"Wonder is not a luxury of childhood but a biological capacity; the mind remembering its kinship with the living world." Yeah... this was a really, really good article.
You are right that we are losing words for the living world. But you are still describing this as though it were mainly a tragedy of forgetting, a sadness of melting glaciers, a thinning of ancestral memory, a diminishment of wonder. All true, but not enough.
Because what is happening is not merely loss.
It is replacement.
The words are not simply vanishing. They are being outcompeted by a more aggressive vocabulary: brand names, platform grammar, algorithmic cues, administrative categories, monetised identities, flattened image-streams, and the dead syntax of systems built to process humans as units rather than beings. The child who cannot name the plants around him but can name dozens of brands is not just suffering a deficit of education. He is living inside a hostile linguistic regime.
That matters. Because once you frame the crisis only as erosion, people respond with nostalgia. They write elegies. They protect what remains. They host workshops on wonder. Fine. But nostalgia is too weak a force against an active enclosure system.
The age is not merely forgetting the living world. It is being retrained away from it.
The glacier metaphor is beautiful, but dangerous if left alone. Beautiful, because it carries memory, slowness, and deep time. Dangerous, because poetry can become a sedative. The machine loves when its critics remain lyrical. It is happy for you to compare words to ice while it is standardising perception, capturing attention, and replacing ecological intimacy with infinitely scrollable simulation. The filing system has no natural enemy in metaphor alone.
And you still speak as though language and perception are primarily cultural treasures.
But they are not only that. They are infrastructure.
A word like bergschrund does not merely decorate consciousness. It opens a channel of contact with reality that would otherwise remain unavailable. To lose that word is to lose a perceptual instrument. And when enough such instruments are lost, a civilisation no longer merely speaks less beautifully. It becomes less able to register the world it depends on.
That is not an aesthetic problem.
That is a survival problem
So yes, there is an ecology of perception. But ecologies can be poisoned.
Modern civilisation has poisoned its own perceptual ecology by reorganising language around extractability, transportability, and speed. It prefers terms that travel well through institutions, platforms, markets, funding models, dashboards, and feeds. It prefers words that reduce variance. Words that classify. Words that scale. Words that strip the world of its reciprocal thickness and convert it into manageable objects.
Once that happens, the living world does not disappear first in matter.
It disappears first in grammar.
The river becomes “water resource”.
The forest becomes “timber reserve”.
The child becomes “user”.
The animal becomes “stock”.
The mountain becomes “asset”.
The person becomes “human capital”.
The glacier becomes “climate indicator”.
And eventually even language itself becomes “content”.
This is how a civilisation loses reality before it loses territory.
So yes, again I say it - you are right. We are losing words for the living world. But the deeper truth is harsher: we are losing the perceptual organs those words once sustained.
This is not just cultural erosion. It is civilisational reconditioning.
The machine does not merely distract us from the world. It replaces the grammar by which the world can still appear as alive.
And once a people can no longer name what is living, they become available for any regime that wishes to treat life as inventory.
Yes, I agree with you, and glad that you’ve said it more outright and directly, and brilliantly. You’ve truly summed up what we’re experiencing as humanity. These empires built on attention are predatory. I am much more direct with my high school students about this subject, trying to get them to understand.
You are also right about the danger in romanticizing this topic. It is something that colonial cultures rely on. Fascism loves nostalgia and the mechanization of “assets”. You’ve pointed this out so well.
I am from Montana, and live with the consequences of romantic myth-making, particularly of the American West. I had a choice in this essay, and I went for the more lyrical version. Partly because I believe if I were more direct and cutting, that I would simply be perpetuating the very same machine that you’ve described so well. We’re going numb. In order for people to truly feel the loss, I believe that they need to tap into their emotional body and longing, to give them a way to enter grief. Ecological activists, like Joanna Macy, understood that in order for people to mobilize and metabolize the scale of loss and destruction, that they had to move through grief first.
