Some Things, Say the Wise Ones
Some things, say the wise ones who know everything,
are not living. I say,
you live your life your way and leave me alone.I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they
are afraid of being left behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry!
and they have said: Thank you, we are hurrying.About cows, and starfish, and roses, there is no
argument. They die, after all.But water is a question, so many living things in it,
but what is it, itself, living or not? Oh, gleaminggenerosity, how can they write you out?
As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside
Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early
the harbor. I am holding in my hand
small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.
Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.
Another weird way hierarchy shows up is with speech: obviously (so They say) it only really counts if someone speaks words in an actual verbal language. Preferably english, since that’s the common global tongue. And not just english but, if you wouldn’t mind, the right english: either a posh British version (the Queen’s english) or standard American, with the right accent, and all the grammatical rules squared up and away, and no slang or frilly bits like “umm” or “ya know?”, no lisps, and no stutters.
It is truly amazing the fine distinctions we use to justify treating people badly.
This leaves out almost everyone on the planet as deserving of respect.
Not to mention, anything not human. Which, of course, do speak, if not in human language.
Juniper sees me putting my shoes on, and runs to the leash, staring at it meaningfully with a waging tail.
“Sorry, little stink. You can’t come with me this time.”
She runs under the buffet — Juniper for “please don’t put me in my crate,” though I haven’t put her in the crate when I left the house in years — then runs back to me, jumps on my leg, and sniffs her leash again.
“Poor Juniper! Sorry, no, you can’t come. You have to stay.”
Stay, to Juniper, means “jump on the window ledge, and run back and forth while jumping and barking,” so that’s what she does.
“I’ll see you in a few hours,” I say, and leave.
This one’s easy. You can already believe that dogs speak.
The tea rose in the front garden is a piece of work. If I don’t cut it basically in half twice a year, it takes over the whole garden, weaving prickly branches through a magnolia, a japanese maple, and an evergreen shrub, all three growing right beside it.
The japanese maple and the evergreen don’t care at all. They continue to grow the way they already grew, blithely ignoring the space invader.
The magnolia is a different story; it leans profoundly and obviously away from the rose bush, with nearly no branches growing on the rose-ward side. Like one of those trees growing in a stiff and constant wind: it leans, and the roses are the gale.
Or like a person on a city bus next to someone with their legs wide open and arms akimbo: leaning away, as if to say, “will you PLEASE give me some fucking space!”
A stretch, hmm? Does it matter if it’s out loud? You’re not saying anything to the man beside you on the bus, either. But anybody looking at you knows what you want.
Bloodroots emerge after winter with their one large, broad leaf wrapped tightly around the stem and flower bud. Almost exactly like someone warm in bed on a cold winter morning, not wanting to come out from the blankets. They come up quite early in spring, and are one of the earliest flowers around here, when it is (most years) still pretty cold. As it warms up, the flower bud peeks out of the leaf blanket and blooms, and then the leaf unfurls to soak up the sun.
Brrr.
Every day, every time, with mom, decoding the quality of her tension: to whom is it directed today? How bad is it? Can I ask for field trip money right now, or should I wait, or ask dad and hope he can say yes? Decoding the patterns in tension and affect in the people around her, the way it swirled like a pond when a stone is thrown in, or the wake of a motorboat, the way all the energy in the room oriented to her, reacted to her, in ways you could read, all entirely without words. Even when she didn’t say a word for months, she spoke.
Then: going outside to get away from it, away from people, and sitting in whatever nature I could find, and just watching. The same thing. No words, but the patterns, the way living things act and react, not like the stone in the pond with the single point of focus and action and everything in relation to it — not like my family. But like a neighbourhood. Everyone acting and reacting, speaking and spoken to, out loud and silently.
The trees, so hungry for the sun. Chipmunks chasing the squirrels. Dandelions happily gobbling whatever space and sun they could get, pushing the grass out of their way. Chickadeedeedeedee. The mulberry growing slyly right up against the trunk of the birch, almost impossible to cut down. A dog on a leash, play bowing and wagging her tail: play with me! The rabbit, bounding away: I am not a toy!
