When was the last time you paused – truly paused – and considered the natural world around you?
When you look at a tree, or a patch of strawberries, or a body of water, do you see an object, or do you see a living being?
I’m reading the most beautiful book right now called Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin is a botanist, professor, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her book is an intricate blending of indigenous wisdom and scientific facts, and it’s full of all sorts of surprising insights. For example: modern languages are about 30% verbs and 70% nouns. We view most everything around us as ‘things’, objects or resources which are meant to be used. By contrast, Native American languages are the exact opposite – 70% verbs, 30% nouns. When talking about a body of water, they wouldn’t say “that is a river” or “that is a bay” – they would talk about it as being a river or being a bay. This is because Native Americans believe that almost everything in this world is alive, and that water, for example, would naturally therefore choose what it wanted to be at any given time – a bay, a river, a cloud, a pond.
I can’t stop thinking about how the language we use can either give something animacy, and therefore life, or take it away. How different would our relationship with nature be if we gave it life through our way of talking about it? Since I have been immersing myself in this topic, I’ve found myself thanking trees for the paper I write on and apologizing to plants for absentmindedly picking off leaves. We were discussing these ideas in our book club last week, imagining what it would be like to bring these concepts into a leadership workshop. Jokingly, I said “Can you imagine? We’d say, ‘Go on, what do you want to say to the strawberries?’” and my friend Beth, without missing a beat, said “And then we’d ask: ‘And what are the strawberries saying back?’”
This week’s poem, by Hafiz, brings these ideas to life in a poem where an apple tree, the clouds, and the sun all have agency and provide for us. I hope it inspires you to pause and consider your relationship with all the life that exists around you, even if not in human (or animal) form.