Your thoughts on this topic are great, thank you for re-framing this so smartly and directly, of pointing out the truth. I am very grateful for your reflection.
Grief is not decoration. It is metabolic. A civilisation that cannot grieve cannot tell the truth about what it has destroyed. Joanna Macy understood that. You are right to say that people often need to feel the loss before they can bear the scale of it. A body that has gone numb does not respond first to argument. It responds to rupture, image, memory, longing, and the sudden return of feeling. So no, I would not dismiss the lyrical register. In a deadened culture, lyricism can reopen the sensorium. It can bring the organism back online.
But here is the danger.
The machine also knows how to metabolise longing.
It knows how to turn grief into aesthetic atmosphere.
It knows how to sell ache without consequence.
It knows how to let people feel beautifully devastated while nothing in the structure is named sharply enough to threaten the structure itself.
That is the line I am trying to guard.
Because colonial culture does not only survive through blunt force and extraction. It also survives through permitted feeling. Through carefully aestheticised sadness. Through the romance of disappearance. Through a kind of elegiac sincerity that lets people mourn the living world while continuing to participate in the systems killing it. In that sense, nostalgia is not merely a right-wing pathology. It is also one of empire’s favourite anaesthetics. Empire is perfectly happy for people to sing mournful songs beside the river, so long as nobody names the dam, the bond issue, the property regime, the cattle contract, the software layer, the school grammar, the platform architecture, and the labour abstraction that made the river unreadable in the first place.
So I would say this:
You were right to choose lyricism as an entry.
But lyricism must not become the whole house.
The wound needs song, yes.
It also needs incision.
If you only cut, people armour up.
If you only sing, the machine harvests the song.
The task is more difficult than either mode by itself. It is to move people through three thresholds:
First, let them feel the loss.
Second, show them the machinery.
Third, force the reconnection between the feeling and the structure, so that grief does not evaporate into mood but condenses into perception, refusal, and changed design.
That is the full arc.
The age has too much bluntness already, yes, and, it also has too much atmosphere.
Too much beautifully worded sorrow with no thermodynamic accounting attached. Too much reverence that stops just short of naming the predator. Too much ecological devotion that becomes a brand of sensitivity rather than a grammar of resistance.
So my answer to you is not: be less lyrical.
It is: be lyrical with teeth.
Let the reader enter through beauty if beauty is the only open door. But once inside, do not spare them the architecture. Do not let the longing float free from the system that manufactured the loss. Do not let grief become another consumable texture in the attention economy.
Make the beauty indict.
Make the sorrow specify.
Make the wonder point its finger.
That is how lyricism avoids becoming a servant of numbness.
You say you were trying not to perpetuate the machine by becoming more direct and cutting. I understand that instinct. But the machine is not harmed by softness alone. Often it prefers softness. It prefers language that stops at sensitivity. It prefers people who can feel the loss but cannot yet describe the mechanism. It prefers ecological mourning so long as mourning does not become operational.
So I would not choose between grief and diagnosis.
I would braid them.
Let the image break the heart.
Let the diagnosis break the spell.
Then perhaps something in the reader will become ungovernable again.
That is where your piece was strongest, even in its gentler register: you were not merely describing lost words.
You were brushing up against a real civilisational truth - that perception itself is being enclosed, reformatted, and thinned.
I love your article. I wish I could write as lyrically. My essays on tracing our deep connection with the land, the sacred, each other and ourselves are still in a gestation process at the moment!
I look forward to reading your writing! Thanks for spending some time with my writing. I was trying to write more lyrically, drawing from poems I wrote several years ago. I was bored of the same old essay I was writing and wanted to push it a little bit. But now I don’t think I can top this one haha maybe I’m a one-hit wonder
It is also a serious issue within the ecofeminist context of the ‘stolen relationship’ between our species and nature. Languages and words are slowly dying out, as a result of post-colonialism, devaluation and subjugation. With them, we are losing (ancient) knowledge about our world. In other words: epistemicide.
