Portals, Walls, And Tricksters

As I travel further into how we human creatures relate with the ecological universe we inhabit, within and without, I spend more and more time with how words - and the meaning words carry - aid, disrupt, and misdirect our being-in-relationship-with.

When it comes to relationality, I find that words are portals, walls, and tricksters.

Words as portals

I learn that the part of a tree where the trunk transforms into roots is worded in English as a root or buttress flare, and splaying my body here is made more abundant with the knowledge of all that runs through these generous places and how crucial this place is to the biological health of a tree: a root flare occurring too low in the soil or too high in the air will likely mean disease, decay, or death. Knowing the name and meaning of these tender and important places transfigures my preferred sit spots into a multispecies happening.

I learn that the Greek root of chthonic is khthṓn, meaning earth or soil (adjective: khthónios, meaning in, under, or beneath the earth), and chthonic’s meaning of relating to or inhabiting the underworld becomes an invitation into the psychological and emotional soil of grief, exhaustion, shadow integration, and the deep rearrangement of initiation and transition. A descent into the earthy darkness that teems with microbial life, germinating us back into the world with new shoots.

Words are portals into perception and relationship. They reveal new qualities in the familiar, and deepen complexities in what we thought was simple or fully known.

Words also travel stories that glisten with community knowledge: transcribing the visceral, the emotional, and the imaginative into myth; carrying warnings and wisdom through manuscript, poem, song, book, and essay. The Andean and Amazonian peoples transmit thousands of years of respect, honour, and celebration into a single word: Pachamama, meaning Mother Earth; a voicing of a long line of embodied interspecies belonging, reciprocity, and kinship, reaching towards me across the ocean.

Through ancestral lines and across land and sea, we visit, arrive, and make-family-with, with words.

From the wording of the arrangements of atoms and cells to the wording of each part of a bird, from locating rivers to tracing the movements of the sun and the moon and distinguishing light waves and sound waves, from locating place to locating the different layers of the Earth, words bridge us, root us, and relate us into our selves, our environments, and the more-than-human we cohabit with.

Words also nurture relational communion, carrying our emotional, psychological, and imaginative inner worlds into the space between us so that we can move towards companionship, understanding, alignment, and resolution.

The Inuit word their experience of quietly sitting in the darkness together waiting for something important or creative to birth in qarrtsiluni, and, learning this word, I have not only become a temporary guest of their lives but have been gifted a new way of being in community, being with time, and being with darkness and creativity.

Katherine May shapeshifts the English word wintering into the times of being thrust into a physical, psychological, or emotional winter through sickness or tragedy or other disrupting event, and I am not only gifted a new framing for the withdrawal and grief and despair this body repeatedly thrusts me into with chronic medical conditions but the word threads me into a multispecies community who know wintering, and often know it well.

In Judaism, the proper name for God is deemed too vibrationally-sacred a sound to be spoken (or read). In Hinduism, the word Om/Aum is viewed as a seed sound, holding the sonic essence of the divine, the primordial sound from which the universe was birthed and is sustained. The etymological roots of the word spell when meaning magical spell is from the German noun spel, meaning talk, storytelling, and sermon (and gospel, meaning good tale).

Science is catching up to what many mystics have known: this is a vibrational universe, and words are magic carpet rides into the mystical and the miraculous.

Words as walls

Yet, words are also walls stretching so high and wide they belong only in fairy tales: unscalable, impenetrable, immovable.

Google’s English dictionary describes nature as being the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations. The Cambridge Dictionary describes nature as being all the animals, plants, rocks, etc. in the world and all the features, forces, and processes that happen or exist independently of people, such as the weather, the sea, mountains, the production of young animals or plants, and growth.

In English, the meaning of nature still stories many of us into a psychological distinction between us and everything else, a distinction that doesn’t, and cannot, exist. In English, I cannot speak of going into nature, loving being in nature, needing time in nature, without recreating the daily violence of this false story.

