The world is Alive
You know that feeling when you encounter something “new”, whether its an idea, an object, a person, or a place, and something inside you responds with recognition? It’s a curious feeling that can be easily dismissed as it doesn’t quite fit into our rational model of the world. THAT feeling is the one I want to hear stories from you about. Where were you? Who or what or how was it? What did you do with the feeling? Did you investigate further? What did you find? Tell me everything!
Our lives are filled to the brim with these little mysterious moments and details. The overly generous winter rains and unfurling of leaves and spring remind me of something I’ve want to share. I’m curious if it revives something similar within you. For me, it felt like a smack on the forehead obvious truth that made me look at the birch trees in our backyard and think “Well of course, I’m sorry that I forgot.”
The moment came a few years ago while I was reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It was the chapter “ Learning the Grammar of Animacy” where she began to describe learning to speak Potawatomi the native language of her ancestors (tragically, like many of the three hundred and fifty Indigenous languages of the Americas the powers of assimilation did their work and there are only nine fluent speakers of Potawatomi left in the world today).
“European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate…To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses though all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.”
Because Robin says it best, I have to share another piece of her writing.
“Imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, “Look, it is making soup. It has grey hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”
Not only does she find that living beings are considered animate but also rocks, mountains, water, fire, places, medicines, songs, drums and even stories. The list of inanimate is much smaller and consists of objects that are made by people. “Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say, “What is it? And we answer Dopen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, “Who is that being? And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is…The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.”
Doesn’t this beautiful language remind you of the magic of childhood? Before we traded imagination in favor of rationality and a strictly material world. While my own childhood feels far and faded, there are these glimmers of salmon berry bushes, banana slugs, and a long lawn behind our townhouse with no fences between all the neighbors. Or perhaps, the language touches something even deeper than childhood.
The past few weeks during my neighborhood walks with Bear. I’ve caught myself being mesmerized by the water flowing ever so gently along side the curb. The word “soft” would come to mind along with a tranquil feeling that brought on inklings of something that can’t be named, but in an effort to give you something it would be “primordial”. I wan’t just looking at water, it was rainfall from the previous nights clouds, moving, lolling, and mixing with sediment. This water was animate and alive and even, dare I say, speaking.
There is so so so much to open to, to become aware of, to communicate, and to interact with in this incredible world. One of my favorite parts of the insights Robin gives, is the wisdom offered within the language that not only is the world inhabited by “Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world.” But the implications are that these beings are aware and can interact with us too. Robin calls them “teachers, holders of knowledge, and guides”.
Everything you look at, looks back at you.
Thank you for being on this journey with me.
With Love,
Nicole