Oh thank you for the new vocabulary word! about 2,000 words summed up in your comment, I love it. I haven’t dived in to ecofeminism yet, and will have to do some reading. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.
Beautifully written and frighteningly apt. Your comment "Many monolingual English speakers rarely consider the cognitive filters this creates." really resonates. Here in South Africa, mother tongue African languages are being replaced by English in education and indigenous knowledge, ancient story and wisdom are eroded along with this loss.
Love this opening to the next world of flow and fluid engagement. But I’d let go of the research on the ‘decline’ in memory, etc. for youth. That’s a modular neuroscience trying to measure a melting glacier. Something else is up with young minds. They’re adapting to flow faster than science can measure.
I love the metaphor, you’ve put nuance to my own and it’s noted. I agree with you that it’s still too early to tell what’s going on, and also people are not a monolith either! We’re incredibly diverse and adaptive. I like thinking positively too, more room for creativity and ingenuity. I do work with a lot of youth struggling with mental health and anxiety, and they have resistance to challenging cognitive exercises (they go to AI for everything) and I do have to say I am biased and anti-doom scroll. I am positive though, because I do think traditional public school models now have quite an antagonist and an incentive to also change and adapt for young minds.
Beautifully said. For me, the English language is one of relaying information concisely and consistently. I'm unsure when English became so standardized, but it seems we have lost that which lingers unsaid, between the words that we do speak. As you say, other languages have single expressions that can embody a paragraph worth of information. Outside of literature, English is a language of information first, feeling second. I find writing like yours important, because it reminds us that a return to this language of feeling is possible.
Beautiful piece, thank you! Did you ever read Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow in which an Inuit speaker talked about the many Inuit words for snow?
Those mountain photos are amazing. And the colours of those rocks!
If you have a spare half hour to listen to this interview with an Australian Indigenous speaker, I can guarantee your mind will be blown. Fits right in with what you are talking about and just a gorgeous contemplation.
Thank you Sue! I will listen to this interview while I make my coffee this morning. I was thinking of all the Inuit names for snow, but did not have a source. Always love learning. Everyone’s comments on this essay have been very enriching.
That's fabulous!✨ It seems to me we all do better if we can put our puzzle pieces together with other people and not have to try to figure it out individually, which I don't think is possible...
I'm just in the middle of something sent to me by chance this evening which is also about language and perception — looking at the Lord's Prayer in original Aramaic, with the context of the world view encoded into that language. It's extraordinary how that differs from the English translation we were made to parrot in school, and how much closer to nature it is, and less the religion it subsequently became. And how much that world view had in common with the Indigenous Australian world views, and the world views you described in your piece...
Thoughtful piece and I thought your observation about monolingual speakers was valid but sad....you wrote: "Many monolingual English speakers rarely consider the cognitive filters this creates." I say sad as I think (am I'm writing in English but I speak several languages fluently) that so many monolingual speakers of English are unaware that English has roots, words, and so on from other languages/places. This obsession with screens and not looking, seeing, our physical world means we stop communicating and trying to learn with and from others. Words are fantastic things in themselves - little carriers of meanings. I could go on but I'll stop. Your piece has made me think...thank you.
Oh please go on, speaking several languages is incredible, I imagine you understand the nuances of language intimately. Words are incredible, as are languages. They are alive and adaptive just like the people carrying them! Researching the history of English has been eye opening, that it is truly a blend of many languages, somewhat of one of the first global language, or the beginning of one absolutely. And that our current iteration is a response to the printing press, that the mechanistic qualities do lend themselves to neat and tidy printing and spreading of information. I speak Spanish, and my first glimpse of the power of language and writing that challenged my worldview came through the authors of the Latin American Boom.
oh my heart, now I’ve got tears! the second essay (I just finished) is how you sat by the river and asked her name. I love the wisdom children have, your son knows. I am really touched by your share, thank you Sara.
