Talking isn’t always that complicated. I talk to my cats all the time, and they talk back, and we generally understand each other. One of my cats speaks German (she was raised by a German family), and though she has lived with me for several years, she still responds better to that than English. We talk to the handsome puppy all the time, and even though we have never taught him the specific words, if we say, Cooper your ball is in the bathroom, he will happily trot into the bathroom and get the ball.
When I was younger and still practicing some variation of Wicca, I read a “spell” that would keep mosquitos away. Basically you told them that if they stayed away, you would not kill them. 99% of the time it worked. Sitting in the woods, reading in “A Language Older Than Words” about Derrick Jensen’s conversations with coyotes, I decided to try this with the spiders who kept trying to climb my legs. I asked them instead to go around me. And they did. They even went in the direction I pointed out for them, once I acknowledged that I realized they just wanted to get around me.
It’s quite true that it can sometimes be very difficult to speak with non humans simply because we aren’t speaking the same language. My cats often get very irritated when they are trying to tell me something and I keep saying “what?” and staring at them blankly. But they almost always understand me. Trees, I think, are the same way. Very rarely have they said anything to me that I would call words, and even when I understand the words as English I’m fairly certain my brain is doing some kind of translation from tree words into words I can understand.
For example, I was having a conversation about naming with the trees. I’ve been learning the English names for trees lately, and I knew I was talking to maples. When I expressed to them that I had learned the name “maple” they thought it was kind of funny. They then told me their names, which I unfortunately cannot repeat in full. They were long and had a lot to do with the shape of their leaves, their bark, and the soil and water they each preferred. That was entirely in tree language. But then all the trees around them got in on it, and told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to uphold my end of the bargain. Somehow this entered my head as English. I can only imagine that we, humans and trees and cats, must have some way of speaking that transcends words. Obviously people talk to each other without words. We typically call this body language, though most of us will also acknowledge an ability to speak to people we are close to just by looking at each other (a meaningful glance). Apparently this works just as well during interspecies communication. I spoke to the spiders in English, and they certainly understood me. I have no idea how. Presumably if I paid enough attention, they would speak to me as well. It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you try to figure it out scientifically. But the important thing, as always, is just to know that it works.
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