Quieseeds
March 13, 2025 at 03:30PM
Christina Rivera | Longreads | March 13, 2025 | 3,159 words (12 minutes)
This is an excerpt from My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women by Christina Rivera, published by Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press and on sale March 15, 2025.
At age forty, I took an intelligence test. Not the standardized IQ, but a newer assessment created by Harvard doctor Howard Gardner. Dr. Gardner suspected intelligence couldn’t be boxed by one overarching mechanism and might be better represented by the many dimensions in which different people process information. After filling in the little boxes of Gardner’s survey and tallying my results, I was shocked by the conclusion.
I shot an email, in jest, to my boss for whom I had already worked over fifteen years, “So, my intelligence type is something called ‘naturalistic.’ How does that apply to what I do?”
My boss didn’t laugh. It had not been his idea for me to take the survey. And he was a smart man. That I had completed the assessment on my own initiative pointed to a leak in my loyalty to my senior administrative position at the company he’d founded. I was unaware of the leak myself and had only thought the results curious. Dr. Gardner’s test concluded my primary strength—as one high in “Naturalistic Intelligence”—was finding patterns and relationships to nature. How exactly did that align with the spreadsheets, surveys, staffing interviews, and statistical reports that consumed my fifty hours a week managing the deployment of international student education programs?
I laughed too because “Naturalist” was not even included in Dr. Gardner’s famous book, Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice, when it was first published in 1983. Dr. Gardner only added the eighth “green branch of intelligence” to his model twelve years later—around the time I was in high school. Dr. Gardner characterized the naturalist’s intelligence as having an innate inclination for observation, a curiosity for seeing how things work, and an instinctual connection with nonhuman species. That description felt familiar, yet distant. It also plucked at the nerve of one of my greatest insecurities. My boss was famous for picking résumés from stacks organized by the prestige of Ivy Leagues. At company gatherings, he introduced staff with orations of their academic achievements. I didn’t have that list, so he always described me as “the only person I hired based solely on a cover letter.” I blushed because his deflection pointed a finger at my fear that I was not smart enough to fit in with the PhD types with whom I shared a mission statement. Except maybe it was I who had a different mission statement, yet unwritten?
I didn’t have to struggle long with the question as a pandemic would effectively toss me from the company and drown me in stay-at-home orders, homeschooling, and quarantines from “the village it takes” for a modern mother to attend also to a career. But the enclosing walls of my house pressurized my creativity, and in the dawn hours, lit by a driftwood-scented candle, I churned a year of handwritten journal pages into the meditations in this book. My paragraphs finally shed their cover-letter clothing and became the essays they always wanted to be. The pandemic spat me out a writer, often with “nature” or “environmental” added to my introductions and bios. I found a new and sparkling sense of fitting in-ness within the circles of poets and artists, who were easily distracted by the constellations in night skies outside nature-themed writing workshops. And indeed nothing makes me happier than chewing on the end of my pen over a blank page on which I lyrically doodle about the wingspans of manta rays, the mothering of Sperm Whales, and the life cycles of plankton. Yet I still doggy paddle in impostor syndrome. For I am not a biologist or cetologist, nor an oceanographer. I am just a woman with a pen, a profound love for water, and an eye for noticing patterns in the currents, eddies, and swirls of living.
There’s a word for seeing relations in the world as flowing. Atmorelational is defined as, “looking at the space or relationship between things as the primary point of focus.” If you don’t remember learning this word, that’s because it’s not in Webster’s dictionary. You’ll find this neologism only in the online dictionary created by the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. On the Bureau’s website is where I learned how the term “atmorelational” was influenced by the work of the Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, and then offered to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality by Léopold Lambert and a group of Field Study 010 participants during the Paris Climate Conference of 2015. The word is new to the world because the dictionary created by the Bureau of Linguistical Reality is about the same age as my daughter. Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott, when they devised and launched the project in 2014, described it as a “participatory artwork” informed by the public for the purpose of “collecting and translating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene.”