"creaking of ice like my grandmother’s bones" ooo ouch! Such wonderful writing and thinking (and photos too)! I will be writing a story about the glacial climate tipping point soon, as part of a bigger project, this will be fruitful inspiration thank you :) looking forward to reading more!
So great, I look forward to that essay. I can’t recommend M Ward’s book The Secret Lives of Glaciers enough, fascinating illustrations and concepts of Glaciers and humans
Instantly subscribed! Thank you for this beautiful piece. My life changed in a quiet but profound way when I read that in the Apache language, the root for the words ‘land’ and ‘mind’ are the same (ni’). Kimmerer mentions this in Braiding Sweetgrass and the anthropologist Keith Basso researched and wrote extensively on Apache conceptions of and relationships with the land. The mutual reshaping between our natural world and language is so fascinating and so worth examination and preservation. 🌎🩷🦋
Such a beautiful way to describe this, thank you for sharing resources, it is super appreciated! That passage from Braiding Sweetgraas inspired me deeply. And I’m excited to look up Basso’s work. Thanks again! I do believe we have the ability to develop a pre-verbal language in us and in relation with the land too. I love all of these shares on language so much, would it be ok with you if I reposted your insight?
I am thrilled to read your elaboration of how language embodies relationship, and your acknowledgement of the pace of change in language over time feels so right to my whole system.
I have been diving deep into interpersonal neurobiology after discovering differences in language of the hemispheres communicate relational vs instrumental perspective.
I’m excited to read as your series emerges. Thank you!
That is awesome, thank you for sharing! I love Tinker Dabble Doodle Try for a neurobiological explanation on creativity. Your research sounds fascinating. I do believe we can cultivate awareness that is pre-verbal, and in doing so create a sort of language through our experiences, as a way to cultivate relationships
Thank you so much for this beautiful and enriching post, Lena; for the new words and ideas I have encountered here and for the elegant way that you weave these together. I am reminded by your reflections on glaciers and lost words of two works: a rawlings' visual poem "Jöklar," which traces the transformation of glaciers through morphing names of Icelandic glaciers, and Robert MacFarlane's and Jackie Morris's beautiful picture book The Lost Words, written in response to the removal of a number of words (such as otter and acorn!) from a major children's dictionary published in the UK. I am so very happy that I have found your Substack and I'm looking forward to reading more of your pieces.
Suzanne, thanks for the beautiful reflection, and for the resources! I have a copy of the Lost Words in my classroom, the book was a huge inspiration for this essay, and i ultimately decided to cut that part out to try and keep the essay short and palatable. The book deserves every mention, what a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy, no? I cannot wait to find “Jöklar”, M Wards Secret Lives of Glaciers has inspired me to go see the Icelandic glaciers. I high recommend her book as well. Thanks again for your support and thoughts
Yes - this brought to mind The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane for me as well, such a wonderful book but so sad to see words like 'otter' and 'acorn' replaced by words like 'selfie' and 'chatroom'...
MacFarlane's latest book Is A River Alive? is also well worth a read if either of you haven't yet done so. I like all of his books, but I feel this one has a different tone: more tentative and exploratory, as I interpret it. He was in Stockholm a few weeks ago, talking about the book (which has recently been published in translation to Swedish). There was a very interesting panel discussion between him and Swedish ecologist, author, and educator Pella Thiel.
Oh I had no idea that the two books were related, what a treat. Is a River Alive? is on my reading list at the library. I hope to visit Sweden one day. That sounds like a fantastic discussion
Simply beautiful...💚
"Wonder is not a luxury of childhood but a biological capacity; the mind remembering its kinship with the living world." Yeah... this was a really, really good article.
You are right that we are losing words for the living world. But you are still describing this as though it were mainly a tragedy of forgetting, a sadness of melting glaciers, a thinning of ancestral memory, a diminishment of wonder. All true, but not enough.
Because what is happening is not merely loss.
It is replacement.
