ON Language

Barry Lopez captures in his beautifully written essays his close and deep observations of places and beings: the Arctic, his stream near where he lives in Oregon, animals, wilderness, life. He recently died but hIs words live on as inspiration for why we do the work we do: “I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the earth.”
In the first blog I wrote about poetry as language that can capture what is beyond words-- like land, like earth, like nature. Lopez writes:“ The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.” Poetry and earth are layered. allow seeming contradictions, welcome paradox, ambiguity, mystery, all that is beyond “reason” and beyond language.
Both “languages” allow us to navigate interconnections that are complex, intricate, inexplicable--that are known and felt, that touch heart and spirit.I have been thinking of how language shapes how we see and understand ourselves and our place in the world, and how we accept concepts as “natural” rather than internalized and imposed cultural values. And how important it is to question what we have acccepted--to redefine our world, to revision, to remember an earlier way of seeing and naming which indigenious cultures still retain and which, as children, we knew.
How we look at earth--at land, water, trees, air--is shaped by the language we have inherited, seeing what have learned to see, accepting what we have learned. But what would it mean to see from the point of view of trees or plants, water or mountains...(or from native peoples before the invasion)? What does it mean that we have learned to see human beings (or some human beings) as “objects,” as commodities and earth as something to to be used and exploited, mined and drilled--as logs and timber rather than living trees, minerals (gold, uranium, copper), coal, oil, gas as valuable only in terms of what we can get from them.    What would it mean to see earth and water as living, as having rights to live, to see all beings as living beings, to view water and mountains as sacred and to value elders who know the land, the history and stories of each place on the earth on which they were born, as elders who still speak their native tongue, their language.
Throughout history those who want to dominate and suppress another culture have tried to silence people from speaking their own language (to restrict music, art, culture) commanding “the other” speak only the oppressor’s tongue and forget all they knew, to lose their language. In a recent newspaper article in our Post Star, people of different tribes spoke of the urgent necessity of protecting their elders from Covid, not just to save lives but to save knowledge, history, story, medicine, memory, wisdom..., revering the remnant still speaking the native tongue, still tied intimately to earth, revering mother earth. Mother, not object, not commodity, sacred.
PBS has a series “Standing on Sacred Ground” focusing on different indigenous people--shamans and elders--throughout our world-- in the Arctic, in Peru, in Australia and Hawaii, Ethiopia, New Guinea...all speaking in their own distinct native tongues, but also allspeaking the same language, able to communicate with each other about the sacred, the waters the earth. Sacred--a foreign tongue to so many of us, so rare--so direct, so honest, coming without artifice or rhetoric, no space between heart and words, like poetry.    Barry Lopez speaks of this honesty: “one of the reasons native people still living in some sort of close, daily association with their ancestral lands are so fascinating to those who arrive from the rural, urban, and suburban districts of civilization is because they are so possessed of authority. They radiate the authority of firsthand encounters. They are storehouses of it. They have not read about it, they have not compiled notebooks and assembled documentary photographs. It is important that they remember it. When you ask them for specifics, the depth of what they can offer is scary. It’s scary because it’s not tidy, it doesn’t lend itself to summation. By the very way that they say what they know, they suggest they are still learning something that cannot, in the end, be known.”    Lopez writes what i have often felt when individuals standing on the ground of their own experience are silenced or told their words and experiences are stupid, invalid, not scientific:”Firsthand knowledge is enormously time consuming to acquire, with its dallying and lack of end points, it is out of phase with the short term demands of modern life. It teaches humility and fallibility and so represents an antithesis to progress. It makes a stance of awe in the witness of natural process seem appropriate and attempts at summary of knowledge naive. Historically, tyrants have sought selectively to eliminate firsthand knowledge when its sources lay outside their control. By silencing those with problematic firsthand experiences, they reduced the number of potential contradictions in their political or social designs and so they felt safer.”
I respect science and all it has allowed us to see and understand on very deep levels. It is information and facts that enable us to see clearly the catastrophic effects of climate change, of what is happening because of fossil fuels, emissions, consumption, human actions. But I also understand how science can be used to silence, whether the eskimos in their lands or the mothers who saw toxins poisoning their children in Love Canal, Flint Michigan, and around the world, the knowledge of those on the ground who are thought ignorant, “housewives” questioned by “the authorities” in power, by politicians and legal procedures..
I think of words like “progress,” unrestrained growth and obscene consumption--how they are defined as success, “good, and think where that progress, consumption, profit, greed have taken us, how they have removed us from our actual experience of what really makes for happiness and wealth, separated us from our hearts and senses.    I think of alternative ways of seeing: a feedback loop (rather than a linear line), circular growth, interdependence and interconnection, community, earth as gift, gratitude for that gift, reciprocity. Instead of gross national product, i think of gross national happiness, the need to rethink what we thought we knew, to question how those in power have defined our reality, and the need to redefine and revision what is sacred,
I’ll end this long blog with other words of Barry Lopez about both poetry and earth and beauty: “Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.” And, “ We cannot, of course, save the world because we do not have authority over its parts. WE can serve the world
though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.” I think that is what we, in this website and in our actions, are trying to do, here and now.