KNOWING

Women of color have experienced the frustration of being excluded, and have long felt the pressure to become academically successful. We’ve bought into the white-controlled game: to gain admission to the club we have to pile up the number of letters behind our names. Leaving aside that fallacy – because what the white club means is that white people with letters can join the club -- education and intelligence are not correlative. I’m not stating anything new: it’s a well-known fact.

This is not to negate the power of being educated. I’m a published writer, so I’m all about reading and writing. But the analytical language we’re so adept at using can build barriers, and I don’t just mean the arcane unintelligibility that can create impenetrability around even basic concepts. See what I did there?

This right here: academic language can block body intelligence.

Example: Jeremy Narby’s book, Intelligence in Nature, examines knowing in plant-life and other natural elements. For almost a month I struggled with the word “intelligence” that connotes conscious decision-making and critical thinking. I went back and forth between “knowing,” “recognition,” and “cognition.” What could plants actually know or recognize or acquire through experiences and senses?

And then I realized that the problem isn’t what plants do – it’s how I perceive what they do.

My view of whether or not plant-life has intelligence is irrelevant. Trees send out roots to feed both old and broken trees as well as young seedlings. In forests, trees communicate and coordinate the period when they all drop their seeds. Plants emit high-frequency sounds when there is a perceived threat or when leaves are removed. Water has memory attributed to it. Masura Emoto’s work in water consciousness, written off as a pseudo-science is still provocative and intriguing enough to have influenced Veda Austin’s research that’s labelled “a blend of art and science.”

How I attribute definitive language – the language of cognitive intelligence -- to what happens in the natural world doesn’t matter. The natural world isn’t dependent on human language: trees have far more important things to do, like defending their tender bark from deer by cultivating brambles around their trunks as an efficient deer-deflection strategy

And then there’s my experience with water. Anyone who’s seen my countless FB reels of waterfalls, streams, ocean vistas, water trickling into drains, knows my water fascination. I just thought that while some people are drawn to the desert, I’m more in my element, as it were, with water.

Recently, I was in a workshop with the highly gifted musician, Alison David, who referred to the commonly observed vibration of water in a glass placed next to a speaker. She correlated that with how our own internal water system vibrates.

Lightbulb moment: was it possible that the two vibrations could speak to each other??I tried it out, standing on a bridge near Multnomah Falls, listening intently to my body without the usual chipmunk intensity of analysis. And it happened. Waterfall vibration called to body vibration that had everything to do with body intelligence and nothing to do with cognitive intelligence.

My body recognized its home in water – and water’s home in my body. I am able to release into a full body water consciousness that’s difficult to describe in any language. All that without having to designate, parse or analyze.

Without recognizing and allowing that power of our body intelligences that inform intuition, music, spatial relationships, body awareness and, and, and – we’ll continue to pursue what we see as the “correct” way to define our lives and how our bodies move through community spaces, peopled by humans or other natural sentient beings.

There’s major value in knowing how to read your body intelligences: not only in how your body responds to and speaks with the natural world – but how to command a room, how to equalize the power balance, how to address conflict or confrontation. Body signals go off all the time and those who can read and respond to them do so on an intuitive level that isn’t cognitive. This is not something that’s shoved and squeezed into academic language. It really only exists only in the body.

In the recognition. In the knowing.

And no number of degrees can teach you that.