimate?

'Somebody' who visits almost daily - rabbit in snow
‘Somebody’ who visits almost daily

In truth, I identified at least to some extent as an animist from my teens, so this is not entirely new territory. The last five years, living so close to nature, this sense has bubbled up with increasing vigour. I perceive the Lake as my greatest teacher, so obviously ‘alive’. I automatically think of the creatures we see or become aware of as beings, as ‘somebody’, even the ticks and the mosquitoes! Likewise, the trees and plants, with whom my relationship deepens as each season passes. This sense of animacy and its implicit connectedness is part of the underpinning of my sense of joy.

I can’t help wondering, now, how other languages reflect and shape their speakers’ relationship with the world – what a fascinating area of study for one of my parallel lives.

Braiding silence with animacy

How wonderful it would be to have a living language, imbued with this sense of being, in which to think and speak and write. Some thirty years ago, I wrote a poem entitled The Speaking of Silence. I still aspire to learning the language of silence. But now I would wish to find some way to braid it together with the language of animacy.

Transformation, mystery and water

Fluent

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

~ John O’Donohue

I look out onto my beloved lake as it transforms, very visibly, from the illusory immobility of ice to its fluid state and I listen to what it has to tell me.

Water is the true stuff of life,
The deep mystery at the centre of all that is.

Water exists in a continuous state of flow,
a constant state of transformation.

Confronted by heat or cold, it turns shape-shifter;
mysterious mists weave their enchantments,
clouds build castles in the air,
Jack Frost traces ferns across the glass,
the land is pelted by hail and graupel,
and blanketed by a quilt of snow.

The lake freezes and, later, thaws;
watching the ice come in and leave
teaches me patience with the ebb and flow,
the unseen nature of transformation.
After days of retreat and revelation
a clear sheet forms over the returned water,
once – oh joy! – with the exquisite,
unexpected blooming of frost flowers.

Yet the process of change
continues inexorably,
moment by moment rewriting
the relationship between ice and water
in patterns of constriction and release,
of return to rigidity, then surge and flood.

Transformation exists
in every moment.
What is now
is not the same as what just was
or will be.

Out on the lake,
the ice lets go as we watch;
the clouds race across
the new-blue sky
casting shadow spells
or float in the emerging reflective stillness.

Clouds on ice and water

Beneath all is the constancy of water
and a process of transformation
without beginning or end.

Water is the true stuff of life,
but life is all transformation!

 

My inner transformation,
in this body that is more than 60% water,
is similarly complex.

There is much that goes unseen.
Just when it seems the ice is melting,
something inside rigidifies once more.

There are moments of unexpected joy and light,
but also times of constriction and the flood of overwhelm.

The lake reminds me that 
all is unfolding, in its own time,
exactly as it should.

As I embrace my own transitions,
may I remember that this moment is all that I have,
is all that I am or need to be.
Let me inhabit it fully,
wrap it round me like silk
then allow it to slip away . . .

Lake in transition

Transitions in the seasons of the soul

I think there are multiple layers to the manifestation of inner seasons.

The internal season

On occasion in the past I have been very conscious of a specific internal season, particularly of winters of the soul as times of dormancy, retreat, grieving even. This is one layer and, from this perspective, I see myself now as in a transition from a winter that has been a time of  mystery, of deep and subtle transformation, of stillness and silence, of hidden growth requiring patience and faith. 

What has been interesting is that, in paying attention to the shift in nature these last weeks, I sense that it is not some human failing that we rarely transition smoothly; if this is the path nature takes then it seems to me that the two-steps forward one-step back dance is an inherent aspect of the character of change.

Thaw - land steepingI see the land, still frozen, steeping in the thaw water that it is not yet ready to absorb, grungy, muddy, yet with hints of the possibility of spring. And I realize that I am content to live this within my own transition, to steep in a flood of insights that I am not yet fully able to soak up. I see the lake existing as thick white ice, clear glass and sparkling open water simultaneously and something inside me whispers ‘yes!’ in affirmation and recognition.  In focusing on the subtleties and nuances of this time between winter and spring, I am newly comfortable in my own space of between.

