Language forges the foundation of our reality and shared experience. It filters perception, allowing us to safely discern among the myriad stimuli and condense them into manageable forms we can transmit back and forth to one another—perhaps in an effort to reassure ourselves that we’re not insane, for our perspectives are so varied and our connections just as ethereal.
The evolution of sanity—stability within a dynamic, self-referential awareness—is no trivial matter. As important as it is to understand etymological roots, engaging with the mutable qualities of language is equally vital. The ever-shifting landscape of perception is always in flux, just as life is forever in motion, continually reforming our reality. Etymology serves as much as a map of ecstatic continuity—as in the resonance between “heal” and “make whole”—as it does a record of language’s dispersal. Heidegger, for example, invites us to resound not merely with beings, but with Being. What a difference two letters make.
When we define phenomena—the words we use to describe, explain, and clarify the influx of reality all around us—we are caught in a work-in-progress, both individually and collectively, swept along by the currents of change that are constantly reshaping our perception.
How I see the color blue, or the first winter’s snow, will differ in subtle yet significant ways from how you see it—filtered by environment, culture, and time. The experience may be universal, but so is the necessary subjectivity of such things.
The problems we face collectively—and which unite us individually, integrating or healing the macro through the micro—are, at their root, problems of language. There are many tongues, many ways of describing the events unfolding before our eyes, and not every language or phrase can be easily translated into another. C’est la vie! So how do we share in describing such phenomena as climate change and human rights—issues that impact us on a global scale—in a way that we can all understand, concur with, and integrate as a truly planetary species?
No matter where on this blue orb we find ourselves, we can all feel the effects of human actions on the environment. Our industries and lifestyles leave behind vast amounts of waste. Lands once fertile are now arid. Sea levels rise, while drought, unchecked fires, and powerful hurricanes become more the banal norm than the shocking exception.
These are all “changes” on a local to worldwide scale. But isn’t change one of the paradoxical absolutes of life?
The wording itself is at the root and mycelium of confusion, disagreement, and animosity regarding the effects of climate “change”—a term that underlines the very crisis we face by circulating a mild, inoffensive marketing slogan: “Climate Change.” It’s PR speak. For those closely observing what’s happening to our planet, it’s too innocuous, and it’s too easily confused with the natural rhythms of our planet and solar system to raise the alarm. From Heraclitus to Darwin and Sakyamuni, thinkers across time concur with Ecclesiastes: This is the plane of change. The living and evolving earth does indeed change—desert eventually becomes oasis, rivers migrate, mountains wither away. The sun flares in cycles, the moon’s orbit steadily drifts from Earth, species die and are born, rain falls, and fires replenish the soil. The very land shifts beneath our feet all the time.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
There is nothing new under the sun. Yet this resonance, this kernel of truth—the essence of life as change—risks distorting our perception when “climate change” erodes the demarcation line between what is natural, even divine, and what is a crisis inflicted by humans upon the earth. Is it this resonance, this “fear and trembling” in responsibility, that forms the center of confusion between climate change deniers and advocates—the eye of our misinformation hurricane?
Yes, change is natural, but no—our actions are not performed with impunity. All planetary traditions teach that we are interdependent. Dependent origination in Buddhism, the practice of forgiveness in Christianity (“seventy times seven”), and the concept of Seven Generation stewardship all testify to our enmeshment—and therefore our responsibility to each other, to heaven, and to the earth, for those willing to risk metanoia and truly feel it.
We are in direct relation with our planet. Our actions matter, and the way we live our lives affects our world, rippling outward from the local to the global along the reverberating web of life. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten—and perhaps stopped feeling—this fundamental truth, as we dream and wander the blind, sometimes absurd, journey of the Western patriarchal mindset that has arisen in the recent acceleration of the civilization experiment.
How can we escape this foolhardy attempt to “achieve a name for ourselves?” This endeavor for immortality from obscurity as material beings is Babel retold—a search for a lasting, singular experience through the forgetting of our matriarchal and evolutionary continuity: our continuums with our mothers and our Mother, this nest of ecosystems with which we are entangled. We are not any one self. We are hosts to a myriad of organisms that sustain, propel, and encapsulate our being in an ever-dynamic, ever-changing localized ecosystem, whose importance is only a matter of scale. As we breathe in, absorb, and alchemize viral particles—becoming, once again, something more than ourselves, in the space of a zombie half-life transmitted and resurrected through us—will we be reminded of our collective vulnerability? Our actual and palpable interdependence that also manifests as love, rather than the fear of our perpetual annihilation?
