As we navigate our way through what many feel to be the collapse of Empire, how to do we language our experience? And why is this important? These questions are the topic of my conversation with Anna Maria Stone from Earth Weavers Collective.
About This Episode
The complex, animate terrain of our embodied experience desires to be languaged. We can look to the living world to connect to the organic intelligence that is rooted into our being. From this perspective, language becomes a function of our collaborative existence with the living world.
When our current language falls short (which often feels the case as English speakers), we are called to explore the wisdom that lives within the nature of our human experience and express authentically from this place. In doing so, we open up new embodied terrain.
The is what I called the legacy of living language. When we choose to deepen into our somatic experience, we find this living language is already within us.
I think about the body as an exquisite instrument - one that perceives, processes, and articulates our relationship with a changing Earth. David Abram beautifully describes how our flesh is not separate from but "caught in the depths of a breathing planet."
The challenge we face is profound: How do we move from these raw bodily sensations to meaningful language? Western vocabularies often fail us because they were developed in a more stable ecological time and from a believe that bodies and nature aught to be disconnected.
Our work is to repair this fracture and we begin by giving language to the experience of returning to relationship within the web of life. We are, as Merleau-Ponty's conceptualizes, the "flesh of the world". Our bodies and Earth are made of the same substance, and whether we realize it or not, we are in constant dialogue.
Let’s dive in!
References:
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.
Joanna Macy, The Work That Reconnects
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