of word finding & spell binding
{5} interwoven: using language to value the animate, the sentient and the unseen
Welcome to interwoven. I am so glad that you are here. interwoven is a gentle, poetic & practical adventure in deep noticing, imagination and appreciation. Explorations of nature and a life lived in relationship.
time tellings
the pittosporum seed pods in our garden are splitting open
introduction
on naming || finding the magic within language || finding what is missing and summoning it
Our emotional landscape is rich. It’s shaped by slits of sunlight, the sound of wind, the shades of green particular to our place. How we express what we feel, who we are and what we know rests in the container of our language. The more complex and expansive our emotional vocabulary, the more nuanced and expressive our lived experience becomes. What we name bears direct correlations to what we know, with all the scope and limitations that encompasses.
Naming and knowing can both reduce our experience or enhance it. We can use names badly, in a way that causes injury and harm. We can name to hurt, possess, or dispose of. We can use names reductively, to curtail curiosity, a shutting down of interest or conversation.
And, of course, there’s the reverse. We can use names, speak someone’s name as invocation, a means to empowerment and upliftment. Where naming allows their presence to enter your mind, your heart, where they roll off your tongue and into your stories. Where naming both affirms and speaks someone into existence.
This week, we are going to play with active naming; playing with names as incantations and as spells and using language to value the animate, the sentient and whatever lies between.
If knowing and naming enhances our internal life, how might knowing and naming more of our place, the creatures, plants, and beings around us enhance our connection to them also?
How might our feel for the world influence our feeling for the world?
small stories
1.
F U C H S I A
Fancy I started by saying that I’d fallen in love with a tree. That it began in passing, a movement on a pathway, a known one, a glance, a look sideways and then up, a breathing in of crimson and a blueness, and a breathing out of me. Imagine realizing the strangeness and normality, the absolute of-course-ness, the moment of be-wilding and be-wildering that makes your heart grow into, grow because of, stretch alongside and in between of, your friend that is a tree.
Understand that the love part was a creeping, vine like, a sneaking and a winding, until you find yourself thinking-- oh, I love her. Her flowers, a hiding place for creatures, beings, of here or other worldly, too small for us to see. Her bark, a library of secrets, paper used for poems written of blue ink, conjured from the senses of her flowers, a spell book, spell bind, spell cast over me.
Can you taste the berries? Here, you should take one. The colour of forgotten language. Her winding branches? Fingers. Installation artwork titled ‘Empress’, ‘Mother’, hung in the forest canopy. Empress of the slightly lighted shadows, Mother of the damply felt and often rivered undergrowth. Empress throwing fistfuls, handfuls, armfuls of berries for Kererū and for Tūī, a banquet, a celebration, arboreal jamboree.
How not to be consumed?