My four year old grandson has been staying with us. He loves words, and is fluent in our language and a language of his own. It's clearly fun to play with sound as air winds round and round and plays with tongue and mouth as meaning and nonsense resound.
Today I removed the Christmas books from the wall system, and browsing through the bookshelves re-discovered The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.
They wrote it as a "spell book", to conjure back twenty words lost from the most recent version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words like acorn, adder, dandelion, newt, otter and willow had been replaced by attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The outdoor and natural world had been replaced by the indoor and virtual. The lost word that most surprised me is "otter".
The page on otter ends with this:
Ever dreamed of being an otter? That
otter underwater, thunderbolt, that
shimmering twister?
Run to the riverbank, otter-dreamer, slip
your skin and change your matter, pour
your outer being into otter - and enter
now as otter without falter into water.
And so now on this last day of 2023, do just that - "slip your skin and change your matter". Today and tomorrow are days to conjure new ways to speak, be present, and play.
Otters play in the sand at Abbott's Lagoon
Mother and baby otters swimming home
Mother and Baby Otter
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