107 Heaven and Earth

The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct.

In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings is the Earth itself. If the Earth is speaking, perhaps we are part of its verbiage.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Logogenesis.’

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