Do our words protect us from what we need to see?

Some of our spiritual sages, philosophers, psychologists, poets, and artists will tell us that the minute we use words here in the West, we go right into our heads. We start "thinking," we start analyzing, we start breaking experience down into pieces of what we can handle, what we can get our heads around.

What that can also do is protect us, a way to step back from what we need to hear in other ways - with our bodies, our spirits, the living communities of beings around us who do not speak our language, who do not speak "words," but communicate in sounds and resonances and energies that humans were once more capable of "hearing," or better, "sensing." Part of that was survival instinct, knowing which sounds - rustling noises in the tall grasses and woods, for example - might indicate an approaching predator, or the first low sounds of a coming storm, a shift in the wind or the air pressure that says, seek cover.

Credit: M. Swedish

We have long separated ourselves from those kinds of communication links. And if ever there was proof that words protect us, keep us a bit removed from the full-on experience of what living reality is trying to tell us, it would be our human responses to decades worth of words about the imminent unraveling of the ecosystems of our biosphere and atmosphere leading all living beings to catastrophe.

And here we are, at the beginning point of the unraveling just as it catches steam, hurtling the unraveling forward, accelerating from one positive feedback loop to the next, and we argue and fret over the words that emerge from the research. We have 50 years, no, 30, now maybe a dozen, to avoid 1.5C of warming, and we go right into our heads, because the words take us there, and, as Margaret Wheatley and other wise ones report - people do not change because they are given information.

Give us words and watch us rationalize and discuss and argue ourselves into a safe place where we determine that we don't have to do anything today, and probably not tomorrow.

But if we turned off that noise inside our heads and listened with our bodies, with every pore of our skins, with the sharpness of ears not dulled by the noise of traffic and appliances and cable boxes and DVRs and earphones piping music right into our brains - would we be able to hear the ominous rustling in the woods and fields growing...ever...nearer?


Drone footage of Mexico Beach FL - PBS video

The people in Mexico Beach, Florida, did not know what was about to hit them. An "ordinary" Category 1 hurricane approached and they started boarding up windows. Two days later they were told to run for their lives as it became nearly a Category 5. While some meteorologists hoped for the usual wind shears and land contact that would reduce the intensity, there were other signs of the approaching monster - like water temperatures way above normal in the Gulf of Mexico, mid-to-upper 80s, in a couple of spots approaching 90!! Hot water adds fuel to hurricanes because they feed off this energy, and in the case of H. Michael, it was like pouring lighter fluid on a burning fire.

Oh wait, that's what happened in the West this year, massive fire storms that burned through whole communities, destroying that U.S. fantasy of the mountain home surrounded by pine forests with

CA fires from space. Credit: Ricky Arnold/NASA

pretty views.

I can't find words. I mean, I can find plenty, but not the ones that stop the thinking, that draw us into reality, rather than pushing us away from it. I want to stop all this thinking about the catastrophe into which we are free-falling; I want to find words, stories, metaphors that make us FEEL it in our bodies and souls, in the deepest parts of ourselves, so that we can finally get to the magnitude of what is occurring on this planet. Because in the deepest part of ourselves, where we are still animals with instincts, still capable of dreaming, of myth-making, of intense listening to our surroundings - we know!

And that is the place we seem desperate to avoid. Westerners who came across the pond fleeing the horrors and brutalities of Europe through the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch-burnings and the plague - brought with them trauma and a deep loathing of nature and the body.

Credit: M. Swedish

I had a next-door neighbor who used to go out repeatedly through the warm months with a broom and power hose to get rid of all the spiders and their webs on the outside walls of her house and her garage. "I just hate all those spiders," she said to me more than once.

Eighty percent of flying insects have disappeared from Germany, and researchers are doing with intention what I have done frequently in recent years by taking a drive through farm states like Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana - driving through these states in the middle of summer to record how many insects get splattered on the windshield. I didn't do this for research. I just drove across Iowa a couple of summers ago and there were almost none - as in, ZERO. When I was a kid, we would have to stop now and then to wash the smear of dead insects off the window.

I was awake enough to notice this, because in my work life for the past 13 years or so I have been concentrating on trying to do that thing that doesn't change anyone - in talks and workshops, blog posts and a Facebook page, offer up the information that indicates that it is already pretty much too late to save ourselves from a truly dreadful future on this planet - with no clue of how we survive that, and, if we do, what new kind of life will emerge from the devastation.

If we were able to turn off all the noise and listen with our bodies to what is going on around us in the natural world, we would realize the danger we're in and our responses would be meaningful instead of empty, or reassuring, or calming, or resigned.

Writers use words. What words break through the thinking? Metaphors and myths? Images? Words that come from dreaming, irrational, capable of breaking down the analytical function of the brain? Can words draw the kinds of emotions and sensations that bring us back to our primitive instincts, the ones that know the danger is - right there, almost within reach?

It came within reach of Mexico Beach, Florida, and in the outbreaks of famine in many parts of the world, and in the Mendacino fire (more than 300,000 acres scorched), and in the endless floodwaters in the mid-Atlantic, southeast, and my state of Wisconsin. Can we feel it in our bodies, this threat, the danger, the way it is peering out at us, watching what we're doing - responding?

To everything we do, the Earth has a response. That understanding ought to sober us.

I have been counseled over and over again in both my writing and speaking to be careful not to frighten people too much or tell them they must change their lives because their defenses will keep them from hearing the message. What!? Well, I've been bad at keeping that counsel. And now what I want to do is find the words, the images, the ways to present that get people back into their bodies and out of their rational brains. I want to break down the thinking, silence the spaces inside of us from all our artificial noise, and get people into their skin, their hearing, their seeing, their sensations, where they can learn everything they need to learn to see clearly what is now unfolding on this sacred, sacred planet.

~ Margaret Swedish