Where are my words in English for wherever I am, I am nature: a living ecosystem entangled with other living ecosystems, a guest house of permanent and visiting inhabitants.

Where are my words in English for every moment of being alive as a human creature is being nature, is being in nature; still, on many days I crave to walk, and sit, and be in places where I can be in the most direct contact with stars and clouds and sunlight and grasses and forests and valleys and rivers and trees and birds and deer and badgers and moles and worms and rot and rainbows and insects.

Words are tricksters, too, shifting our being-in-relationship-with or perception-of in unhelpful ways, sometimes travelling us down treacherous paths that distort reality and meaning.

‘In our language we have no word for “nature”, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the western world likes to make between humankind and nature is in the traditional Inuit view both foreign and dangerous’, writes Sheila Watt-Cloutier in the essay No Word for Nature, shared in Where the Leaves Fall.

‘There is no word for ‘environmentalist’ for Native people. It’s just how we are. Our thoughts are always placing Earth as our elder’, shares Tiokasin Ghosthorse with Kaméa Chayne on the Green Dreamer w/ Kaméa Chayne podcast.

‘We don’t have a word for non-linear in our languages because nobody would consider travelling, thinking or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, therefore it needs no name’, writes Tyson Yunkaporta in Sand Talk, in reference to Aboriginal indigenous thinking.

Words falsely group and divide, reduce and inflate, too, as exemplified in the case of the English pronoun we.

In Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta notes that, ‘In Aboriginal languages there are many more [pronouns than the English pronouns I/me and we/us], including pronouns that are translated as: I, I-myself, we two, we but not others, we altogether (emphasis added). Repeating the plural ones twice can mean ‘It’s up to us’, but repeating ‘I’ twice can mean ‘I go my own way’. There is a balance between self-definition and group identity. These two are not contradictory but entwined, and there are names for all the roles you occupy as agent of complexity in Aboriginal society’.

Instead, another English we springs forth in Zoom rooms and on radio stations, in Substack essays and LinkedIn posts, dangerously blunting complexity while gathering within its reach people and species that might not choose to be included (or should not be) and leaving out people and species that might choose to be (or should be).

The possible groupings we human creatures navigate at this time are so multitudinous that an entirely new lexicon of English pronouns is needed. Depending on the intention of the speaker or writer, we could mean you and I, or everyone in this room right now, or everyone who holds similar perspectives/ideas/ways of being to me, or everyone with [this] skin colour, or everyone of [this] gender/non-gender/ age range/sexual preference, or everyone from [this] religion/culture/region/country/place, or everyone with [these] passports/language norms/economic backgrounds/political views, and on and on.

Being-in-relationship-with beyond words

Even as we recognise both the relational possibilities that words open up and the trickiness of their creation and travel, to hold them as necessary, or our only worldbuilders, also holds dangers.

There is an aliveness in rearranging words, in affording them new meanings, in creating new ones.

Mysteries beyond their reach

Whether newly rearranged, weighted with years of usage, or storied through riverlets of meaning, words are portals, walls, and tricksters.

The precision and intentionality of words travel us into self, into cultures and inner worlds, into the more-than-human, into the world and into the universe. Words become ideas, concepts, framings, models, poetry, prose, essays, books, encyclopedias, conversation, reconciliation, repair, stories, myths, warnings, cosmologies, community weavings, and generational threads.

Words also become misunderstandings, conflict, disruptors, psychological and visceral ruptures of what is, or was, whole. They can also be troublesome tricksters, misleading us and directing us onto dangerous paths. Just ask Loki, and how he tricked Eitri and Brokk by promising them his head, when, as Odin later agreed, he’d promised only his head and therefore they had no right to touch his neck and take their winnings.

Words deserve to be approached with awe, a little caution, and a lot of respect. Yet, mysteries live far beyond their reach; and we human creatures have access to being-in-relationship-with in ways that words cannot touch.