“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
“We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.”
(Adapted from a journal entry)
There is so much information and misinformation out there. So many opinions and words. New words, and the erasure of old words. So many devices, memes, and voices making themselves heard, while others remain unheard. We are bombarded with noise.
I am reticent and reluctant to utter anything so as not to disturb the impeccable beauty of this perfect silence – breeze in cottonwoods in yellow becoming, lazy hum of insects in the afternoon sun, distant gurgle of stream, intermittent call of flicker, whose orange under cloak I receive as blessing and welcome, the rhythm of my easy breath. And yet, the old ones might say that human beings have been exclusively gifted by creation both the capacity to recognize the exquisiteness of this life - experience enchantment, wonder and awe - and the corresponding ability, ingenuity and inclination to praise and make beauty to give back in return in 10,000 forms of creative celebration. Language and expression is one such form.
A warm afternoon in a shady gulch, I lay my naked body in the cool soft sand, delighted that the tones of the arroyo match my skin to perfection. I marvel that every body must have a corresponding soil place, an earth color to match skin color. How strange that I am only just now aware of this reflection of skin, sand and soil. But of course, we are made from and of the earth. Our bodies, earth body. It is how we humans got our name, Human, from Humus: meaning earth or ground in Latin; dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and animal matter decays. It is also the root of the word humble and humility. This strikes me as significant in the midst of our country’s reckoning with racism and oppression, the othering and annihilation of dark skin bodies, earth tone bodies, in the name of the white self interest rampant in these times. The joy of my body immersed in itself, steeping in its own essence, is both a prayer and an expression of the “soft animal of my body loving what it loves”.
This is the second time I have been away from home since the global pandemic lockdown began in March at the Spring Equinox. The first was in early August when I spent a few days in Washoe Territory around Lake Tahoe, California. There, as I slept outside on the bare ground in the silence under the tall trees, I am awakened by a plaintive howl in the not so far distance. (Wolf calls are often referred to as plaintive, a sorrowful lament, and although I like the sound of it, I am not sure it is that true or that simple —- I am wary of assuming I understand. Furthermore, true lament carries our love and gratitude, as a song of praise contains the inevitable sorrow of loss). I am immediately alert. Again, the howl. This is not a coyote. I recognize the sound from my time in Montana at a gathering of the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. I am awe struck, and shocked. How is it possible that there is a wolf in California? They have not been here for years. In the morning, I search the web and discover that in fact, grey wolves returned to California in 2011 after being locally extinct for over ninety years. A healthy pack now resides near Lassen National Forest, and had eight pups this summer bringing their numbers to fourteen individuals. There are also wolves that roam in the area without a pack; these animals are referred to as dispersing wolves, and are known to come down near the lake. Several have been shot in the last ten years, some by ranchers mistaking them for coyotes, others by ranchers knowing they are wolves, and still others have died unknown deaths. I am filled with a sense of wild wonder and possibility as something stirs deep within.
Weeks later, I am called to the land of Southern Utah, Ute land, Paiute and others, land of the ancient ancestors, whom the Hopis call the Old Ones Who Came Before. I stop in the very small town of Canyonville – one market with empty shelves and a visitor center on a rural road. As I enter the visitor center, the Park Ranger behind the desk looks at me curiously and pronounces, “…Slutzky,” which stuns me. He then mentions the name of a farm in California (Quail Springs) where years before we had taken a Permaculture Design Course together. He is the gatekeeper of my time here on this solo journey and I am grateful for the connection as well as the story he shares about the first peoples of this place. A warm welcome in unfamiliar territory makes all the difference. I offer him roasted bay nuts that I had harvested and prepared before leaving home, a traditional food of the Chumash people where I live in Santa Barbara, California.
Surrounded by canyon and cliff, I find a place along a small creek bed and meander downstream over sandstone rock, past ancient flint knapping sites with beautiful yellow, red, white stone flakes, worked by hands of the ancestors, round juniper trees laden with fruit. Yellow cottonwood leaves fall against my dry skin, carried through the smoke filled sky, by wind from California. The fires still blazing, feeding off the dry drought burdened trees of the West Coast. Four million acres. Countless ancient trees. Countless animals. Human lives and dwellings as well. Casualties of our way of life. Grief and love. Heartbreak and steadfastness. Although my lungs protest, I find it oddly heartening that blue skies will not lull me into a trance of forgetting. There is no where to go, no where to escape what we are doing to each other and the earth. As much as I don’t want to stay, I also do not want to flee. Fleeing, an essential root of the great catastrophe. Fleeing from drought, plague, war, famine, family, discomfort, in search of something better - opportunity, greener pastures, a new beginning. To settle in someone else’s homeland and bring the disease of unmetabolized fear, pain, disconnection and trauma only to inflict it upon others. European colonial settlers suffered the great forgetting - of tradition, song, place, culture in order to assimilate into the pall of whiteness and live the American dream, a story of separation and domination. In California, on the edge of western expansion and manifest destiny, there is no more ground in the push for freedom. There is no where to go. Civilization as we know it is in the midst of collapse. Other planets are not an option. Human existence not a given. The power we have sought through progress and infinite, incessant growth, is our downfall. And may we fall down, down into the hummus of the earth, face to the dirt (stripped of all nutrients) into humility. And learn to listen there, and breathe, and tend the ground so that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is sequestered there too and life returns. I pray some sort of redemption will come from finally confronting our limits, the finiteness of this planet, our own lives. That a transformation will arise from facing and finding our way with endings, extinctions, mortality. Of course, this is nothing short of a cultural overhaul, or underhaul rather- to reimagine, revision and recreate our world out of the ashes. Either way, we are held and embedded in the cycles of nature. Death, decay, new growth. Earth, resilient. Creativity, limitless. Humans, nature. Everything is possible when we align with the wisdom of nature, of who we are. Revolution is not out of the question. Beauty and becoming. When the smoke clears, I am grateful for blue skies and the blessing of clean air.
