what am I processing /
thinking about these days?
my friend Audrey is an herbalist and a poet.
in one of their Love Letters workshops, she gave me permission to write about my obsessions - and lately i have been SO obsessed with language!
engaging with a book or in a conversation; have you ever had a moment when someone’s introduced you to a word that describes an experience you’ve had in your body? i hope you have! what does that feel like for you?
me? my eyes usually widen and my jaw drops a little; usually to form the words “oh my god, yesssssssss!”
it feels like someone just unlocked a part of me that needed something…
validation - a beautiful impact of a loved one or even a stranger having helped me better understand myself. this is a gift of words and language.
what i want to share with you today are some of my thoughts about language and accountability. there is a craving i have in this lifetime for deeper connection between the divinity that i experience in world [and myself] and language. i know only one generation away i had that. the languages i speak now, spanish and english, just don’t seem to touch the part of reality that feels most crucial to experience. i think part of the reason for this is that language is not just expansive and liberating. as a tool of power, under this oppressive empire, it can also be restrictive and imprisoning.
let me try to explain why. within the dystopian reality many of us experience, we constantly find ourselves trapped in a hustle, grind, on the go, multitasking - surviving; we need to move fast. from gender identity to new political content, we’re expected to pick things up quickly and one of those things is language. everywhere i turn; within myself, my closest relationships, in my work, community, and most definitely in the broader society - i've noticed that the way we use words and language leads us to feel that we understand a concept as soon as we learn new vocabulary. in my observations, the way many use language feels like an end-point in our learning process, like; how diplomas imply the end of learning in our culture. as in okay you learned the things so now go do the thing how we taught you to (like how Paulo Freire describes the banking model in Pedagogy of the Oppressed). this is reinforced by how process-oriented words in english are almost all conjugated in the past-tense or in absolute forms, e.g. “our work is trauma informed”. that’s it. it can go on my resume now.
nouns, in our language are a denial of relationship with Time - of being in process and they are artificially removed from natural cycles in Life. it’s in this removal from Time and cycles that our language becomes restrictive; as if an apple, for example, wasn’t just sunlight and air for awhile. instead, it is just an apple - extracted from Time. fixed.
but this isn’t entirely true. so i wonder, isn’t everything that makes an apple an apple its’ process?
colonial mindsets of control are grounded in this denial of relationship with Time; for example, it pretends that land can be “owned” as though the land didn’t give birth to us and won’t carry our remains or carry our ancestors, as though the land they think they own doesn’t precede and exceed us by billions of years or that the land isn't us. this mindset of control is pervasive; we exist in one of the most violent, dominant, and oppressive cultures in the world and it is perpetuated by practices of control and extraction. of course this shapes how we use language. how could it not? language and culture are inextricably linked. within the colonial language there is a normalized, inherent obsession with understanding, knowing, objectifying, and identifying as ways to exert dominance, expertise, ownership, and control.
because we have violently inherited this weave of dominating language and culture, it is all too easy to distance ourselves from being in Time, affecting and being affected, perpetuating, and in process. although we have this deep longing to be more connected to the natural world and one another, and although we are practicing this connectivity to the best of our abilities, our inherited colonial language creates barriers around us. the distance between that subtle barrier in our language and us, makes it much harder for us to embody the connection we seek in ways that have the depth we crave. our efforts towards connectivity are hobbled and curtailed by the controlling and culminating nature of the words we are attempting to connect through. the essence and very structure and syntax of english reinforces this.
isn’t that. some. shit.
take a phrase like “that’s my cup.” the possession supersedes the subject itself.
it’s not, “the cup that is mine” or in a non-possesive form, “the cup that i am in relationship with at this time” - which, for me, would be way more accurate and a less controlling way to express the sentiment, right? you see how hard it is to make english flexible? i have to do some intense gymnastics to make the language non possessive or controlling. if i were at a friends house and using their cup, it becomes “my cup” while im there. just in our language, hospitality is the extension of possession or control.
in the way society normalizes the use of the english language, we subconsciously define ourselves and our spheres of control with our syntax and implications. in addition to the way we can rigidly define what we are, we also use language to restrictively define what we are not, e.g. “because i am trauma informed, i am not triggering to my students.” this is dangerous. yeah, i said dangerous. this is because we begin to box in what we can perceive about ourselves.
(note - identifying as not something doesn’t prevent us from being that thing or becoming that thing, it just prevents us from seeing the ways in which we perhaps are that thing. wanting to be something or adopting a new word for something, does not actually make us that thing. can ya’ll hold this to be true while simultaneously holding the fact that identity is part of culture and that vocabulary can be affirming and liberating?)
defining what we are not has so much power. restrictively defining what we are not gives more power to the potential of creating invisible barriers around us, a space that we cannot see. for example, if i think of myself as anti-racist- it's a big part of my identity and especially if i say i am anti-racist, i distance my sense of my own identity from the idea of being racist. this completely shapes the way that i think of everything about me. i move through the world protecting this thing that i believe, which is the idea that i am not racist. nothing that opposes this idea of myself can get close to me. the slightest hint that something i did or said might have been racist is anathema to my identity. this has big potential to block awareness of my impacts and makes it harder for me to receive relational feedback.
