a conversation between stones

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Nouns are mainly designated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate. The word stone, akin, is animate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. 

Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand. Stones are not the same as they were to me in English. 

I can't write about a stone without considering it in Ojibwe and acknowledging that the Anishinabe universe began with a conversation between stones.


—Louise Erdich
Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart

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When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.


—Joy Harjo

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If you are stone, be magnetic;

if a plant, be sensitive;

if you are human, be love.

—Victor Hugo

Les Miserables

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