“The limits of your language are the limits of your world.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Aren’t squirrels cute? With their fluffy tails and pointy ears, scurrying up and down trees and playing catch with each other, they can get quite a following on social media for their adorable appearance and harmless demeanor. To a gardener like me though, their presence could be threatening. Taking a bite out of every single tomato? Sure! Descending in dozens on fruit trees and leaving not a single apple or pear behind? That happened too. And if you ask some suburban dwellers along the East Coast of the US what they think about the eastern grey squirrel, the answer is often “rodents” and “pests”. In our tamed world, we easily borrow and use labels and attitudes circulating in our language, culture, and society just because “that’s the way things are”, just because we have words to do so. The ANFT guide training took me on a journey of untaming and unlearning that made me question what I know and understand about language and communication. Encounters with the More-Than-Human World have led me to recognize my own cultural conditioning and to start “re-membering myself whole”. This story is about words and language, and a particular eastern grey squirrel as a teacher and a partner.
It was a bright summer day at the beginning of my ANFT guide training. I was looking through an open window on the second floor at an elderly maple tree, about 20 feet away. I was practicing noticing. The maple’s trunk was covered with lichens and moss, and a seedling was growing from the groove where the trunk and one of the branches met. My gaze was traveling up and down and along the branches, catching glimpses of the blue sky through the gently swaying leaves. Suddenly, I heard a scratching noise – a squirrel was hurrying along the metal fence below. I was startled and reacted with a loud yelp “Squirrel!”, which in turn startled the poor creature, and she almost fell off the fence but composed herself and kept on running. I got back to practicing my noticing and enjoying the breeze. And what do you know? I was interrupted again by the same squirrel. Only this time, she was climbing the tree. That’s what squirrels do for a living, right? To my astonishment though, she stopped at a point parallel to the window, turned towards me and, looking me straight in the eye, started chirping and squeaking loudly. Her irritation was palpable. I was lost for words. After all, I don’t speak Squirrel. But she kept chirping so insistently. I was truly sorry for startling her and apologized in English, which I’m sure the squirrel doesn’t speak. But I knew it, on a deep level that was neither cognitive nor rational nor language-based, that mutual understanding was reached. After my apology, the squirrel didn’t say anything else and hurried along to a hollow high up inside the maple.
This encounter got me thinking about language and communication from a different angle. And the label “pest” is no longer part of my vocabulary. Let me explain.
I’m a linguist, so thinking about language and communication is natural to me. That’s what I do for a living: carefully examine nuances of meaning and the composition of sentences, make sure that words are used correctly and fit together like a neat puzzle to tell a story, as well as teach others about the power of human language and the amazing linguistic diversity that exists on our planet, but is unfortunately under threat. Language is what makes us human, or so I’ve been taught. We need our human languages to transmit intergenerational wisdom through songs, prayers, origin stories, proverbs, and more. We also need our languages to organize life in society – to maintain and challenge hierarchies, to prescribe norms of behavior, to create and project our identities, and so on. Non-human animals have been thought of by many scientists as inferior to humans because they don’t have “language”. Along these lines, animals communicate and express emotion, but don’t create culture. They organize into groups, but don’t form complex societies. Then there’s a whole centuries-long debate about the origins of human language with a common thread – humans are special. We have words, and we can use words to talk about words, and to think our thoughts, and to discuss our thoughts and feelings with others!
Words, words, words… Noise of the tamed world…
ANFT guide training gave me a gift of a wordless space of bodyfullness and liminality and the magic of Simple, Open, Sensory, Infinite partnership invitations. You see, while you are reading these lines, your brain is hard at work – receiving letters and spaces as stimuli through the optic nerve, interpreting them as separate words, then producing meanings for words, then sentences, then the whole text. Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Listening to human language is not much easier. Neither is processing complex signs of a human sign language. But when we are interacting with the More-Than-Human World through our senses and with our hearts, words are not necessary, and the brain can rest, pausing a lot of that analytical activity. Sometimes, an insight or a revelation cannot be explained adequately with words but is still full of meaning. Many lines above, I described my encounter with the squirrel using almost 300 words! I can write much more trying to explain the significance of this encounter to me, but I won’t succeed. I felt the squirrel’s teachings in my heart, just like I felt a wave of childhood memories when I chewed on a pine needle during one of the trainer-guided walks. Or when I felt completely alive following a trainer’s invitation to take a wander and see if I could encounter a gift. No amount of words is enough to describe the transformation that happened within.
Humans are special – in a tamed world. Paradoxically, this story of our exceptionality is causing the extinction of the very phenomenon that is said to make us special. According to the Language Conservancy, humanity will lose about 90% of its languages within the next century.1 And, as David Abram aptly stated in The Spell of the Sensuous, “arguments for human specialness have regularly been utilized by human groups to justify the exploitation not just of other organisms, but of other humans as well…”2 Sadly, language is often a tool of othering, labeling, classifying and separating. Nature is talked about as a resource, insects are divided into beneficial or harmful, trees are classified into hard and soft lumber kinds, squirrels are pests, etc.
In a wild world, however, we and squirrels are kin, just being, just here and now, sharing the same earth, connected. Human language is not needed to understand each other.
Since that summer encounter, the squirrel and I have become partners in a wordless space of natural cycles and reciprocity. I regularly put out bits of fruit and seeds for her. Toward the end of the summer, a seedling emerged in a random spot in my yard. The squirrel must have buried a seed for safekeeping. The seedling grew into a mighty butternut squash plant.
In the fall, I gathered enough squashes to make many dinners for my family and also to share with neighbors and friends. It’s winter now; roasted butternut squash is delicious; the seeds go back to the yard for the squirrel.
The limits of our language are indeed the limits of our world. If we don’t find ways to connect to ourselves and the More-Than-Human World through our senses, through our hearts, sans words, we’ll be locked in the usual patterns of thinking and doing prescribed to us by our culture and society.
1 https://languageconservancy.org/language-loss
2 Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. Vintage Books.
Cover Photo by Estee White @esteewhitephotos
Second photo by Nick Collins, webdesignnewcastle.co.uk