QUOTE: LANGUAGE, STORY, WAYS OF KNOWING: - #4

“Should not the music of place and its other-than-human beings come first in our learning, rather than unsung words alone, or songs unconnected to place-beings? One thinks of children growing up on television and radio jingles, or nursery rhymes set to music but not to place-beings… Insofar as our words, both spoken and written, are not rooted in precise place and learned from such place – I would emphasize learned in song from place-beings – such free-floating, detached speech becomes dangerous and, often, destructive, even if inadvertently so. For such disoriented, strictly human-oriented speech has always tended to succumb to fear and, worse, its corollary, mendacity.”

- In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time, Calvin Luther Martin