Earth is a Language
| by Zahrah Vawda |
Earth is a language; a rhythm of species, patterns and sounds – individuals of all shapes and sizes that come together in a melodic balance of natural cycles that riff off each other. Sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful. It’s a lyrical narrative of our everyday lives – systems of nature, both apart and a part of us – humming a constant white noise in the background. When we speak Earth, we turn attention to the many lives and many ecosystems that encompass it. When we speak Earth, we bring it to life.
Earth is shared, as is language. Language: a system of communication that brings a community, no matter how big or small, together. Much like the systems of Earth – it cannot exist alone, it lives to be shared. What needs to be shared needs a way of sharing: the patterns of gestures, symbols, or sounds, that capture and communicate an experience.
Language is an ever-changing landscape, shaped and grown around what is important to its community at a moment in time. Language goes beyond borders – its dictionaries span subjects of our macro and micro cultures. Earth as a language is a dictionary made up of the words we share when we notice the faint songs of the ecosystems around us – those that exist alongside us, those that support us, those that make us part or whole.
Language carries culture, and culture carries language. As cultural importance and the time that surrounds it shifts, language adapts to express it. New words come in to replace old words that are no longer needed. Sometimes they resurface with new meanings, other times they become archived hieroglyphs carved into the texts of their time. Robert McFarlane’s book, The Lost Words: A Spell Book, stunningly illustrated by artist Jackie Morris, brings forward the words of nature disappearing from children’s dictionaries in the UK as they are spoken less and less. As a spell book, it holds poems to be voiced out loud, summoning forgotten words and their meanings back into our lives.
When acorns, conkers and dandelions are becoming less culturally important to our younger communities today, should we be concerned? When my mind glitches and I scramble in search of the small yellow birds that live in my local woodland whose name once rolled off my tongue, am I also forgetting? I don’t remember the names of birds when I’m not speaking them enough. This is language, shifting in real-time.
While cultural shifts affect how language evolves, shifting trends in our languages influence culture, too. Words have power. The words we use trickle through (and from) how we think. The weather is one of the most discussed Earth cycles in our everyday lives; it thrives in our language. But is our language and thoughts keeping up with the times? Increasing and unpredictable heatwaves are a dangerous threat of the rapidly declining balance of the planet, yet does it fall into the first assumptions we have when we hear about ‘bad weather’? We bring Earth to life in our language, but the words we use matter.
The Earth breathes a constant, charging life into our ecosystems. With each inhale we take, it moves through us. These are the systems that keep us alive. Still, just as Earth – in all it’s lives, systems and cycles – is threatened with a rapid extinction, its language is at risk of this too. When we speak about the world, we are steering the cultural shift. The words we use influence our thoughts, our thoughts filter our priorities.
Whether we steer this shift towards, or away from Earth – building or demolishing the connectedness of ecosystems that sustain our survival – is up to us. With every inhale, we take in the Earth. With every exhale, we keep it alive.
