The Road Is How by Trevor Herriot

Author:Trevor Herriot [Herriot, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443417938
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

ROAD CONDITIONS: WALKING A NEW LANGUAGE

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains Of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Until quite recently, human beings looked to nature for insight and inspiration as well as food. Reading the signs of the meadow, the river, or the woods was more than a survival skill; it was a way to develop the self within its nurturing matrix of creaturely life. Animals advised adolescents on the threshold of adulthood. Plants whispered of their healing properties. Bill Plotkin and David Abram say the human spirit does not develop fully when we undervalue the wildness within and without and disengage from the “more-than-human-world.” But our resistance, our unflagging confidence in rationality, keeps us impermeable, closed, and dubious. The language of nature may remain untranslatable, but walking or sitting alone in wildness at least places you within earshot. In time, you become more porous, less obtuse and guarded. Thoughts that leap to mind are not dismissed as mere imagination, as a dragonfly lands on your arm, a robin pounces on a small snake to defend its nest, or a hundred spiders balloon across your path. The untranslatable is still worth listening to, for even with our own speaking, much of the meaning is carried in the sound itself or in the body of the speaker.

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