Water in three states - between seasons

Carrying all the seasons within

At another level, I am aware that I carry all the seasons within me, and can draw on the riches of each as I need or choose at any given time.

The turning of the year

Finally, there is the part of me that responds to the turning of the year, increasingly delighting in the changing rhythms that inform my living in both the exterior and interior worlds.

As winter leaves the lake . . .

 

Now, in this time of increasing intimacy with both the natural and the inner world, each season, each new manifestation, each day of brilliant sunshine or unrelenting rain, each moment, is becoming equally precious. This is becoming almost as true for the seasons of the soul as those of the year’s turning. I try to sit with each, knowing that all things pass.

 

Flexing very stiff poetry muscles, exploring eternal life

In a still very tentative flexing of underused poetry muscles, the idea behind the poem below came to me so vividly that it had to be written, even if not well! It speaks to a sudden deep internal awareness that particles are more or less constant in the universe; so all of us, in a way, have an eternal existence.

Eternal Life

When my human days are done

and I walk the path of the long goodbye

I will not be gone.

 

Will some particle of me take form

in rock or stone,

ruby’s heart or emerald’s gleam?

 

Or will my flash of green and red,

touched with gold,

draw your eye to the blur of hummingbird wings?

 
Lake and sky
 
 
Within the flow, catching the light

of the lake’s constant changing –

Is it there I’ll be?

 

Perhaps, in the creaking of branches

and the susurration of leaves,

you’ll sense a trace of me still.

 

Or maybe I’ll be a sprinkling

of stardust on indigo

somewhere far out in the universe.

 

It’s somehow comforting to know

that the particles that make up ‘I’

may scatter, but they (almost) never die!

 

February 7, 2018

 

I wrote my first poem before I could actually transcribe the words onto paper.

Then, in my teens, poetry and my deep connection to the natural world saved my sanity in an era when no-one considered the impact of significant loss and grief on an adolescent.

Every now and again, amid the roller-coaster demands of just living a life, the poetic impulse has bubbled briefly to the surface.

Now it feels as if it is time once again to tap into this part of me. But oh how rusty I feel, how hard it is not to become self-conscious, to lose the flow, to try too hard or not enough – I’m not yet sure which!

 

What does nature mean to me? Why is it important?

I was ever a child of nature, integrally connected with the rhythm of the seasons and with a strong link between external and internal realities.

Nature’s place in my life is as a sweet familiar melody running through my living,
it speaks the language of my soul;

it connects my roots to the beating heart of Mother earth
and it centers me in ‘now’ and ‘am’;

it lifts me out of the mire of day to day concerns;
gifting me moments of deep knowing and insight;

even in my darkest days, it anchors me to wonder and joy,
lighting my way back home to my best self;

it roots me in awareness of the constancy of change, unafraid,
and threads the cycles of dying and rebirth within my being;

it enfolds me in a living silence, rich in mystery,
opens the door to realms of myth and magic;

it inspires me to watch, to note, to listen,
sating my senses;

it draws from me a life-affirming reverence,
a deep resounding ‘yes’!

 

Nature - a rhapsody in blue - jay and lake

 

I’m very excited to be embarking on an exploration into Nature’s Poetry. Even this afternoon’s first foray into the preparatory work for Session 1, beginning to look at my personal connection with nature, has been richly nourishing.

I have, over the last couple of years, felt the pull back to my writing roots, which started with poems before I could even put pen to paper (I was three years old). So this online course speaks both to my deep sense of return and re-connection to nature in living rurally and to rediscovering a mode of expression that faltered as I focused on career and family.

What a delicious luxury it is to be invited down a path along which poetry, both in the reading and the writing, can illuminate one’s inner landscape! 

I intend to do my best to follow Mary Oliver‘s instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.