You find yourself before a pile of pieces. Jagged shards and jumbled slivers glint in the evening light. A whiff of old spices on the wind. You see the remnants of a cold forge. Your hands recall the contour of a circular shape, a specter of round form. You sense that these pieces were once coherent, once whole. You can almost feel the weight of a soup bowl, heavy with food. You realize you are holding a well-worn hammer, there is a fire rising within you, and the hour is growing late. You are meant to repair, to restore these shards, but the only tool you have is that which destroyed the once life-holding vessel.
The English language is a device of conquering, a matrix of taking and force, crafted over centuries of military tactics, religious commandments, thievery, domination, and fear. It has been used to dehumanize, to colonize, and to strip people of our natural intelligence and connection to life. It has been fashioned into a machine to channel and concentrate resources and power into the hands of a few people. It has been falsely called superior to the Indigenous human languages and the countless beyond-verbal languages spoken by all creatures, and used to erase the existence of those people and languages, justifying that erasure through it’s own self-evidence. And yet English is what those of us who speak it have to work with. How do we heal wounds when we’re still holding the weapons that caused them?
The English language is also a tool of beauty, a mélange of tastes and sounds, dynamic and evolving through application and exploration. It is used by poets and storytellers to attempt to capture the ineffable effulgence of life in a way that can be expressed to another person. It holds the arc of Western history and the wisdom of scientists and truth-seekers.
We are remembering the many ways we communicate beyond English, there is a movement to preserve the remaining Indigenous languages, and in many other ways English is increasingly less of a dominating force on this planet. And yet it persists, and I believe we can find ways to evolve it in the direction of our healing. I think of this as a form of alchemical transmutation. In some alchemical processes a solid substance is melted down; heat is carefully applied over time as other ingredients are mixed in; and with great patience, steadiness, and mindfulness something magical, powerful, and beautiful is made. While the ostensible goal may have been material gain, to turn lead into gold, the tender tenacity and care required for such a complex and nuanced endeavor transforms the alchemists themselves into sources of beauty and medicine.
With our broken bowl of connection and communication, our ungainly hammer of English language, we get to go on a journey of transmutation that alters us as we seek to revise our words. We learn how to melt the hammer down with our patience, our care, and our commitment to a healthier way of being together. We wield the awkward handle, the bit of what was once living tree that we still hold, to spread the heated metal of hammerhead like glue, carefully handling those sharp shards so we harm ourselves and each other as little as possible in this process of repair. We bring the pieces together, one breath at a time. Until eventually we have something that, while it might not bear any resemblance to its original shape, can once again hold that which nourishes life.
This is the beginning of our Disarming Our Language work, an invitation to explore why we say what we say, what we truly mean, and how we might transform our relationships through how we wield our words.