Though this Anthropocene dictionary is online and exists in no paper, printed, or otherwise material form, I was so strangely thrilled that I created one for myself. I printed out each word onto a notecard and stacked them on my desk. Their physical existence brings me joy, this naming of things I have felt for a lifetime, but which had no official recognition. Words like:
Neopangea, neo-pan-jee–uh: A hypothetical way of thinking the world is no longer geographically separated.
Kincara, kin-car-uh: A person of any gender who plays a loving, maternal role in raising children they have not physically birthed.
Shadowtime, shad-ow-time: The notion of a time scale in which the near future will be drastically different from the present.
Epoquetude, epo-qu-e-tude: The reassuring awareness that while humanity might succeed in destroying itself, the Earth will survive us.
Surbrace, sur-brās: Conviction to do the right thing after one has already let go of the outcome.
I love these words. They name so many of my secret, but otherwise unhoused, sentiments. Which was exactly the goal of the project. Quante and Escott created the dictionary because they felt at a loss for words to describe the emotions, ideas, and situations relevant to the current reality of our climate crisis.
I feel a recognition of what’s missing in the stack of cards on my desk. They give me permission to think outside the box of Webster’s dictionary. To name things in my own life that hold audience in my heart but lack proper name. Words like . . .
The verb for missing the blue of a Colorado sky underneath a dangerous AQI of smoke.
An adjective for the ache in my bones for the absence of migratory birds in the sky.
The adverb describing my heart’s retraction in contemplation of the loneliness of the last Vaquita Porpoise on the planet.
Though they (probably) have no word for it, whales know the atmorelational. Rebecca Giggs in her book Fathoms explains, “Because cetaceans evolved their communicative abilities in the absence of hands, facial expressions, head-on eye contact, and within an underwater environment unfurnished by graspable objects, they evolved a ‘language’ centered exclusively on their interrelationships.” I love this notion: that in vast seas and the absence of cues, the space between whales became the point of focus. The whale’s evolution gives me hope in the face of the growing isolation of humans on Earth. Maybe a shift of perspective awaits in the vastness? A revolution that holds the space in between things in focus?
A study in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed nearly a thousand MRIs and concluded that while male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, women’s brains are more interconnected with fiber pathways that zigzag between hemispheres that “facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.” When I read this, I sat up in bed, called my husband, and pointed a finger at the research on my laptop. “Babe! This is why I can’t tune the kids’ voices out when we are trying to talk, and you don’t even hear them! My left and right brain sides do more talking to each other!” He leaned into the bedroom from the hall, cocked his head, then disappeared without comment back into the noise of the football game in the living room.
The right and left brain functions have sometimes been oversimplified (or incorrectly reduced to the idea of individuals “favoring” one side or the other), but what remains true is that the two sides work differently. While the left hemisphere might process the sounds that form a sentence, the right hemisphere might spin abstractions off the language. In general, the right brain is less logical, nonverbal, and recognizes images, integrates feelings, appreciates aesthetics, and can synthesize multiple dimensions at once. Leonard Shlain, in his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, further delves into the powers of the right brain: “When people find it necessary to express in words an inner experience such as a dream, an emotion, or a complex feeling-state, they resort to a special form of speech called metaphor that is the right brain’s unique contribution to the left brain’s language capacity. The word metaphor combines two Greek words—meta, which means ‘over and above,’ and pherein, ‘to bear across.’”
To bear across from over and above sounds a lot like the atmorelational. Could the language of the atmorelational live in the right brain? A mode of intuitive processing often repressed in human society alongside the oppression of women and the arts and the queer and all the cognitively non-normative?
This question brings me back to Gardner’s “naturalistic” category into which I had no idea I slipped footing until that fateful survey day. Except maybe I did not slip footing as much as I found a little ground. Like the nook under the rhododendrons where I crawled when I was five. Like the tunnel I dug through the blackberry bushes when I was eight. Like the hidden bay near the river where I’d cry when the dramas of high school punched too hard. Like the Cenote caves of the Yucatan into which I scuba dived over a hundred feet, where the nitrogen narcosis wove tree roots into a vision of my suspension in the basket of an Oriole’s nest. Seems I’ve always been looking for nooks in nature where I could find home. And that my impostor syndrome was less a task of fitting in, than finding an identity in which I could burrow.