Somehow, we began to see ourselves as fundamentally different from the world that birthed us. We were no longer a part of nature, but apart—divinely destined to master and enslave the resources at hand, easing the short-term burdens of a few, often with little care for the purpose and existence of the resources and lives taken. Yet these are crucial links in the chain that binds all life together, from mineral to human. In non-secular traditions, we have forgotten the Creator and idolized creation, forgetting “That from which we Are.” Without our continuity and interconnection with the biosphere, we simply are not.
And it is this alienation—this severing, disjointed perspective—that lies at the diseased heart of our societal ailments: a sickness so enmeshed in corporate and political structures, it is like an engorged tick feeding on itself, digging deeper until it no longer knows which way is up and which is down. All we know is that something is wrong. Something needs to change if we are to move toward balance.
But change and balance are delicate things—everything has a cause and effect, whether we can see it in the moment or only after generations have passed. It’s a continuous motion, requiring persistence, strength, and great delicacy to navigate—turning what is often deemed a struggle into a dance, joyful and difficult at once.
We have solutions for our problems. We know what is wrong. We have diagnoses and treatments—if we can only get the care we need, or break the addictions and chains binding us to a sinking, unsustainable ship that is our economic and socio-political infrastructure. The fundamental unit and currency of this infrastructure is an ego, or ahankara, that feeds on a feeling of separation and sacrifices its matriarchal aspect—the divine feminine that returns and returns again, in the form of Mary, Tara, Attabey.
Yet, all things must pass. Just as we will one day die, so too will the Earth and the Sun. It would be more disconcerting if civilization did not follow that rhythm—but nature has built-in checks and balances. Now—and I do mean N0w—that doesn’t mean we should move through our days in blissful nihilism. When we become aware of an area we can change, we must change it; it is the only way to grow. It is up to us to navigate these changes with care and grace, or risk having our resistance to change metastasize and distort into something monstrous that forces change upon us. Conflict propels the story, just as change is the only constant in the universe.
And this change can be discerned and induced in the subtle nuance between being non-attached and being detached. Non-attachment recognizes the transience of life while asking us to remain present. When we are detached, we cut ourselves off from life—most often in defense against harsher or more complex realities. But that illusion of separateness only lasts so long before our glasshouse shatters and we are impaled by smithereens of its jagged shards. Like the image of the Ten of Swords in the Rider pack, we are impaled by our own beliefs, lying bloodied and dismembered, as in a shamanic initiation. And when we pick up the pieces and reforge a new whole, we see with a deeper understanding—a gnosis that transcends words. Is this the meaning of the True Cross—to be impaled by the shards of our false self-narrative?
Once we recognize the magnitude of the crisis and allow our ego to begin to wither, the pathway of the Bodhisattva opens. Here, we do not seek to detach ourselves from the world and live only in nirvana, but to bring that wisdom back by embodying presence. Silence then becomes as powerful as words, for both strum the field of the heart—a language as pure and resonant as music, uniting and transcending all systems. This is the best culturally-relative understanding of our shared experience, going beyond even the isolated communication of human-to-human, extending to a greater network—closer to mycelia—a Universal Translator for all life: a pure spanda, a vibration of intent beyond language and thought.
Ultimately, this “vibe” serves as the best barometer of our experience. It becomes the loving heartbeat—the lifeblood behind the words we speak and the messages we seek to convey, no matter what language our offerings are forged in. For although it may sound as if we’re speaking about the same thing, we’re often left only with the assumption that what we said was understood—that our words didn’t fall on deaf ears or get entirely misunderstood. What remains is an opening of the heart. Here, we can feel faith in the transmission of all the teachers across history, through an opening to that very vibration of selfless love we now sense. The subtle cues of a smile, a glint of the eye, or a nod of understanding are as strong as any spoken acknowledgment. It’s the stuff—the essence—behind the words that gives them life. It’s the Language of the Heart.
