Our Language Reveals Our Roots

Our Language Reveals our Roots

I have probably mentioned before that we keep chickens. We get a few eggs, manure for the garden and help controlling bugs on our plants. Gradually, chicken care and chicken behavior have become part of my life. I was noticing lately how much language comes from human interaction with chickens, and I wondered how much of our language originates from our historical relationship with animals, plants and the natural order. Quite a bit, it turns out. I never reallypaid attention before, but as I started writing down all the references I could think of it quickly became an overwhelming list. It made me realize how deeply connected humans are to nature and our roots in hunting, animal care and agriculture. I guess it’s kind of an obvious observation, but perhaps, like me, you have overlooked this language connection as our human culture has gradually moved away from our deep kinship with the natural order. For most of human history people’s lives were deeply intertwined with the rest of the natural world and it seems to me that only in the last century or so that have we developed this artificial sense that we are separate from and superior to nature. Just to get you thinking, here are a few examples I thought of that have to do with chickens, but this is only scratching the surface (so to speak) of all the many words and idioms in the English language that have to do with the Earth: animals, plants, forests, agriculture, hunting and such. Try making your own list, I bet in five minutes you’ll be amazed at the number of phrases you think of from “wild goose chase” to “snail’s pace” that have to do with nature or agriculture.

Here’s my chicken list: crowing (boasting), rooster tail, chicken scratch,pecking order, to be chicken, a chick (young girl), brooding, hen party, nest egg, scratching out a living, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, chicken feed, feather your nest, hen pecked, which came first the chicken or the egg, I laid an egg, mother hen, as scarce as hen’s teeth, coming home to roost, madder than a wet hen, fox in the henhouse. I may have missed some but you get the idea.

Why this seems important to me today is that it made me think about how rooted our language, and ultimately, ourselves are in the processes of the Earth. For most of human existence people lived intimately with animals and plants. We may feel we have moved beyond this connection and that humans were always separate or “above” the rest of creation in some way, but our language reveals the falsehood in this. This is where we came from, and I propose, what we need to rediscover. I believe we are part and parcel of creation, one with it and dependent upon our fellow creatures, flora and fauna. With language, we can’t ignore our roots, and I think the same applies spiritually and intellectually. When we rediscover our oneness and interdependence wewill rediscover ourselves. Our original nature is to live intertwined with all of nature. We know that digging in the dirt of a garden heals us, that the beauty of nature restores us, that time in the wild revives our spirits and “getting our hands dirty” cleans us out. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay, “Nature”: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, —no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my had bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.” Emerson found not only renewal and repair in nature but that in his essential being he was a part of God.

Wendell Berry’s poem, “Country Once Forested”, is an illustration for me of the human memory of forest and farms in our heritage. “The young woodland remembers the old, a dreamer dreaming of an old holy book, an old set of instructions, and the soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.” We humans are like the young forest and the soil dreaming of grass under the pavement of modern cities. Some part of us is aware of our basic connection to the rest of creation but mostly we have forgotten. Our language remembers. Perhaps reexamining our language will help us renew this connection and help us save ourselves in the process. Under the thin veneer of contemporary, industrial and technological human life is our original identity of wildness. For most of human history we lived as part and parcel of the natural world: growing and gathering food, hunting and caring for domestic animals and surviving in harmony with the cycles of nature.