I am a native English speaker, but I’ve always loved learning and was able to acquire Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan pretty fluently. There comes a time your understanding of a language goes beyond the words, and you can’t really translate back into your native tongue and do the images justice. I have appreciated the ability to connect deeply with people because I understand their language and it resonates with me in a way thats less about words and more an energetic heart exchange.
English is my first language, like you I took enough Spanish to understand and speak it somewhat. I feel fairly comfortable with digital and try to keep learning. I totally appreciate growing up as I have at the age I am now because I think I have had the best of both worlds. I look forward to your new album, I love your music and your words. Thankyou.
Oh language, it is an incredibly powerful bridge or breaker. I speak French about as much as you do Spanish. People make assumptions that I cannot speak English due to disability. I speak just fine, the average person can understand me. Once upon visiting DisneyLand Paris, I had a less than ideal experience with a person who decided that I wasn't welcome in the haunted house because they didn't like the way I looked. This person didn't want me to exist in that space and had no idea that I understood what he was saying. I responded calmly and diplomatically in French with my plan to enter the space, noting my desire for respect. By the end of my utterance his amazement outdid his capacity for either language and I went on with my plan for the day. Language is in many ways is the bridge to my very existence, a vehicle for the invisible to become visible. For the incapable to become capable. I ask myself then, how is it that I can be intentional in helping my friends who cannot use verbal communication to build community? I know there are many ways to to do that and I'm actively involved in doing so. Just something for the community to ponder..
I really appreciate your story and experience with language. I'm sorry that sometimes people are initially make wrong assumptions. Its so beautiful that you didn't yell at or shame the fellow, and that you spoke with diplomacy but with full integrity.. These are moments that can shift a person's understanding. " I ask myself then, how is it that I can be intentional in helping my friends who cannot use verbal communication to build community?" such a great question!
Thank you! I choose to believe that people are doing the best they can in any given moment and sometimes their best has not included experience with my truths. We learn together through patience, empowerment and generative community.
Such a beautiful quote! Love and connection are natural inclinations of human nature, I believe. Adjust our sails into the wind of a Great Wild Mercy and rejoice 💖 I appreciate you!
yes, being generous with others, believing most folks are doing about the best they can works better for me than assuming the worse. I don't know. There is an Einstein quote "the single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe that the universe is friendly.?" but as you said, the best someone can do at the time may not line up with how you choose to be in relationship - so we make adjustments :-)
I find the reality of two languages very close, and the idea of analog and digital languages, especially appealing. I live in Poland, Polish is my mother tongue and I speak it in everyday life. English is my second, learned only language. Fluency in English helps me a lot at work, but even more importantly, lets me broaden horizons.
I started working as an engineer in the analog era. My tools, then, were: a drawing board, a pencil, and a pocket calculator. Now I design in sophisticated two-dimensional and three-dimensional software, and consider myself quite tech-savvy in the world of computers.
In what way, having grown up in the analog reality helps me in the digital world? Perhaps, and this is the main idea of this comment, the analog-speaking mind provides me with a critical filter through which digital novelties must pass. About some of which I was enthusiastic (e-mail, the Web, exchange of files, engineering software), while others I rejected without even giving a try (Facebook, Twitter.)
Only recently I started to share my thoughts on Substack, and I believe that the advantage of knowing both the analog and the digital languages, leaves its mark in my posts.
Thank you, Carrie, for the thought of analog and digital skills as of languages! And for reminding about "long letters written on real paper and with real pen." They are an indelible part of my life, too.
Wow, Jackek, Thank you for your wonderful post. You must have experience do much change in the field of engineering! Yes, for those of us who grew up analog, we've needed to be willing to learn and become fluent in all kinds of new innovations. It is interesting to think about how our experience in the analog and digital world shapes our view of things. I really appreciate your comment about consciously deciding what digital experiences you choose. Change has come so fast, we are only now really reflecting upon the good or harm that can be caused by technology. I think its an important conversation, and I'm so grateful to hear about your experience and thoughts.
Carrie, my second language is music, and I learned it from you! For which I’m eternally grateful. Now all I need is to get my ten books translated into English... And, of course, get into the R&R Hall of Fame, with your help...
