The book that has been waiting for me in the wings – ecologists and philosophers could have told me – is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than Human World. It’s been a classic of the environmental movement for over twenty years but is new to me. Abrams speaks…
Read MoreWhen I walked my daughter to school today, it was cold, there was a hard wind and a number of things to grumble about. She needed some distracting. Luckily, we saw some hawks who have been circling over an area of our Village near the elementary school and an adjacent church. I drew her eye…
Read MoreIn Potawatomi, an Anishnaabe language, nouns and verbs are separated into two different classes: animate and inanimate. You speak one way of a living being and a different way of a non-living thing. Moreover, such beingness is attributed not only to humans but also to plants and animals, even to rocks, mountains, water, fire and…
Read MoreIn an earlier post, I wrote about a kind of literacy we seem to have lost: the ability to “read” our landscape, to recognize and name the plants that make up our natural world. Thinking about this analogy between nature and writing, I started to wonder if one kind of literacy supplants another. In other…
Read More