The words are not simply vanishing. They are being outcompeted by a more aggressive vocabulary: brand names, platform grammar, algorithmic cues, administrative categories, monetised identities, flattened image-streams, and the dead syntax of systems built to process humans as units rather than beings. The child who cannot name the plants around him but can name dozens of brands is not just suffering a deficit of education. He is living inside a hostile linguistic regime.
That matters. Because once you frame the crisis only as erosion, people respond with nostalgia. They write elegies. They protect what remains. They host workshops on wonder. Fine. But nostalgia is too weak a force against an active enclosure system.
The age is not merely forgetting the living world. It is being retrained away from it.
The glacier metaphor is beautiful, but dangerous if left alone. Beautiful, because it carries memory, slowness, and deep time. Dangerous, because poetry can become a sedative. The machine loves when its critics remain lyrical. It is happy for you to compare words to ice while it is standardising perception, capturing attention, and replacing ecological intimacy with infinitely scrollable simulation. The filing system has no natural enemy in metaphor alone.
And you still speak as though language and perception are primarily cultural treasures.
But they are not only that. They are infrastructure.
A word like bergschrund does not merely decorate consciousness. It opens a channel of contact with reality that would otherwise remain unavailable. To lose that word is to lose a perceptual instrument. And when enough such instruments are lost, a civilisation no longer merely speaks less beautifully. It becomes less able to register the world it depends on.
That is not an aesthetic problem.
That is a survival problem
So yes, there is an ecology of perception. But ecologies can be poisoned.
Modern civilisation has poisoned its own perceptual ecology by reorganising language around extractability, transportability, and speed. It prefers terms that travel well through institutions, platforms, markets, funding models, dashboards, and feeds. It prefers words that reduce variance. Words that classify. Words that scale. Words that strip the world of its reciprocal thickness and convert it into manageable objects.
Once that happens, the living world does not disappear first in matter.
It disappears first in grammar.
The river becomes “water resource”.
The forest becomes “timber reserve”.
The child becomes “user”.
The animal becomes “stock”.
The mountain becomes “asset”.
The person becomes “human capital”.
The glacier becomes “climate indicator”.
And eventually even language itself becomes “content”.
This is how a civilisation loses reality before it loses territory.
So yes, again I say it - you are right. We are losing words for the living world. But the deeper truth is harsher: we are losing the perceptual organs those words once sustained.
This is not just cultural erosion. It is civilisational reconditioning.
The machine does not merely distract us from the world. It replaces the grammar by which the world can still appear as alive.
And once a people can no longer name what is living, they become available for any regime that wishes to treat life as inventory.
Yes, I agree with you, and glad that you’ve said it more outright and directly, and brilliantly. You’ve truly summed up what we’re experiencing as humanity. These empires built on attention are predatory. I am much more direct with my high school students about this subject, trying to get them to understand.
You are also right about the danger in romanticizing this topic. It is something that colonial cultures rely on. Fascism loves nostalgia and the mechanization of “assets”. You’ve pointed this out so well.
I am from Montana, and live with the consequences of romantic myth-making, particularly of the American West. I had a choice in this essay, and I went for the more lyrical version. Partly because I believe if I were more direct and cutting, that I would simply be perpetuating the very same machine that you’ve described so well. We’re going numb. In order for people to truly feel the loss, I believe that they need to tap into their emotional body and longing, to give them a way to enter grief. Ecological activists, like Joanna Macy, understood that in order for people to mobilize and metabolize the scale of loss and destruction, that they had to move through grief first.
Your thoughts on this topic are great, thank you for re-framing this so smartly and directly, of pointing out the truth. I am very grateful for your reflection.
Your instinct is not wrong.
Grief is not decoration. It is metabolic. A civilisation that cannot grieve cannot tell the truth about what it has destroyed. Joanna Macy understood that. You are right to say that people often need to feel the loss before they can bear the scale of it. A body that has gone numb does not respond first to argument. It responds to rupture, image, memory, longing, and the sudden return of feeling. So no, I would not dismiss the lyrical register. In a deadened culture, lyricism can reopen the sensorium. It can bring the organism back online.