Ah, that is another whole conversation about language....musical language, dance language, visual art language! Its been such a gift to mull and muse and create together in several "languages". But the R&R hall of fame...well, you've been making using with a folksinger my friend. so we'll just have to see :-) If folks are interested in hearing a bit of our collaborative musical language I'm putting a link in the post to the song, The Music Will Play On" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDL66reGG3U
A thoughtful post! My ongoing process of learning Spanish has increased my appreciation of the nuances of language and cultures. Among other things, Spanish has so many subtle verb choices and English has its improvisational grammar. My Spanish-fluent friends have explained differences in translation to English of Spanish writers & I’ve tried to help them with American writers translated to Spanish. And looking at the values of different cultures and seeing what we all share in common. I’ve been fortunate to travel to Guatemala and experience the generosity of Guatemalans.
How wonderful to have friends who are willing to explore what is so valuable in both languages, and that context of culture is fascinating and very powerful! wow, so beautiful.
Language verbal or written have given me such joy and challenges.
I have difficulty pronouncing certain words, and so my spelling is a problem. These learning differences were some what helped with SPELL CHECK. I worked with migrants on AZ border, and eve went for a Spanish immersion 2 week class in Mexico. A friend became my tutor, but after months gave it up Bette. So I just smile, and hug those I work. Being open with who I am solved my issue🥰
Talking about stepping out from under the umbrella, resurrected this wonderful memory of my dancing in the rain at my grandmothers house and a lesson from a 75 year old woman I lived with my first year after graduation, who said “I never let the rain interfere with what I will want to do.
Now as a Octogenarian, I need to rind myself of her advice.
I too have always loved words. As an only child I grew up with older people..thus, a career in social work, working with the elderly, disabled, and marginalized. After college, I lived in a tiny village in Haiti with a minister, his wife, and 5 young children. It changed my life to say the least. Those 5 kids,( along with some college classes in Haitian Creole with a Haitian Linguistics professor at IU and a lot of help from God!) gave me a pretty good handle on the language. A new place, a new language, a different lifestyle, young children that I had never been around, certainly stretched my being. Then I have found the language of my pets stretches me as well. They communicate so effectively with absolutely no words, they are so much younger and yet so much older and wiser all at the same time! But, the point that seems so very obvious to me is that your music supersedes all that!!!! Thousands of people listen, hear, are touched, and moved along their life’s journey wherever they happen to be. The very same words you write, mean one thing to me, and another thing to the next person, and another thing to the next. “You can do this hard thing”....you can pass this test, you can survive this grief, you can solve this challenge of finances, you can make this pie crust, you can teach this child, you can grow this food, you can fight this disease, and a million more you can’s.....so, English may be your primary word language, but love, grace, acceptance, forgiveness, encouragement and however many other life giving adjectives exist, are your REAL primary language, and we are all so blessed by that gift!!!! I am anxiously awaiting the newest lessons to be learned with A Great Wild Mercy!!!!
Perhaps listening “with curiosity and a willingness to hear” IS a second language, nuanced w/the subtleties of spirit and intuition. Bede Griffiths once said that in the cave of the heart, there is no language. And I communicate daily w/people I pass by, not knowing which language they speak, just by smiling.
Language, words and where they originated as well as their shades of meaning, has always fascinated me. I grew up in a place where English and Spanish were spoken...English being my primary language, the beauty of Spanish my joy to learn. In my twenties I found myself deep in religious language...totally English...with some Latin and German in my studies. In a spiritual practice shared by Todd Weir a few weeks ago I realized that all my experience had deepened my roots in relationship with that Spirit I think of as God, creator and guide. My languages have broadened my perspective...your music has touched the depth of many of those perspectives...I look forward to Wild Mercy!
It was an insight for me to understand that social media has joined the Great Lie that there are no bridges. And it gave me more new language to work with as I try to send an alternative into the world. Conversations across the so-called divisions help to heal the gaps, and yes it is horribly hard at times! This came to me suddenly the other day in conversation with a friend whose wife, also a friend, was dying. We had such different perspectives on a political and faith issue - mostly because we listen to the sources who most agree with us - but our common language is grief, and we survived the conversation. Thank you for this new metaphor of second language; it's rich!
