Language of Place

There is a language indigenous to this valley, this I know.

And while it may have been heard by peoples aboriginal to this place, and while they may have learned to enmouth it, its origin is clearly of the earth.

I know this because there are moments when I begin to hear it.

Moments during the winter rains when I hear the strident voice of the creek, moments in mid-summer when things have dried and its absence is plaintive.

There is a shimmering sound the bees make in September, when they are pollinating the fir trees, a sound of their millions of translucent wings beating.

The coyotes of this place, in early summer, just before dawn, howl when they congregate at such a pitch of strength that my dog, sleeping with me on a platform out of doors, grows so scared he falls backwards off the sleeping platform, then climbs back up shakily, worms down to the bottom of my sleeping bag, and spends the rest of the night shivering there at my feet.

And when the Pileated Workpecker arcs through the air to tackle the side of a Great Douglas Fir, laughing, sometimes I understand what he is saying.

Once I hosted a gathering of Indigenous women on this land, and prayers and songs were made in several languages.

One of the Elders, from a tribe whose ancestral lands are a couple of hours from here, in the foothills of the Sierras, began to sing and I watched the entire landscape perk up its ears and listen.

Deer stopped grazing, and their ears went up. Rabbits sat up on their haunches.

Above us, raptors wheeling on thermals tilted their heads in our direction.

The grass listened.

I watched a giant boulder lean in.

Later, when we were talking privately, I told her what I had seen.

Ah, she said. My people have been traversing this valley for many thousands of years.

The land remembers your language, I said.

This interested me, because there were other indigenous languages sung that day, but the land didn’t recognize them the way you stop and stare at a favorite aunt or uncle from childhood whom the vagaries of time and distance have kept away from you for a decade or two.

On first sight, something inside of you melts, and you run to them, embrace them with abandon, something loosening deep inside your heart. Instantly time is erased. That is the ease of this kind of love. It meets us in the everywhen.

The earth remembers her children.

Restore Wellbeing, from which this text is excerpted, arrives March 1. It is available for preorder now.