“You know it’s interesting. We don’t pay a lot of attention to natural sounds and we’ve forgotten all about the voices of nature. So we live in this world where we’re insulated from this incredible chorus of sounds. It’s all around us at all times. I think that in order to understand our world, we need to start listening to what everything around us is saying. We think the human voice is the only one that has come to matter to us. For indigenous people, I think it’s very different from that—that all of the voices around us, wind and water and ice and animals, they all matter, they’re all part of our single language of living things.”
Richard K. “NELS” Nelson, 2014 Interview
The last two neighborhood walks, mostly because I’m hobbled from skiing too hard this weekend, but in small part because I’m trying to stay alert to Cedar’s personality, I’ve let her set the slow pace and allowed her more time than I think I have to follow her nose, and ears, and curiosity.
This morning was another of those beautiful post-snow still air walks. There must be a weather word for this in some language or culture—mornings when the background blur of noise quiets and individual sounds fill in.
And so…like the lazy writer that I am this morning, I share a few moments of listening with dog Cedar just now. Although I could have captured a moment or two to prove that the human voice is the one that has come to no longer matter to Cedar, these clips give a good sense of her developing personality.
Warning: This video contains no action and explicit renderings of very little going on. It may not be suitable for those even slightly susceptible to having something better to do
As I was recording the last of this, neighbor and friend, Molly, texted as we were paused just below her house.
Although Rodin’s thinker was pondering the gates of hell, and mine birds and sky and snow and very likely food, maybe they share a phrase or two in that “single language of all living things”?
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