To Speak Their Language

The oak and the ant

My first response to the giant oak tree was to crouch low and make myself small. I was pulled to this tree, as a five year old, no doubt knowing the wisdom she carried, aware, yet unaware, of the conversation between my heart and hers. I bent down, hovered my chest over my knees, feet cradled between her roots, arms cupped around my shins, hands following the path of the bark, wondering what it would be like to be an ant. To make a home here. To speak their language. To be so small with a big purpose. Ask me with a serious face if they talked, if they were conscious, if they were alive beyond the mere fact that they moved — I say yes.

This is the first knot of a memory I have of keeping awake to the idea that everything is One. Connected. Unified in a field of everything we cannot say. As a five year old I couldn’t put language to it other than the simple fact that I could hear them. The ants talked to me, the tree whispered, the grass sang a song, and that was enough.

No one taught me that the earth and her animals and her plants were alive. I was not taught beyond the science of how seed turns to flower. That a great spirit lived inside. I think kids just know. I think James asking the flutes of an ornamental grass if he can pick some of her stems, and then thanking her, is part of the ancient wisdom we’re born with.

I participated in conversation with the oak and the ants that day and began to hear the elephants, the dolphins and the dogs. I saw everything as alive with something to say. Not in a playful, imaginative way, but in the same mysterious way that we are atoms and molecules and particles and yet we mean something. I felt the living relationship to the Earth in my palms, and I held on for dear life.

“A transmission was taking place, a transmission of female wisdom from my life to hers, a passing of consciousness, of the potential for sacred poetry that lives in the female soul.”

- Sue Monk Kidd

We are born with this gift from the First Mother, from the Earth. It gets covered and buried and hurried along with the rush. But she still sings and we can still listen.

The prompt~

What great mystery brushes your shoulder? How do you converse with the earth? Give language to the world around you. Or write about a time you felt so deeply connected to something outside of you, and within you, all at the same time.

A place to start~

As a letter or manifesto; “As I plant my heart in the world…”

As a poem; “I know I am made of this Earth…”

A place to write~

Beneath a tree. In the wind. On a blanket in the grass. On the sand.

I fly with Her, enter her with my mind, leave myself, die for an instant, live in the body of this bird whom I cannot live without…Because I know I am made from this Earth as my Mothers hands were made from this Earth.

-Susan Griffins

I know I am made of this Earth 
for the wind that passes my ears
plays tunes of timeless treasure,
not of the kind that rusts and 
turns green but is green and
so terribly soft that I want to lie
down in the melody of crickets 
and tall grasses, to nestle close
and snuggle up to the symphony
of my first language. Where I feel
heard, and I do not have to make
a sound. 
~n

I can’t wait to read your song.

with love.

nicole