speak to me

Drawing by Leonora Carrington from the series Una Vida Surrealista

“While persons brought up within literate culture often speak -about- the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly -to- that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation.

Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue; they do not speak in words. They may speak in song, like many birds, or in rhythm, like the crickets and the ocean waves. They may speak a language of movements and gestures, or articulate themselves in shifting shadows.

Among many native peoples, such forms of expressive speech are assumed to be as communicative, in their own way, as the more verbal discourse of our species (which after all can also be thought of as a kind of vocal gesticulation, or even as a sort of singing). Language, for traditionally oral peoples, is not a specifically human possession, but is a property of the animate earth, in which we humans participate.”
- David Abram, Becoming Animal