Like many of my fellow nature-connected Iowans, I’ve recently been spending time out in the woods on the hunt. Mid spring is morel season, and there’s few tastier reasons to get outside and open up my senses to feel into the forests for these emerging gifts.
In her illuminating book, Braiding Sweetgrass, the Native American author, botanist and professor, Robin Wall Kimmerer, introduced readers to the Potawatomi word, puhpowee, which, roughly translates into english as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.”
For those who walk in the woods regularly, you may well understand why such a word exists to name this phenomenon. Where yesterday was a hillside with leaf litter and some ephemeral wildflowers, today is a veritable fungal feast with hundreds of crenulated creatures emerging from the loamy darkness. Where and when causes and conditions are just right, something appears out of nothing, and we lucky ones attuned to that force get the tasty benefits from this generous growth.
Kimmerer shares many examples of how her native language differs from modern English. In this one example, we can see how having a word for something draws your attention to it. Words hold a power in the human psyche to shape our reality. We often learn of the existence of something by hearing a word for it. My son asks me what (insert word here) means, and his world expands to include a new concept or thing.
These days new words, aka neologisms, crop up seemingly daily. Through social media and rapidly distributed memes, millions of people are introduced regularly to new words signifying concepts and phenomena that either didn’t exist previously, or were less articulated as constituting a discrete phenomenon (eg. ghosting, tweeting, FOMO, unfriend, etc.) With all this exposure to novel words and concepts, I have to ask myself, are the new words I’m consuming and using helping me to live in the world in a way that better aligns with my values and priorities?
If I am less occupied with social media, I’m less likely to be concerned about being “unfriended” on Facebook. If I’m more attentive to the interactions with my son, I might long for a word to precisely describe the experience of warm-hearted surprise and wonder I feel when he asks me an innocent yet astute question about life. He and I might co-create a word or concept that points to this phenomenon, thus heightening our awareness of it and strengthening a cultural bond within the family.
If words are the building blocks of the meaning we make of the world we inhabit, then it’s worth getting curious about the words you use, consume and long for:
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Where do you source the words that create meaning in your life?
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What are you reading, consuming or sharing that serves the values and vision for the world you live in?
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What words do you long for?
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Are there experiences you wish to have more often? If so, put some words to those experiences and ask yourself how to make them more alive in your life.
If you find this interesting or helpful, send some words my way. I’d love to hear from you.