Honeybee, buzzing around my head: Are you food?
Me: no, sorry.
Bee: Are you sure?
Me: Pretty sure, yep.
Bee: Not a fan of your shampoo, human person.
It finds a flower, and zips back to the hive to do its waggle dance: poppies, 50m north-north-east.
Green frogs, at the pond in early spring: love me love me love me love me love me.
I have a great patch of shoreline real estate in a safe neighbourhood where we can raise our hundreds of tadpoles in confidence! You will eat the tastiest and most nutritious of flies in the most comfortable surroundings. Listen to how well I sing — don’t I have a beautiful voice? Haven’t I mastered this song? It’s been a long lonely winter; please come see me. What a beautiful day, feel that sun! All I need is someone beside me.
Boy Dragonfly 1: Buzz off buddy, this is my patch of water.
Boy Dragonfly 2: I’m bigger than you so maybe you want to reconsider.
Boy Dragonfly 1: Not a chance! Scram!
Boy Dragonfly 2: Make me!
Boy Dragonfly 1: Oh hey, there’s a girl! Wow, look at her eyes.
Boy Dragonfly 2: You’ll have to beat me to her!
Girl Dragonfly: Both of you can just get lost.
A plant, being eaten by a bug, releases pheremones into the air and chemicals through their roots into the local network: Hey neighbours, thought you should know, there’s predators about.
Neighbours: Cool, thanks for the heads up!
And they make their edible parts less edible through increasing the amount of untasty or dangerous chemicals in them.
Don’t take my word for it. Go outside. Be silent and still, watch and listen. (Did you know the chickadee’s song is a warning cry, and that the more “dees” they sing the greater the threat? Chances are every chickadee you’ve ever heard has been warning its friends about you.)
When I go to my favourite pond alone, I can see it, how all the living things freeze up when a group of noisy humans clatters and chatters by, how they open up again when they pass. Treating the world as if it were our living room, or our stage, and nothing more important than us happens there. And everything you miss out on.
They’re all (or almost all) afraid of you. You have to make yourself small and harmless if you want to see them as they are.
Of course it’s mostly projection. It’s mostly projection when you talk to your friends and family, too, and you’d never doubt that they speak.
In the fall, a squirrel, aware that it is being watched by other squirrels, will pretend to bury nuts in false locations, and wait to bury them for real until they believe they are alone.
Birds, when perceiving a minor threat, use specific alarm calls meaningful only to their own species or perhaps their own family. In an emergency, their alarm calls will communicate to all bird species nearby — and maybe the not-birds, too.
Birds pay more attention to birds who call less, knowing who is more likely to make false alarms and so discounting them.
Plants rearrange their leaves to avoid shading their kin.
The world is so much bigger, wilder, stranger, deeper and more amazing than you have been taught. It is all around you and you are missing almost all of it.
I leave through the front door for the 2-3 weeks in spring when the robins are raising their babies on my porch light.
mama bird: human! Human! Alert! Get away!
She flies at my head.
Me: I would never ever hurt your babies, mama bird.
mama bird, from the other magnolia: Scram! Shoo! Leave them alone!
Me: I will, I will! Look, see, here’s me walking right by, just getting to the sidewalk.
mama bird, settling back on the nest — built on my front porch light: I hate humans.
Last fall, R and I at my favourite pond — he for the first time — taking in the view on a warm early-fall day. Behind us a noise we’d never heard before. When we eventually turned around, two deer, both female. One leaping back and forth dramatically while staring at us and snuffing/snorting loudly.
Deer: Get away from our pond!
Us: Yes ma’am, right away.
Where do you think your emotions and feelings came from? Did they just pop into the human mind, a purely human capability, after millions of years of evolution left every other kind of skull, nervous system and organic electrical infrastructure untouched? Do you think human language sprang from the void? Voicelessness voicelessness voicelessness voicelessness, then, surprise! syntax and grammar.
Of course not. Everything speaks. It’s a matter of whether or not you’re open to being spoken to.
Zoopolis 
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