Thoughts on Words and Nature

4th Mother Letter of 2007. It is the 13th of January. Wintry day in Austin


Dear Mother,

Lean over and bend your ear close to the paper. I want to whisper something to you. i've had no headaches in over a week. Hallelujah! If they've ended, this will be a record. The 2nd shortest Cluster time - ever.

Ever since using the word, omphaloskepsis, in your 2nd Mother Letter, Brother-in-Law Dan and I have been parleying back and forth on word meanings. In a recent email he suggested that in this technologically, every-changing, fast-paced world we are living in, "We are in danger of losing the ability to connect with our past and our people who lived in those times" by corrupting meanings of many old words and re-arranging meanings to suit modern demand and fashion. If this is the case, "It is possible that the language we use to convey our thoughts may not carry the ideas originally intended by those people from our past who generated the ideas." As an example, Dan dug through his old files and shared an expression sent to him at one time by his brother, Ernest -- one that with the passage of time just "slipped-slided" into a current idiom.

"Many years ago in Scotland, a new game was invented. It was ruled that Gentlemen
Only could play the game. Ladies Forbidden. Thus, the word GOLF entered into the
English language."

Among all the little points unfolding in this story, there is also, one of synchronicity. Wednesday morning on my early drive down Mesa to go meet Judy and Laura for our early run, rounding the first corner from the house, I slowed to let a squirrel cross the street. Usually, It's deer. This morning, a lone squirrel had the right-of-way. A couple of hours and couple of cups of coffee later, I remembered the second part of Dan's email and his story of the squirrel. That we'd have two instances of meaningful squirrel stories so close together is the wonder of synchronicity.

Brother-in-Law Dan, is very proud of the deck he added onto his and Karen's Columbia home. He calls it their, three-seasons room. It's outfitted with indoor-outdoor carpeting and has eight, fairly sizable windows opening on the front and sides of this covered porch to bring closer to them the beauty of their treed, woods-like, backyard. Deck project finished, here came the winter storms their part of the country withstood this past year.

While scraping up and sweeping out almost a foot of snow that had blown in through the open windows, Dan mentioned that during a couple of work breaks, he noticed a squirrel running down one of the large oak trees in the backyard. Curious, he stood and patiently watched. The squirrel ran down the tree until it was almost six feet from the ground and then took a diving jump right into the middle of a snow pile leaving a hole of about three inches in diameter. "About 30 seconds later, the squirrel popped its head up out of the hole and, in fits and starts, made a 360 degree check of its surroundings. Then back in the hole the squirrel went. After it repeated these various maneuvers 4 times, the squirrel re-emerged with an acron in its mouth."

Dan told me that it was at this point he got hit with the "duh" bolt of memory. "Growing up, I remembered watching squirrels find acorns in the winter, no matter how cold or wet the weather happened to be." However, he'd never had the experience of watching squirrels high-dive from trees into banks of snow to food hunt as the part of Oklahoma he grew up in didn't see snow too often. Then, right behind his first memory jog, quickly came another thought and then another.

First Dan thought, "those squirrels will probably be finding acorns or whatever passes for food eons after humans become a piece of archeology." Second thought coming to Dan and shared with me -- "Maybe being viewed as "Squirrelly" is not such a bad thing. Maybe I should not have been so upset with the fellow who once arrogantly told me that my ancestors must have lived in trees. If the squirrels can survive, perhaps my people really do have a chance."

Patience and observing nature really do provide opportunity for profound lessons. Getting a chance look at the survival techniques of the winter squirrel, Dan's follow-through on his curiousness, synchronized nicely with how many would dub his time spent as eccentric or "Squirrelly." Lessons from the animals can take racist words and spin them into hope.

(Squirrel story provided by Dan Cockrell, Master deck-builder and Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri-Columbia)