But here is the danger.
The machine also knows how to metabolise longing.
It knows how to turn grief into aesthetic atmosphere.
It knows how to sell ache without consequence.
It knows how to let people feel beautifully devastated while nothing in the structure is named sharply enough to threaten the structure itself.
That is the line I am trying to guard.
Because colonial culture does not only survive through blunt force and extraction. It also survives through permitted feeling. Through carefully aestheticised sadness. Through the romance of disappearance. Through a kind of elegiac sincerity that lets people mourn the living world while continuing to participate in the systems killing it. In that sense, nostalgia is not merely a right-wing pathology. It is also one of empire’s favourite anaesthetics. Empire is perfectly happy for people to sing mournful songs beside the river, so long as nobody names the dam, the bond issue, the property regime, the cattle contract, the software layer, the school grammar, the platform architecture, and the labour abstraction that made the river unreadable in the first place.
So I would say this:
You were right to choose lyricism as an entry.
But lyricism must not become the whole house.
The wound needs song, yes.
It also needs incision.
If you only cut, people armour up.
If you only sing, the machine harvests the song.
The task is more difficult than either mode by itself. It is to move people through three thresholds:
First, let them feel the loss.
Second, show them the machinery.
Third, force the reconnection between the feeling and the structure, so that grief does not evaporate into mood but condenses into perception, refusal, and changed design.
That is the full arc.
The age has too much bluntness already, yes, and, it also has too much atmosphere.
Too much beautifully worded sorrow with no thermodynamic accounting attached. Too much reverence that stops just short of naming the predator. Too much ecological devotion that becomes a brand of sensitivity rather than a grammar of resistance.
So my answer to you is not: be less lyrical.
It is: be lyrical with teeth.
Let the reader enter through beauty if beauty is the only open door. But once inside, do not spare them the architecture. Do not let the longing float free from the system that manufactured the loss. Do not let grief become another consumable texture in the attention economy.
Make the beauty indict.
Make the sorrow specify.
Make the wonder point its finger.
That is how lyricism avoids becoming a servant of numbness.
You say you were trying not to perpetuate the machine by becoming more direct and cutting. I understand that instinct. But the machine is not harmed by softness alone. Often it prefers softness. It prefers language that stops at sensitivity. It prefers people who can feel the loss but cannot yet describe the mechanism. It prefers ecological mourning so long as mourning does not become operational.
So I would not choose between grief and diagnosis.
I would braid them.
Let the image break the heart.
Let the diagnosis break the spell.
Then perhaps something in the reader will become ungovernable again.
That is where your piece was strongest, even in its gentler register: you were not merely describing lost words.
You were brushing up against a real civilisational truth - that perception itself is being enclosed, reformatted, and thinned.
Thank you for opening this door.
I love your article. I wish I could write as lyrically. My essays on tracing our deep connection with the land, the sacred, each other and ourselves are still in a gestation process at the moment!
I look forward to reading your writing! Thanks for spending some time with my writing. I was trying to write more lyrically, drawing from poems I wrote several years ago. I was bored of the same old essay I was writing and wanted to push it a little bit. But now I don’t think I can top this one haha maybe I’m a one-hit wonder
That was brilliant!
It is also a serious issue within the ecofeminist context of the ‘stolen relationship’ between our species and nature. Languages and words are slowly dying out, as a result of post-colonialism, devaluation and subjugation. With them, we are losing (ancient) knowledge about our world. In other words: epistemicide.
Oh thank you for the new vocabulary word! about 2,000 words summed up in your comment, I love it. I haven’t dived in to ecofeminism yet, and will have to do some reading. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.
