"The words you speak become the house you live in."

Hafiz

The main thesis of the lecture is the claim that the words we speak determine how we perceive the world around us, or rather, the world we live in. American ecophilosopher David Abram has insightfully observed that one of the main reasons why our perception has become so disconnected from nature is related to the role of our language; to a certain type of discourse, based on alphabetic writing, which has significantly transformed our perception of the world around us, including ourselves and our relationship to the sacred. We will get acquainted with Abram's explanation of how the use of alphabetic writing effectively short-circuited our original rich sensory reciprocity with the sensory land and led us to the fact that our consciousness closed in on itself, into its abstractions, and began to communicate only with its own signs and technologies.

This very risky situation brings us today to the brink of ecological and climatic collapse, when we perceive the natural world only as a set of inert objects and processes that we try to control and master, but we do not feel ourselves to be a fully integral part of the natural world: a part of the animals, plants, mountains, forests, rivers, birds, sky and stars, which earlier cultures perceived as distinct soulful subjects and considered them as their larger family. The second thesis of the lecture is therefore the statement that today we again need to give ourselves a new cultural form that will be coherent with the larger community of life. We need to reawaken to our animistic senses and begin to learn how to listen deeply to the more than human land around us again, how to establish a conversation with it, how to feel its animating touch again, how to be in tune with it. The key locus of this transformation is an expanded understanding of language that can include the surrounding living land as our speaker in dialogue. In this, some indigenous cultures and some poets (Robinson Jeffers, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, etc.) can be a great inspiration for us. Today, we need not to talk about the world to that extent, but above all to talk to the world. "Shout to the winds, whisper to the rivers and deer..." (David Abram).

George Zemanek, art historian, curator, publicist and cultural activist. He is interested in the overlaps of art in the fields of ecology, cosmology and spirituality and the formation of a new integral culture. He founded the civic association Pilgrim – The Wandering University of Nature, which is dedicated to the care of barrier-free landscapes and the deepening of the relationship between man and the land, and the Czech section of the Budapest Club. He is a translator and editor of texts in the field of deep ecology, cosmology and a wide range of holistic thinking. He collaborates with the magazines Sedmá generace and Tvar.