Re-Storying: Finding the Language to Reconnect

To move toward re-connection and healing, we must re-story, creating new stories that help us learn in relational, ecological, and spiritual ways. We must ask: How do we tell the stories of our connections with other beings in ways that truly portrays our deep connections? Language carries forward culturally specific ways of knowing and our view of reality is encoded in language. We often have difficulty seeing the world in terms of process and relationships because English and other western languages don’t reflect that reality. Language helps to perpetuate our disconnection but can also potentially help support the internal shift toward a deep knowing of interconnectedness. We can find new ways to talk about and to our more-than-human relations, and find new language and metaphors to embody the relational world we inhabit, adopting the “grammar of animacy.” As we seek to re-story our world, we start telling new stories. Here I share several stories, from my own life and from higher education, of how dominant colonizing language creates damage and disconnection, and how we might begin to use language differently to re-story in real ways, especially in teaching and learning settings.