Of course! <3
Beautifully written and frighteningly apt. Your comment "Many monolingual English speakers rarely consider the cognitive filters this creates." really resonates. Here in South Africa, mother tongue African languages are being replaced by English in education and indigenous knowledge, ancient story and wisdom are eroded along with this loss.
Love this opening to the next world of flow and fluid engagement. But I’d let go of the research on the ‘decline’ in memory, etc. for youth. That’s a modular neuroscience trying to measure a melting glacier. Something else is up with young minds. They’re adapting to flow faster than science can measure.
I love the metaphor, you’ve put nuance to my own and it’s noted. I agree with you that it’s still too early to tell what’s going on, and also people are not a monolith either! We’re incredibly diverse and adaptive. I like thinking positively too, more room for creativity and ingenuity. I do work with a lot of youth struggling with mental health and anxiety, and they have resistance to challenging cognitive exercises (they go to AI for everything) and I do have to say I am biased and anti-doom scroll. I am positive though, because I do think traditional public school models now have quite an antagonist and an incentive to also change and adapt for young minds.
Beautifully said. For me, the English language is one of relaying information concisely and consistently. I'm unsure when English became so standardized, but it seems we have lost that which lingers unsaid, between the words that we do speak. As you say, other languages have single expressions that can embody a paragraph worth of information. Outside of literature, English is a language of information first, feeling second. I find writing like yours important, because it reminds us that a return to this language of feeling is possible.
Beautiful piece, thank you! Did you ever read Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow in which an Inuit speaker talked about the many Inuit words for snow?
Those mountain photos are amazing. And the colours of those rocks!
If you have a spare half hour to listen to this interview with an Australian Indigenous speaker, I can guarantee your mind will be blown. Fits right in with what you are talking about and just a gorgeous contemplation.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/indigenous-language-and-perception/11457578
Thank you Sue! I will listen to this interview while I make my coffee this morning. I was thinking of all the Inuit names for snow, but did not have a source. Always love learning. Everyone’s comments on this essay have been very enriching.
That's fabulous!✨ It seems to me we all do better if we can put our puzzle pieces together with other people and not have to try to figure it out individually, which I don't think is possible...
I'm just in the middle of something sent to me by chance this evening which is also about language and perception — looking at the Lord's Prayer in original Aramaic, with the context of the world view encoded into that language. It's extraordinary how that differs from the English translation we were made to parrot in school, and how much closer to nature it is, and less the religion it subsequently became. And how much that world view had in common with the Indigenous Australian world views, and the world views you described in your piece...
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193607318
Thoughtful piece and I thought your observation about monolingual speakers was valid but sad....you wrote: "Many monolingual English speakers rarely consider the cognitive filters this creates." I say sad as I think (am I'm writing in English but I speak several languages fluently) that so many monolingual speakers of English are unaware that English has roots, words, and so on from other languages/places. This obsession with screens and not looking, seeing, our physical world means we stop communicating and trying to learn with and from others. Words are fantastic things in themselves - little carriers of meanings. I could go on but I'll stop. Your piece has made me think...thank you.
Oh please go on, speaking several languages is incredible, I imagine you understand the nuances of language intimately. Words are incredible, as are languages. They are alive and adaptive just like the people carrying them! Researching the history of English has been eye opening, that it is truly a blend of many languages, somewhat of one of the first global language, or the beginning of one absolutely. And that our current iteration is a response to the printing press, that the mechanistic qualities do lend themselves to neat and tidy printing and spreading of information. I speak Spanish, and my first glimpse of the power of language and writing that challenged my worldview came through the authors of the Latin American Boom.
Weeping. Thank you 🙏
You put into words something I have felt quietly for a long time.
Once my young son said that there is a language that people don’t know anymore.
Today I say by the river and asked her what her name was, before they renamed her a colonized name.
Then I asked myself what my name was before it was Sara or my ex husband’s last name or my father’s, or white or female.
oh my heart, now I’ve got tears! the second essay (I just finished) is how you sat by the river and asked her name. I love the wisdom children have, your son knows. I am really touched by your share, thank you Sara.
