What's happening

What I love about blogs is the chronicle quality. That it is a dated path. So I find myself in moments pre-writing answers to questions I had when I began this blog. Lofty ones like: how must language change for us to belong again to nature? And the little practical ones like: how can I inspire my students to care about their impact on the distant future without being preachy and dogmatic? And now I can say joyfully, the answers don't seem as elusive as they did seven years ago. I think language is changing. I guess I say this today because I found a compatriot in David Mitchell's character Zachry in Cloud Atlas. In my own deep word ecology it's not that I want to appropriate images from nature so much as make the images the star of the show, the teachers, the collaborators, the wonderous. Not as objects but as subjects, the ones with the know-how that I didn't figure out or know that perhaps I belonged to. Instead I suffered for a long time because I let my ego be the dictator. And we in nature surely are dictators, predators; nature's not a democracy, but it's also not all as greedy and selfish a base reality as we imagine it to be.  At a talk on leadership at the Center for Eco-literacy, Zenobia Barlow warned of the little words that are getting in the way: I, me, she, it, them, you. The subject pronouns that make objects out of others.  At least that's how I remember her talk.

 So I wonder if the next influential phase in language will be emergent, merging, not so easily the voice of one as the voice of the inter-relational and ever more diverse. Ex. if I am only the consequence of every little action around me, and I am fluidly in relationship with these ever merging and emerging elements, then I am everything and at once anew and also not really "I." It's an abandonment, a dissolution of self, a take to the wind, and yet also an acceptance that we belong and become. It's odd, because our language gave humans a feeling of superiority and entitlement. So it's an endless humble path to imagine the languages of beings without our speech. We can't forget, what has been done in our names. In our tongue. Sometimes I imagine every word must be an apology.