I think it is important to step away from the big lie and call it for what it is. Yes, understanding language and context of language has been so interesting to explore. yes...there is common language fo human experience. Your story about your friend is so touching, and so true.
English and Digital are both second languages for me. Although I live in both now, and have for many years, being able to "think" in my original languages gives a very different perspective. It's pretty clear to me that both my first languages are dying out with my generation. What insights will we lose?
My first business partner was 35 years older than me. He had a Grade 8 education, having left school to help his family through the Depression. He was the smartest and wisest person I ever knew. I learned from him to look at life and problems from an oblique perspective, never assuming the first view is the only one, or the best one.
Meeting and being warmly welcomed into the Friends community shifted my view of life completely, and by far for the better. Experiencing life from alternate angles and alternate knowledge sets enriches both the perceiver and the subject.
Thank you for your comment Anton, I loved your description of what you learned working closely with someone 35 years older, and how it opened up a wider understand. Its interesting you mention Friends community, because in the course of a silent meeting there is often so much "communication" happening. :-)
The first song I ever heard from you was in the mid-90s on KPFT in Houston. It was Another Thunder: “I don’t want to see it pass over; I’d just like to see it pour.” Sounds like Great Wild Mercy will be a companion piece to that very old song!
Incidentally, I was instantly hooked by your music. I was driving home when the song came on, and the minute I got home I ordered the album, I assume from a still extremely-new Amazon. What luck that when our church went on retreat in the Texas hill country a few weeks later, you were on the roster at Kerrville that very same weekend. The rest is history! Thanks for sharing life in multiple languages with all of us. (On a personal level, I’m still so grateful to you for blurbing my first book, 10 years ago now!) Onward.
MaryAnn, thanks soooo much. what a gift to hear about a song that was written a long time ago. I had not thought of the connection...but its a thread pulling though for sure. I looooved your first book and your writing my friend. I hope folks definitely check out your substack page and ALL your books. https://www.maryannmckibbendana.net/thebooks
I am a native English speaker, but I’ve always loved learning and was able to acquire Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan pretty fluently. There comes a time your understanding of a language goes beyond the words, and you can’t really translate back into your native tongue and do the images justice. I have appreciated the ability to connect deeply with people because I understand their language and it resonates with me in a way thats less about words and more an energetic heart exchange.
Vicki Cook
English is my first language, like you I took enough Spanish to understand and speak it somewhat. I feel fairly comfortable with digital and try to keep learning. I totally appreciate growing up as I have at the age I am now because I think I have had the best of both worlds. I look forward to your new album, I love your music and your words. Thankyou.
I LOVE YOUR WRITING. IT SPEAKS TO MY HEART.
Oh language, it is an incredibly powerful bridge or breaker. I speak French about as much as you do Spanish. People make assumptions that I cannot speak English due to disability. I speak just fine, the average person can understand me. Once upon visiting DisneyLand Paris, I had a less than ideal experience with a person who decided that I wasn't welcome in the haunted house because they didn't like the way I looked. This person didn't want me to exist in that space and had no idea that I understood what he was saying. I responded calmly and diplomatically in French with my plan to enter the space, noting my desire for respect. By the end of my utterance his amazement outdid his capacity for either language and I went on with my plan for the day. Language is in many ways is the bridge to my very existence, a vehicle for the invisible to become visible. For the incapable to become capable. I ask myself then, how is it that I can be intentional in helping my friends who cannot use verbal communication to build community? I know there are many ways to to do that and I'm actively involved in doing so. Just something for the community to ponder..
I really appreciate your story and experience with language. I'm sorry that sometimes people are initially make wrong assumptions. Its so beautiful that you didn't yell at or shame the fellow, and that you spoke with diplomacy but with full integrity.. These are moments that can shift a person's understanding. " I ask myself then, how is it that I can be intentional in helping my friends who cannot use verbal communication to build community?" such a great question!
Thank you! I choose to believe that people are doing the best they can in any given moment and sometimes their best has not included experience with my truths. We learn together through patience, empowerment and generative community.