"creaking of ice like my grandmother’s bones" ooo ouch! Such wonderful writing and thinking (and photos too)! I will be writing a story about the glacial climate tipping point soon, as part of a bigger project, this will be fruitful inspiration thank you :) looking forward to reading more!
So great, I look forward to that essay. I can’t recommend M Ward’s book The Secret Lives of Glaciers enough, fascinating illustrations and concepts of Glaciers and humans
i would say the most anti-woke-possible bullshit being portrayed as new and woke
constantly
while saying its equal with being a native american or kid who’s dad was a slave that got lynched after being free for a week
Yeah we’re all in a real hot mess these days.
Instantly subscribed! Thank you for this beautiful piece. My life changed in a quiet but profound way when I read that in the Apache language, the root for the words ‘land’ and ‘mind’ are the same (ni’). Kimmerer mentions this in Braiding Sweetgrass and the anthropologist Keith Basso researched and wrote extensively on Apache conceptions of and relationships with the land. The mutual reshaping between our natural world and language is so fascinating and so worth examination and preservation. 🌎🩷🦋
Such a beautiful way to describe this, thank you for sharing resources, it is super appreciated! That passage from Braiding Sweetgraas inspired me deeply. And I’m excited to look up Basso’s work. Thanks again! I do believe we have the ability to develop a pre-verbal language in us and in relation with the land too. I love all of these shares on language so much, would it be ok with you if I reposted your insight?
Absolutely feel free to repost. Basso’s book ‘Wisdom Sits in Places’ is a great one to start with :)
I am thrilled to read your elaboration of how language embodies relationship, and your acknowledgement of the pace of change in language over time feels so right to my whole system.
I have been diving deep into interpersonal neurobiology after discovering differences in language of the hemispheres communicate relational vs instrumental perspective.
I’m excited to read as your series emerges. Thank you!
That is awesome, thank you for sharing! I love Tinker Dabble Doodle Try for a neurobiological explanation on creativity. Your research sounds fascinating. I do believe we can cultivate awareness that is pre-verbal, and in doing so create a sort of language through our experiences, as a way to cultivate relationships
Thank you so much for this beautiful and enriching post, Lena; for the new words and ideas I have encountered here and for the elegant way that you weave these together. I am reminded by your reflections on glaciers and lost words of two works: a rawlings' visual poem "Jöklar," which traces the transformation of glaciers through morphing names of Icelandic glaciers, and Robert MacFarlane's and Jackie Morris's beautiful picture book The Lost Words, written in response to the removal of a number of words (such as otter and acorn!) from a major children's dictionary published in the UK. I am so very happy that I have found your Substack and I'm looking forward to reading more of your pieces.
Suzanne, thanks for the beautiful reflection, and for the resources! I have a copy of the Lost Words in my classroom, the book was a huge inspiration for this essay, and i ultimately decided to cut that part out to try and keep the essay short and palatable. The book deserves every mention, what a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy, no? I cannot wait to find “Jöklar”, M Wards Secret Lives of Glaciers has inspired me to go see the Icelandic glaciers. I high recommend her book as well. Thanks again for your support and thoughts
Yes - this brought to mind The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane for me as well, such a wonderful book but so sad to see words like 'otter' and 'acorn' replaced by words like 'selfie' and 'chatroom'...
It is truly something to grieve
MacFarlane's latest book Is A River Alive? is also well worth a read if either of you haven't yet done so. I like all of his books, but I feel this one has a different tone: more tentative and exploratory, as I interpret it. He was in Stockholm a few weeks ago, talking about the book (which has recently been published in translation to Swedish). There was a very interesting panel discussion between him and Swedish ecologist, author, and educator Pella Thiel.
Oh I had no idea that the two books were related, what a treat. Is a River Alive? is on my reading list at the library. I hope to visit Sweden one day. That sounds like a fantastic discussion