the application of these rigid identities to myself is an attempt at control - control of other people’s stories about me and how i want them to perceive me, and control of myself by selectively defining what i am and what i’m not. this has impacts; one is that i block my psychological access to continued learning on subjects and identities that i identify with, and another is that i block my ability to see other people realistically or wholly. the nature of this rigid cycle makes it difficult to see and therefore we don’t talk about it enough.
if it is inherent in our language that nouns are fixed, removed from time, process, and natural cycles, and we are also using these fixed labels to box in ourselves and others, then we create a system immune to feedback or growth. specifically, we inoculate ourselves against the awareness of the impacts of our actions or the change, motion, and cycle of others in their potential. what i’m tryna say is that: this is dehumanizing to each other and to ourselves- when we identify only as our rigid and restrictive identities, we exclude our capacity for motion, expansion, and flexibility- we do not give ourselves or each other the humanizing grace to make mistakes. to be humans; trying to do our best, learning and unlearning, integrating and composting what we’ve been brought up to think, to be the cyclical beings we are, trying to survive in a society that wants us to be fixed and to just produce.
the process of maintaining our own worldview by dehumanization or by denying relational feedback or impacts is one large aspect of colonization. we are buying the privilege of our own ignorance at the expense of other people’s realities.
this rigidity in sense of self or projected reality is extremely fragile. when I look out at the forest in a storm, it’s noticeable the ways that the trees move. they sway with the winds, and dance with their roots. all except the dead ones. the dead trees are rigid- they don’t sway or dance, they barely flex or move, and their roots rot. they’re losing reciprocal connection to the ground. so when the wind pushes on them, they resist, and then they break.
i am not tryna tell you to not to have an identity. living trees have identities. i'm saying we can further liberate ourselves when our identities are dynamic. the trees identities are dynamic; they grow and dance and respond to their circumstances and the feedback they receive. when the dead trees become restricted to one rigid identity; that is the problem. so it’s in how we use it, not in identification itself.)
also, i'm not just describing a parallel between this rigid use of definitions in our language and identity and the mindset of colonization - they are the same thing. the perpetual legacy of colonization can be defined as a process of continual denial of impacts, blockage of relational feedback, inflexibility to be shaped or changed, and the purchasing of an artificial self-image at the expense of our ability to see each other’s humanity.
so the questions i’ve been asking myself and that i invite you into now are:
⧫ where is the boundary between trusting our intuition / our ancestral wisdom / our awareness and the rebranding of supremacy and colonial tools into different langauge and terminology? especially as Black and Brown people taking the lead in birthing a new world?
⧫ how do we practice the expansive, humanizing, and cyclical aspects of language without falling into the trap of thinking we understand something in a way that excuses us from further exploration of ourselves?
⧫ what are the ways that we are currently falling into the trap of merely rebranding internalized tactics of colonial dehumanization as radical, regenerative and liberatory practices?
the way that we frame our questions is never neutral; our choice of syntax gives power to something, whether we know it or not. for example: “how do we not perpetuate hierarchical norms in our egalitarian governance model?” this is an important and great question, and it reinforces the rigid definition of self as non-hierarchical / egalitarian. in the framing of this question is the idea that it’s a possibility not to perpetuate hierarchical norms, and that is misleading. this makes it harder for us to see our own iterations and expressions of internalized hierarchy. In this way, it gives power to hierarchy. the practice of expansive framing of questions is tricky, and i’m still learning. my current practice is to frame them so that they point to the thing i want to see or understand; e.g. “what are the ways that I am embodying hierarchy today?” this gives power to my awareness of my own internalized patterns of hierarchy; it helps illuminate the parts of me where hierarchy still lives and evolves. this effort of illumination is an ongoing process and through a lens of compassionate inquiry- i found some questions surface …
so;
⧫ what are our mechanisms for seeing the ways in which we’re falling into our indoctrinated programming?
⧫ how do we hold ourselves accountable?
⧫ how are the people we are accountable to holding themselves accountable? is it something we see them practicing?
⧫ what does accountability mean to us and our community?
if we cannot answer these questions, how do we know we are in integrity?
(integrity can be measured by the distance between your action, your values, and your language. i.e. the distance between how you show up and how you think and talk of yourself showing up).
without this intentional illumination of the parts of ourselves that maybe we’d rather not look at, it is dangerously easy to become complicit in the unintentional co-optation of language, the dilution and appropriation of powerful words (and the life-giving culture that they foster, express and come from) into colonial rebrandings. this strips us of the liberatory power that language can have, and further ties us to the cycles of rigidity and dehumanization. the point i’m trying to make is that we need to be pro-active - we need to find, create, maintain, refine, and utilize mechanisms of personal and collective accountability.
how are we co-creating containers for hard questions to be received and held? what is possible when we allow ourselves to be challenged? what happens when we make room to witness the parts of each other that have felt trapped? what is possible when we dare to be loved and cared for in these ways? what is possible when we have care and community to support us in deepening our relationships with control and fear? what are we afraid to reveal if it can only be the blueprint to own freedom? who would we be without the identity that we’ve built around our grief (a question Martin Prechtel asks)?
what happens if we dare to ask?
