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Tales from the Other Side of Language 127 lives of trees, rocks; I’m in relationship with qualities, spirits, and beings I can’t see. These narratives are not verbal, but still they resonate in other parts of my brain as realities. In archeological time, paradoxically, everything is new and very little is new. Some few basic patterns reconfigure over and over in different life forms across time, creating immense variety. I live at the edge of these ancient processes. I, too, have re-formed and reconstructed. I am comforted by the magnificence of being a part of this vastness, humbled to live as human in the maelstrom of so much diversity. The coos, jabbers, clucks, knickers, murmurs are among the first oral sensory languages of animals, parents, lovers, and babies, communications full of comfort, vitality, passion, and meaning. The swish of the mountain meadow grasses, the scent of asters and dogwood, each speaks its language. The trees in my yard murmur and co-breathe with me. They breathe oxygen to me, and I, carbon dioxide to them. It is an intimate and delicate relationship without special agency or thought. The trees talk to one another through roots and pheromones, to the birds that sway in their branches nibbling tiny life in their branch crannies. The luscious scent of my wild roses drags me across my yard. The din of incessant human words drowns that. The silence I heard after the stroke made hearing these other languages possible. I have been developing a sensory mind all this time. It is wider and deeper than my verbal mind was. Sensory mind belongs to the moment of now and the flow of all the sensory experience of all the others around me and the long eons before my life. The breadth of experience of the trillions of cells in my body sing me alive. Sensations of my family, the soaring trees in my yard, water flying across my sky as white wisps of cloud this morning, the jays and the crows rushing to the feeder next door all are present in my existence this dark morning. I wonder: What did my body think when my brain no longer processed sensations into emotions? It must have felt loss, and perhaps grief, not in my mind, but in all my sensory tissues. Emotions are not gone; they speak in
128 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: my body. If I think that everything valuable is in my brain, then my feelings are gone. When I think with my body, the whole sensory array of emotions becomes alive in me. I’m learning to think more with my body, becoming aware of the sensations there that receive the world around me. When I lost speech in the stroke, my body was a barely a partner. With the new basic damage in sensation and perception, I have to understand my body more deeply to recover. My daughter coaches the class in a morning Nia class: “Think of your arms and shoulders as wings and move into free dance.” Immediately I feel the muscles in the center of my back and sense that they are large and strong to lift the wings I see in my mind as eagle wings. I perceive directly from my body the sensations of flight as I circle, swoop, and turn. My brain receives the input from my body second. Feeling the desolation of the young woman muted by stroke and the grief of the older woman losing the clinical practice that was her lifework, I can listen and feel both of them. To learn the breadth of my non-verbal mind and the depth of what my body can tell me through so much chaos is bittersweet. It’s like tasting dark chocolate melting in my mouth.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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