I would just ask you to exercise some caution bordering on restraint when you invoke the words “we” and “us” and “our.” That you wonder again who you imagine to be included in such a word, and who wants to be included in your understanding of “we” and “us” and “our.” And of course is it just human? Is it even principally human, this citizenship that’s evoked by those words? A lot of the dilemmas that we are talking about, and the way we’re articulating them, are particular to a kind of northern European-derived dominant culture North American “terrible time.” Characterizations, especially the polarizing and paralyzing ones might be particular to us. In other words, the way we talk about what’s going on might be part of what’s going on. The way we talk about what’s wrong might be part of what’s wrong. Sigmund Freud characterized his discoveries about the psyche and so on as “the talking cure.” That’s what he called his new science. And I’ve been for years on the idea that maybe what we need to do instead is cure the talk instead of talk the cure. So my focus has always been on the language, understanding as I do that human language is the principal vector for our imagining, really. That’s including imagining alternatives.” — Stephen Jenkinson For the Wild interview On Closing Time
Finding Words to Match Our Beliefs
Regrounding agrees that language is the principal vector of imagining, which also means of perceiving and of sharing ideologies. So language embodies intentions and beliefs, whether the speaker is conscious of it or not. And since our kind has become disproportionately powerful in relation to most other kinds of beings, human language is critical to the future for life on Earth. To truly live in “harmony with nature,” which still seems to be desired by many of us, we extraction-dependent people need to change our beliefs and habits. Changing our language is a logical first step. We do need to cure the talk. As Martin Shaw says, “Language has a radical agency to it…You shift your relatedness to everything through speech.” Also, many of our “connections” these days are not face-to-face, like reading these words on a screen, for example. This communication at a distance means there is usually no body language and no shared setting in which to nest the words, or from whom to be given the words or other kinds of language.
We have found that being mindful of our words is a constant reminder of–and action for–how we start to co-create and share the story of the world we want to live in. Regardless of how slim are the chances of ever seeing that world expand beyond our horizons, love is the driving force behind using language consciously, and love doesn’t ask “What’s the point?”
We think of this conscious awareness of our language as reverent talking, and see it as subversive to the language of science being the default narration of human relationship with the living world. But we do it mostly in order to reflect our love and reverence more fully. We also like that language is one of the few things we have a say over–changing it is doable!
Publicly describing our language choices may sound haughty, but we know language is contextual, and so we have no need to direct people to speak as we do. This isn’t about “My words are better than yours,” it is about our own relationships with the rest of the world. And besides, we are a religious non-profit obligated to offer our beliefs publicly!
We share some of our reverent talking in the following:
| Terms We Use Frequently | Terms We Embrace But Use Carefully | Terms We Are Trying Not To Use |