Last night I camped on a mesa off a dirt road, far from any signs of civilization. In a clear night full of billions of stars and the river of the Milky Way overhead, I was enveloped by the most profound silence I have ever not heard. This is what is possible with what is referred to locally as dispersed camping, whereby you set up camp where ever you want. Disperse: to distribute or spread over a wide area; disseminate, dismantle, disrupt. Wolves, campers, seeds, trees.
Our words create worlds, caste spells, illuminate, fool, entrance, inspire, inform, awaken, dismantle and disrupt, and most anything else as a reflection and creation of our consciousness. The names for trees in many indigenous languages are onomonopoetic, meaning each species of tree is named for the sound they make as the wind moves through their leaves. Their sound is their song, and their song is their name. They sing and sound who they are. Compare this to the names of the places I have seen along my travels this week - Devils Canyon, Hells Backbone, Goblin Valley. I recently watched a documentary of the work of intuitive Anna Brachenbach, an animal communicator from South Africa. In one particular scene she learns from a black jaguar that he does not like the name he has been given, Diablo. This is not a new conversation. It is as old as the fleeing, as old as the colonization. We in modern society, are quick to name things in an attempt to define, make order, know and control, often without realizing that in doing so we stifle and confine, and destroy the possibility of true intimacy. And sometimes that has been the intent, destruction and annihilation. Intimacy and understanding require presence, attention and not knowing, and reverence. Listening to what is revealed, to what emerges from the entanglement of connection.
Our words matter. Matter, material substance that constitutes the observable universe and, together with energy, forms the basis of all objective phenomena. Matter is place and we are all of a place. Our bones know the true names of things, of beings, from a time beyond our own, in a language older than words. We are all in a place. Wherever we are, we are in a place where the original peoples likely still live, where the original names are still uttered, if only in dreams and on the wind.
What if we stopped talking and naming and listened? What if we listened to the people, beings, elements, animals, that modern civilization has drown out and shunned? The drone of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism needs us not to listen, as our civilization feeds on inequity, extraction and othering. What if we listened and only said what needed to be said? Like elders around the world. A friend, Unangan elder and teacher Ilarion Merculieff, shared that when he grew up in his village on the Pribilof Islands off the coast of what is known as Alaska, there were more animals than people, and when out hunting sea life with his relatives, they would often go days without speaking. In the stillness and silence, listening to the water, suddenly, the heads of his uncles would all turn in the same direction, and moments later, a sea lion would emerge from the sea. How can we train ourselves, and allow ourselves to be trained, to be elders? Elders in training? And good ancestors for that matter? I certainly do not always know what needs to be said, to differentiate my wants from the essential, but I do practice listening wherever I am, and whomever I am with, including myself. When Vietnamese activist and Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was asked what we most need to do to save our world, he responded, “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”
On my way home, during this time when so many trees are dying, I make a pilgrimage to one of the oldest living beings in the world, an Aspen grove, named by scientists, Pando, Latin for “I spread”. This grove of more than forty thousand trees is considered one organism, one being, as all the trees in the grove share the same root system. What affects one affects all. This grove of Aspen trees is dying too. Disease, climate change and wildfire suppression all contribute, but a significant cause of the decline seems to be too many mule deer, nibbling at the young shoots. Wolves, their natural predators, were killed off in Utah due to powerful ranching interests more than a century ago. We all share the same root system. What affects one affects all. “A species can only thrive, when everything else around it thrives too,” says David Attenborough.
Some days unfold with grace, the way opens. Other days are more of a wrestle and I do not know where or when to go, stumped momentarily by instinct and intuition, uncomfortable in the uncertainty. Then I am reminded, I will know when I need to know, it is always so. Just be patient and present for the next thing, slow down and the path will unfold. A dispersing female traveling alone, I apprentice to relatedness and emergence, and the listening that hones the voice.
Of course, yes, there is a time to speak, for each of us, in our unique voice. Especially those who have been silenced. Shame silences. Oppression silences. Our authentic, particular voice is needed, to utter, shout, chant what is true from our heart of hearts. Speak out we must, on behalf of beauty and justice and love, as if our lives depend on it. A chorus of kin. What song might we sing together then?
The last time I was on this land was almost twenty five years ago, when I fasted alone for three days and nights amongst the sandstone rocks. In the silence of the place, I heard an unfamiliar voice say to me: Speak out against injustice, everywhere. Don’t be complacent. Be in love.
…
Oh divine holy powers of creation, please make my song full of compassion, truth and beauty. Enchant myself to you and you to others. Surrender me to the desire at the center. Call forth my harmony. Awaken my 13.8 billion year old wisdom and the creativity of the cosmos in my form and expression. The energy and power that emanates from the stars, guides the wolves, turns the leaves golden, rotates the earth, also courses through me. Speak through me with the tongues of the old ones and the ones yet to come. May I be humble in my listening and courageous in my voice. May I use the power of my privilege and embody the privilege of my power to allow my naturalness in service to all life.
Utah 2020
