The website, Literature of Restoration, (literatureofrestoration.org) will be live on Earth Day, April 22, 2023. Its intention is to bring together a dynamic anthology of writing with this question at its heart: If our literature changes, if our language is infused with different values, might we begin to reverse the deadly trajectory toward extinction of all life that results from the culture of the Anthropocene?
The field that arises from the Literature of Restoration seeks to duplicate in writing the complexity, interconnection and vitality of the natural world and all life forms. It is a way of writing and being that calls to us and we hope will call to others, to you as visitor, reader and participant.
In our website welcome letter we write: “We are deeply pleased for the opportunity to introduce Literature of Restoration and to introduce you to it. As literature emerges from culture which, in turn is shaped by literature, we are hoping that over time a new literature will emerge, not wedded to death and violence but from which we might say, Long Life for the future of all beings, (all beings!) the natural world and Earth…We think of this site as a community gathering in conversation around a central fire in the woods,” where the Owls hooting to each other, the Wolves howling to the moon while gathering the pack, the Crickets chanting while tuning the world are informants and characters in the stories told as well as companions in the circle. We come together, all of us, to share stories, the oldest form of telling, in old, old, and also. very new ways.
In September 2014, working on my novel, A Rain of Night Birds, (Hand to Hand, 2017) I visited the Yakama Reservation in Washington state. At lunch, a Yakama Elder, Russell Jim, Head of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation's Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program blessed the food and then he said the Yakama prayer could not be translated into English. He was against dictionaries and online language courses, he continued, as they give the illusion of translation but become unwitting vehicles for undermining and limiting a People’s culture by reducing it to the narrowest band where English meets Yakama, where a secular culture meets the sacred. One has to sit, he said, with and at the feet of those who learned the language as children, who learned the songs, chants and prayers in the original language. Translation can’t transmit the range and subtleties of meaning, the spiritual dimensions, the implicit relationships, particularly, but not exclusively, to the beings of the natural world intrinsic to Yakama (and Indigenous languages) because they aren’t present, have no equivalents in English which no longer carries these values. A mere translation of one word to another only renders impersonal data but Indigenous languages are relational. The map is not the territory. When you read the translations, you can’t imagine what is meant. Those of us, all of us, who have been birthed by the Anthropocene and are compelled to live by its systems, unwittingly contribute to the demise of what sustains life.
But what if the manifold denied wisdom traditions and the range of human and more than human understanding could be transmitted, permeating our consciousness so that we live differently? What if such understandings, dreams, stories, insights, forms, words and heart could enter our language, could become the ground, a true ground, for a new literature and culture? What blessed universe might emerge from such a transformation?
Literature of Restoration exists within the natural world as a voice that grows out from it. It is complex, ecological, post-anthropocentric. It includes the intelligence of the more than human and is informed by myth, dream, intuition, vision, and instinct which are valued as much as science, data, and rational thought. Here EuroAmerican or Western thinking and beliefs co-exist with TEK, and the diverse teachings of traditional cultures. This literature is open to the reality of the ancestors, the presence of the spirits, the great mysteries. It is not focused on conflict or the eros of violence nor obsessed with possessions, things and power. It is based on the magnetic field of relationship and brings things together rather than setting them apart.
We invite you to join us, to visit the site, read the offerings, listen to the readings, take a MindWalk, unite with us to restore our beautiful world.
So vital to include the photos and imagery that can transcend words and culture. Sound and music too, beyond the human utterance of language, as we experience in music Dare healing circles. And silence...
In deep gratitude for what you are doing here. I would like to participate ~cannot afford to pay. Are there options for those of us who are elders living on a very small amount of $ ??? I do hope so.