Such a beautiful quote! Love and connection are natural inclinations of human nature, I believe. Adjust our sails into the wind of a Great Wild Mercy and rejoice 💖 I appreciate you!
yes, being generous with others, believing most folks are doing about the best they can works better for me than assuming the worse. I don't know. There is an Einstein quote "the single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe that the universe is friendly.?" but as you said, the best someone can do at the time may not line up with how you choose to be in relationship - so we make adjustments :-)
Hello,
I find the reality of two languages very close, and the idea of analog and digital languages, especially appealing. I live in Poland, Polish is my mother tongue and I speak it in everyday life. English is my second, learned only language. Fluency in English helps me a lot at work, but even more importantly, lets me broaden horizons.
I started working as an engineer in the analog era. My tools, then, were: a drawing board, a pencil, and a pocket calculator. Now I design in sophisticated two-dimensional and three-dimensional software, and consider myself quite tech-savvy in the world of computers.
In what way, having grown up in the analog reality helps me in the digital world? Perhaps, and this is the main idea of this comment, the analog-speaking mind provides me with a critical filter through which digital novelties must pass. About some of which I was enthusiastic (e-mail, the Web, exchange of files, engineering software), while others I rejected without even giving a try (Facebook, Twitter.)
Only recently I started to share my thoughts on Substack, and I believe that the advantage of knowing both the analog and the digital languages, leaves its mark in my posts.
Thank you, Carrie, for the thought of analog and digital skills as of languages! And for reminding about "long letters written on real paper and with real pen." They are an indelible part of my life, too.
Wow, Jackek, Thank you for your wonderful post. You must have experience do much change in the field of engineering! Yes, for those of us who grew up analog, we've needed to be willing to learn and become fluent in all kinds of new innovations. It is interesting to think about how our experience in the analog and digital world shapes our view of things. I really appreciate your comment about consciously deciding what digital experiences you choose. Change has come so fast, we are only now really reflecting upon the good or harm that can be caused by technology. I think its an important conversation, and I'm so grateful to hear about your experience and thoughts.
Carrie, my second language is music, and I learned it from you! For which I’m eternally grateful. Now all I need is to get my ten books translated into English... And, of course, get into the R&R Hall of Fame, with your help...
Ah, that is another whole conversation about language....musical language, dance language, visual art language! Its been such a gift to mull and muse and create together in several "languages". But the R&R hall of fame...well, you've been making using with a folksinger my friend. so we'll just have to see :-) If folks are interested in hearing a bit of our collaborative musical language I'm putting a link in the post to the song, The Music Will Play On" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDL66reGG3U
A thoughtful post! My ongoing process of learning Spanish has increased my appreciation of the nuances of language and cultures. Among other things, Spanish has so many subtle verb choices and English has its improvisational grammar. My Spanish-fluent friends have explained differences in translation to English of Spanish writers & I’ve tried to help them with American writers translated to Spanish. And looking at the values of different cultures and seeing what we all share in common. I’ve been fortunate to travel to Guatemala and experience the generosity of Guatemalans.
How wonderful to have friends who are willing to explore what is so valuable in both languages, and that context of culture is fascinating and very powerful! wow, so beautiful.
Language verbal or written have given me such joy and challenges.
I have difficulty pronouncing certain words, and so my spelling is a problem. These learning differences were some what helped with SPELL CHECK. I worked with migrants on AZ border, and eve went for a Spanish immersion 2 week class in Mexico. A friend became my tutor, but after months gave it up Bette. So I just smile, and hug those I work. Being open with who I am solved my issue🥰
Talking about stepping out from under the umbrella, resurrected this wonderful memory of my dancing in the rain at my grandmothers house and a lesson from a 75 year old woman I lived with my first year after graduation, who said “I never let the rain interfere with what I will want to do.
Now as a Octogenarian, I need to rind myself of her advice.
Carrie “Much success with your concert.”
