Page 144 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

crops, and, with each spring, growing worries that this would be the year that our well would dry up.

On that snowy December night, as I stood by the fire listening to my friends speak aloud their hopes

for greater peace in the world, I did not know what I would say. I had moved to this land to grow my

own food and live a life close to the earth, but what exactly did this mean in the context of a changing

climate and the sixth greatest extinction? How could a lifestyle choice – or hope - be enough? What

came to me by the fire was the understanding that I owed the worldwide water crisis, the shriveled

coconut palm, the blighted fields of potatoes, something more. When my turn to speak came around, I

heard myself say something about wanting more peace in the world. But inwardly, I felt a new and

different statement forming. On the brink of this new year, I realized I wanted to give the collective

survival of the earth my voice.

***

The Ainu, who are native to Japan, have a word, “iworu,” which means their territory or range, their

biome.* “Iworu” has specific land mass denotations – the deep forest over the rise, the salty bay full of

salmon, the high, pointy mountain. As is true of most original cultures, the Ainu invest their geography

with spirits. There is a pulse in the forest, a cry in the winter field, a song in the mountain.

Language belongs not only to humans, but to animals and spirits, to all things wild. Ancient cultures,

whether in the depths of the Indonesian jungle or the high arid desert of the American West, felt a

natural desire to sing, chant, call out the names of the places that held their stories, as an answer to

the hawk's cry and the wolf's howl, as an expression of gratitude for how the land gives us our lives.

Story and place were one, and that symbiosis meant survival.

Survival was catalogued in the beauty of hearing the names of places spoken aloud.

***