I recently clawed my way through a wonderful new book by Derrick Jensen called A Language Older Than Words (he also wrote Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros, which was published by Sierra Club Books in 1995). If you have not read it yet, I implore you to do so, and soon. This wonderful book makes it unmistakably clear that what we, as a culture, are doing to destroy the world is also destroying us as people. I mean this in two ways:

First, we destroy ourselves by destroying the world because we are wholly woven into the web of life - what we do to it, we cannot escape also doing to ourselves. As I pointed out in an earlier article (I Want to Destroy "the Environment"), there is no "environment" outside what many people think of as the human part of the world - it's all one world. Any harm we do to it, we do to ourselves because we are part of it.

In a second, more personal, sense, we also do to ourselves what we do to the world because we enact the same kinds of violence in our human relationships that we inflict on the world. The same systemic cultural forces that are tearing apart the community of life are also tearing apart our human communities. There is truly no safe haven, because the violence is passed on even within our own families, in the ways we neglect, coerce, ignore and brutally abuse our children, our spouses, our parents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles - and our very selves. The macrocosmic violence of the world and the microcosmic violence of the family aren't separate issues, to be addressed separately. They are two aspects of the same violent way of life, and we'll have to address the systemic cause of both to address either.

In the reading of A Language Older Than Words, Derrick launched himself into my heart like an arrow, then set about tearing open the scarred-over places of my past anguish by telling the story of his own, far more brutal suffering. He gouged deep into the sloppily self-cauterized stumps of my amputated need to belong, to live in a world that makes sense and fulfills my deepest needs for community, security and purpose - for tribe - and left me grateful and happy that he did so. How can this be?

It can be because I am convinced that it is only in reawakening to the ability to truly feel again that there's any hope in saving both ourselves and the world. As long as we are numbed to a world where more than two hundred species are driven to extinction every day, where sons lie down at night in their beds fearing the approach of their father's steps outside their door, where the U'wa are being driven from their ancestral lands because of our insatiable appetites for oil, where whole islands of life are on the edge of being drowned by the waters we've warmed with our raging fires of ancient sunlight (a/k/a fossil fuels) - where so many atrocities happen day in and day out that they threaten to consume the whole world - then we have no hope of walking away from the way of life that creates all these horrors and striving for something better.

A Language Older Than Words is a book about interspecies, even inter-conscious, communication, a conflicted internal debate on the appropriate response to those who profit most from and fervently defend our conquest and exploitation of the world, a personal memoir of one boy's experience in a family tortured by a father who was consumed by his own strangled pain, and a shatteringly honest exploration of the atrocities our culture has committed and is still committing in its quest to try to rule the world. Please, don't be afraid of the agony this book will reawaken - open yourself to it.

In exploring his own past and the ongoing process of coming to terms with and confronting his childhood experiences and our culture, Derrick helps to clear a path for the rest of us to do the same in our own lives, for the rest of our lives. We can never be put back to what we deserved to be, but we can come together to heal ourselves and go A.W.O.L. from our culture's war on the world if we're just courageous enough to face what has happened and is happening.

We can only move forward if we're willing to deal with our stuff, and with all the stuff carried by all the people in our lives. This process is sometimes almost overwhelmingly messy, but it must be done, we must risk it despite knowing that at any time our risk-taking may mean pain and failure - and sometimes it will mean pain and failure - or catastrophe will certainly overtake us.

A Language Older Than Words makes clear that our destruction of the world is not only global, not only bioregional, not only communal, but also utterly personal. Despite its horrific passages, it isn't by any means a relentlessly dark, negative, and depressing book. Derrick has somehow found a way to alchemically transmute atrocity into inspiration, in his own life and in my heart as I read. This doesn't mean that it all becomes easy, of course, either for him or for us. His nightmares continue, the climate still warms, salmon still bash themselves to death against dams, forests are still axed and burned, and the biotic holocaust continues. When I finished the book, though, in some strange, inexplicable way, saving the world felt more possible than it did when I started.

To find out more about A Language Older Than Words, drop in at the book's web site: http://www.contextbooks.com/language older/language.html. I close with an excerpt from the first chapter, "Silencing":

"There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harms' way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction."

"And keeping ourselves distracted from our feelings is the point of so much of what we do, is it not?"