Civilized, civilization, settler colonialism, colonized – See Natural, below. Also, colonizing plants, microbes, fungi, and animals integrate into the communities they occupy and generally only stop expanding when the suitable conditions are exhausted. It is a normal part of the ebb and flow of life. So to make a distinction, maybe we need a modifier or descriptor for the civilized human version of colonizing: extractive colonizing. Comparing extractive with degenerative or destabilising or diversity-depleting colonizing…they all look bad, but the only one outside the realm of evolutionarily-consistent relationships is extractive, which literally means removing bits of creation from the place they’ve helped hold together for eons. Arundo donax replacing willow is a process of the native tree dying out, not one of extraction. Defenders of civilization would say we just move materials around at a larger scale, but it is still all here, and there is truth to that, but that scale has a lot to do with the multiple crises for life right now. The sheer quantity of the changes made by the activities of civilization are unprecedented, and the speed of those changes is like those of constant large-scale volcanism. Yet there is more to it: The wholly unprecedented thing is the converting of biotic life and land into damaging, life-undermining waste. So waste is another lens through which to see the differences between earth-integrated cultures and extractive colonizing societies. The first creates no waste. Their personally unneeded creations are still usable by some of the community of life right where they live. The latter create poisonous waste, especially so in the industrialized version of it. Colonize (murder most or all of the indigenous humans), extract, poison, scale up, repeat, that is the tune of industrial civilization. To clarify, there was apparently a long transition of earth-integrated peoples to what is now called civilized, and some long-lived, place-integrated cultures seem to have been on the path to “living in cities.” There is no way of knowing which direction these cultures would have gone had they not been overtaken by a colonizer society, but there is plenty of evidence that city-based societies collapse when their needs surpass their ability to procure the necessities from elsewhere. So, civilization, as we use the word, signifies a society that cannot be sustained because permanent growth and expansion (as is taken as given by the colonizing dominant societies’ capitalist approach to survival) is impossible on a finite planet. In simple terms, we see the difference between living in place for the long haul (many thousands of years) versus the colonizing/civilizing approach being one of place-feeding vs. place-robbing.
Devotional – This means of, or used, in religious worship. While the word may have a bad rap in this rapidly secularizing society, we find it a perfect word for the way we feel toward the life–land–who has claimed us. We can’t imagine a place-integrated human culture whose forms of worship are not intertwined with the lands with whom they live.
Indigenous – We like Tyson Yunkaporta’s definition: An Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land base, as part of that land base.
Natural – This word is often used to mean “of this world,” but would it be more useful if it meant “of the other-than-self-centered-human world?” This does not mean we believe self-centered/anthropocentric humans are technically separate from the rest of this planet, or that we were not born of the same process as the rest of the kinds of people on Earth. However, through civilization our kind has created processes and powers that are outside of the realm of, and undermine, the evolutionary processes of our genetic kin, meaning that the cumulative effect of anthropocentric human societies has given us powers approaching those of the major creative/destructive forces–on par with volcanoes or even meteor collisions. The mindset behind this trajectory has similarities to those of other kinds of people, but our ability to understand what we are doing and still proceed signifies, to us, something foreign–unnatural–to the behaviors of the rest of our planet mates, including those earth-integrated, kincentric (relationship-centered) humans. We imagine that those bacteria who defeat and devour all others in their landbase may also be aware of the suicidal nature of their actions, but we wonder if those same bacteria might be aware, say through their connections the other life at their periphery, that their kind exists all over known creation and the loss of one bunch of them here and there is simply part of the cycle of life–emerge, eat, grow, be eaten, be shat, feed other kinds of people, repeat. Are civilized humans different? Less natural? No, but we think scale is critical to the difference. Bacteria, along with fungi, might just be the closest biological entities to large gods–creators of diverse kinds of life. Can human claim that? Humans, prior to civilization, seem to have learned, in many locations around the world, how to live with a place without wiping out most other kinds of beings. But civilization and the scale of it undid those place-centered ways of living. No other kind of creature is capable of causing a mass extinction through sheer destruction of the homes of other kinds of people, or of causing a rapid climatic shift through creating vast quantities of waste, something usually reserved for volcanoes. In the natural world (which includes earth-integrated human people), all dead bodies and bodily waste feed life. The same can’t be said for the civilized world. We recognize that the line between civilized and non-civilized can be blurry, that some earth-integrated cultures may consider themselves a civilization, but we use those terms with an understanding that civilization is dependent on extraction–plunder–from outside the homeland. Earth-integrated cultures are integrated into the natural cycles of life and death where they live.
Our – Since “our” can be interpreted several ways, we make the effort to ensure that our language matches our intent, so it means we might have to use more words to be clear. We think life is better served when we do not to leave it up to the listener or reader to interpret “our” to mean ownership, which grants the owner the right to “manage” the owned. A common example these days is “our oceans.” This easily implies ownership or right to manage. It could be used to endorse actions by those who want to control everything. Since the oceans consist of millions of living communities and billions of beings, all of whom are both autonomous and symbiotic, just like we are, how can they be ours? Not being clear on this can sustain the mindset of exploitation and domination. The same goes for all self-willed lands, forests, woodlands, rivers, butterflies and so on. They are all our kin, but none of them are ours. They very likely all have the same desire to live unfettered lives that we do. Using this word rhetorically or uncarefully can too easily convey a sense of entitlement to use, manage and destroy the rest of the living world.
Ritual, Ceremony, Worship – We trust Malidoma Somé’s definition of ritual, which he says is an art that consists of a planned and prepared space combined with the unpredictability of Spirit. He says “Every time a gathering of people, under the protection of Spirit, triggers a body of emotional energy aimed at bringing them very tightly together, a ritual of one type or another is in effect.” So when we use the word, this is what we mean. As for ceremonies, he says they are reproducible, predictable and controllable, and lack the spontaneity of rituals. We love this distinction and it reinforced for both of us why we never liked rote prayers of thanks before meals…they aren’t normally said with heartfelt emotion! Worship is not a word we use much because it seems to trigger images of people on their knees or prostrate in prayer in churches or mosques, but when we use it, we simply mean “to show reverence for,” which can be as simple as laying hands on a tree’s trunk while feeling love and gratitude for them. Planting a sprouted acorn/oak seedling could be seen as ceremonial, but there is always an emotional component, so this borders on ritual sometimes. Most accurately, it seems a form of worship, a devotional act.
Sacred, Sanctity – We ascribe to the simple definition of sacred–worthy of reverence; so an entity’s level of sanctity depends on how much the worshipper reveres them.
She, He & It – See They, Them and Their in Terms We Use Frequently.
Spirit, Spirit World – These words, unless they are coming from the mouth of an indigenous person, can quickly make science-oriented people turn and run, but we have embraced them for a number of reasons. Many earth-integrated peoples the world over believe there are sentient and powerful forces who created the world, and we find this a reasonable starting point from which to express a belief system. This invisible, mysterious, creative life force is called by many names. We use Spirit. So the Spirit World is our term for all those possibilities of relationship within the unknowable realm of this powerful, seemingly infinite, creative energy who gives us all life and occupies more than 99% of the “empty space” between the known parts of atoms. To us, the Spirit World generally means that realm from which surprising or extremely detailed images or information comes, usually in dreams or by surprise. To embrace this term is to embrace mystery and the possibility of experience being much larger than linear, rational thought can grasp.
Wild, Wilderness – see Self-willed on our Terms We Use Frequently page
| Terms We Use Frequently | Terms We Are Trying Not To Use |