writing without words

what knowledge cannot eat

I’m at a loss for words lately. I’m weary of the world and its hollow repetition; the threads that take you nowhere, the endless scroll. I’m exhausted by the discourse— the public feuding— the reactivity— the disposability. Are we ever going to grow up? Pieces of our humanity are being sold to an empire whose current colonial project is our inner world. Our hearts become content and our souls are turned into profiles and brands. We are empty shells that carry the same cost our ancestors paid to become American. Except the price is never fully paid. Empire extracts across generations.

I can’t describe fully what has been lost. The English language doesn’t have enough words, enough sounds to wrap my tongue around. The English language is loss itself. Made up of lost heritage and stolen cultures. Every word has a history, and yet it doesn’t go back far enough. Maybe what I’m trying to describe is not in words at all. Maybe it’s more of a grunt, a low hum. Maybe it’s a drawing in the sand, or on a cave wall. Maybe it’s something more eternal, ethereal, beyond time itself.

In the Dagara culture, people believe that reading and writing takes the place where spirit should inhabit. In their village, spirit is an integral part of the human experience. The material and the spiritual are not separate but rather extensions of each other. They don’t have a word for supernatural either. The closest word is yielbongura, which translates to “the thing that knowledge cannot eat.”

There are experiences beyond words, beyond language. There are things that cannot be extracted and consumed through thought.

I remember being eighteen, sitting at a café with my mom and talking with her about personality and identity. I didn’t understand the concept of identifying yourself as an angry person, or a happy person. “Don’t emotions come and go?” I asked. She said she remembered feeling that way too at my age. Later on, I would learn that in Irish, we don’t say I am sad, we say tá brón orm— the sadness is on me. My ancestors talking through me in the silence, behind a question.

I remember being sixteen, sitting underneath a tree, and having a profound spiritual experience. I tried to write it down, but the words could not translate the feeling. I don’t know what happened, or what kind of tree I was sitting under, but I was changed.

I grieve for all the old-growth forests we never got to see. Those haunted photos are all that’s left, the ones with the giant, fallen trees and the people who did the chopping to build their new homes. Is that why there are so many haunted houses? Is that where all the ancestors have gone? I’ve had dreams of those forests… of being up high, in a canopy of trees. Something I’ve never seen before but know so intimately. A remembering beyond what the mind knows.

Mary Oliver said that prayer is the doorway into silence in which another voice may speak. Maybe that’s our problem in the west. We talk too much. Talking heads. Talk therapy. We talk ourselves into complexes, talk ourselves out of what we really feel. I tell my friends that I think the people in this country have lost their souls. They nod in agreement, disgusted by the soulless other. But if they allowed themselves to feel the weight of that statement, that quiet knowing, they would go silent— or break at the knees and weep for what we have done… what we’ve become. Maybe the world would break open in this way. A broken bowl spinning on the floor, shattered glass echoing through the doors.

The presence of deep listening unfolds in me, like linen being shaken open and hung out to dry. New dimensions open, suspended in the sun. Here, I become infinite. No longer grasping and clenching for a stagnate identity, but letting myself unravel, slowly— unfurling differently in each moment that I’m in. Meeting myself there, like a soft kiss, or a gentle breeze.

Shedding the fixation to be somebody in a soulless world. Like a deer bashing his antlers against a tree because sometimes growth requires blood. Rejecting the culture of extraction and consumption that goes into being somebody. Refusing to carve myself into pieces, labels, categories. I am not easy in this way. I give birth to myself over and over again. My soul is a dialogue between all my selves. And sometimes, that dialogue takes the shape of a newborn— hungry, and screaming.

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Hello dear ones,

I will be hosting an in-person grief circle in Eagle Creek, Oregon on June 13th. We will be gathering for a 3 hour ritual where we will sing, build altars, share stories, and collectively alchemize grief. Click the link for more details & please share with your communities if you feel called to support this work🌹🌿