I too have always loved words. As an only child I grew up with older people..thus, a career in social work, working with the elderly, disabled, and marginalized. After college, I lived in a tiny village in Haiti with a minister, his wife, and 5 young children. It changed my life to say the least. Those 5 kids,( along with some college classes in Haitian Creole with a Haitian Linguistics professor at IU and a lot of help from God!) gave me a pretty good handle on the language. A new place, a new language, a different lifestyle, young children that I had never been around, certainly stretched my being. Then I have found the language of my pets stretches me as well. They communicate so effectively with absolutely no words, they are so much younger and yet so much older and wiser all at the same time! But, the point that seems so very obvious to me is that your music supersedes all that!!!! Thousands of people listen, hear, are touched, and moved along their life’s journey wherever they happen to be. The very same words you write, mean one thing to me, and another thing to the next person, and another thing to the next. “You can do this hard thing”....you can pass this test, you can survive this grief, you can solve this challenge of finances, you can make this pie crust, you can teach this child, you can grow this food, you can fight this disease, and a million more you can’s.....so, English may be your primary word language, but love, grace, acceptance, forgiveness, encouragement and however many other life giving adjectives exist, are your REAL primary language, and we are all so blessed by that gift!!!! I am anxiously awaiting the newest lessons to be learned with A Great Wild Mercy!!!!
Perhaps listening “with curiosity and a willingness to hear” IS a second language, nuanced w/the subtleties of spirit and intuition. Bede Griffiths once said that in the cave of the heart, there is no language. And I communicate daily w/people I pass by, not knowing which language they speak, just by smiling.
(And don’t get me started on babies😊👶🏼)
I loooove how you engage with people with willingness and welcome. I totally smile at babies too...isn't it great to get a grin in return.
Language, words and where they originated as well as their shades of meaning, has always fascinated me. I grew up in a place where English and Spanish were spoken...English being my primary language, the beauty of Spanish my joy to learn. In my twenties I found myself deep in religious language...totally English...with some Latin and German in my studies. In a spiritual practice shared by Todd Weir a few weeks ago I realized that all my experience had deepened my roots in relationship with that Spirit I think of as God, creator and guide. My languages have broadened my perspective...your music has touched the depth of many of those perspectives...I look forward to Wild Mercy!
It was an insight for me to understand that social media has joined the Great Lie that there are no bridges. And it gave me more new language to work with as I try to send an alternative into the world. Conversations across the so-called divisions help to heal the gaps, and yes it is horribly hard at times! This came to me suddenly the other day in conversation with a friend whose wife, also a friend, was dying. We had such different perspectives on a political and faith issue - mostly because we listen to the sources who most agree with us - but our common language is grief, and we survived the conversation. Thank you for this new metaphor of second language; it's rich!
I think it is important to step away from the big lie and call it for what it is. Yes, understanding language and context of language has been so interesting to explore. yes...there is common language fo human experience. Your story about your friend is so touching, and so true.
English and Digital are both second languages for me. Although I live in both now, and have for many years, being able to "think" in my original languages gives a very different perspective. It's pretty clear to me that both my first languages are dying out with my generation. What insights will we lose?
My first business partner was 35 years older than me. He had a Grade 8 education, having left school to help his family through the Depression. He was the smartest and wisest person I ever knew. I learned from him to look at life and problems from an oblique perspective, never assuming the first view is the only one, or the best one.
Meeting and being warmly welcomed into the Friends community shifted my view of life completely, and by far for the better. Experiencing life from alternate angles and alternate knowledge sets enriches both the perceiver and the subject.
Thank you for your comment Anton, I loved your description of what you learned working closely with someone 35 years older, and how it opened up a wider understand. Its interesting you mention Friends community, because in the course of a silent meeting there is often so much "communication" happening. :-)
The first song I ever heard from you was in the mid-90s on KPFT in Houston. It was Another Thunder: “I don’t want to see it pass over; I’d just like to see it pour.” Sounds like Great Wild Mercy will be a companion piece to that very old song!
Incidentally, I was instantly hooked by your music. I was driving home when the song came on, and the minute I got home I ordered the album, I assume from a still extremely-new Amazon. What luck that when our church went on retreat in the Texas hill country a few weeks later, you were on the roster at Kerrville that very same weekend. The rest is history! Thanks for sharing life in multiple languages with all of us. (On a personal level, I’m still so grateful to you for blurbing my first book, 10 years ago now!) Onward.
MaryAnn, thanks soooo much. what a gift to hear about a song that was written a long time ago. I had not thought of the connection...but its a thread pulling though for sure. I looooved your first book and your writing my friend. I hope folks definitely check out your substack page and ALL your books. https://www.maryannmckibbendana.net/thebooks
Thank you so much for the kind words, and the soundtrack of my life for lo these many years.