Whale songs might not only traverse the hemispheres of the planet, but also their brains. In a 2017 study, accelerometers were attached to Blue Whales to record their precise movements. Researchers discovered the whales demonstrated a preference for left-turned movements in shallow waters. These “lefty” whale movements likely correlated with right-brained thinking. Cetaceans also use echolocation to bounce sound off underwater landscapes to “see” the size, distance, speed, and density of objects in returning sound waves. Bioacousticians consider this holosonic picture language a multidimensional form of communication. When Leonard Shlain wrote, “A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities,” he was not talking about whales. But I am. Humpback songs once nearly went silent when they were hunted to only 450 individuals in the 1950s. It wasn’t only the mass murder of a species, but also the near-genocide of a unique picture language. Which makes me wonder how the biodiversity of human language and consciousness has likewise been harpooned?
Quante and Escott similarly point to the immense cultural power of the absence of words in language. They note the word “genocide” was only invented in the 1940s when lawyer Raphael Lemkin combined the Greek word genos (“race, people”) with the Latin word cīdere (“to kill”) and used the new word to describe “the destruction of a nation or ethnic group.” But it was only after the word was created and used that humans could fully conjure and hold the tragic human phenomena of genocide in mind. What other realities have we disappeared by lack of a proper noun? And what other possibilities—after we break constraints to a book founded in 1806 by a racist man named Noah Webster—can we freely begin to fathom?
Humpback songs are typically made of repeating patterns that can travel ahead and behind paths of migration. When one whale hears another’s song, the pattern can evolve into a more complex version of the same song. But once every three years, Humpback songs change in structure entirely! A team at the University of Queensland explained in Gigg’s book, “When their songs cannot become more ornate and still be remembered . . . then the degree of complexity crashes. A whale singing a less demanding song stands out against those attempting poorly learned, but more complicated tunes.” During these cultural shifts, new whale songs sweep the seas in simpler compositions. Scientists call them “revolutionary songs.”
As for my own vocabulary revolution? The stack of new words on my desk has moved to a new home in my heart. Neopangea has recollected the continents into a shared shape, bringing my host families in Senegal and India and Colombia as close as they have always felt in my memories. Kincara is the flushed face of my childless-by-choice best friend after driving through a snowstorm to sit on the couch and teach my daughter her first chords on the guitar. Shadowtime—that alternate reality right over my shoulder—aligns my gratitude in equal step with my grief. I find epoquetude when I sit in the gnarled-root arms of a three-thousand-year-old Bristlecone Pine tree and surrender to its densely storied resiliency. And surbrace is my daily practice of letting go of my fear, to focus on loving this life one good day at a time.
This integration of novel words into my new worldview, “affecting perception, cognition, and decisions,” is called linguistic relativity. A theory built on the idea that language is the expression of the spirit of a nation. Which gets me thinking of how new language—a new melody—could, in turn, influence the spirit of my country. And of what new verses have the potential to sweep our culture in undulating revolutions of new, uncomplicated meaning? Ursula K. Le Guin spoke to this power of the art of words in her National Book Foundation acceptance speech: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
In 1970, Songs of the Humpback Whale—an album recorded by a top-secret US Navy hydrophone listening for Russian submarines—went multi-platinum. Soon after, the Marine Mammal Protection Act was debated by the US House and Senate. Christine Stevens, the famous animal welfare activist and originator of the Save the Whales campaign, participated in the debates. She rested her case by playing Humpback songs before Congress.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act was subsequently signed into law.
In 1977, Humpback Whale songs were put on two phonographic “Golden Records” and sent to space aboard the Voyager shuttle for the ears of extraterrestrial life. Carl Sagan curated the record and titled it “A Love Song.” The probe is still adrift and transmitting today. And what a body to bob in! In 2023, NANOGrav (the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) reported a “major discovery” recognized by an international team of scientists. They found compelling evidence for the physical existence of space-time “waves.” The report confirmed time isn’t straight, nor space smooth. Rather, space-time churns and ripples. And among these waves, the Earth itself bobs. The astrophysicist Michael Lam described their conclusion, “The picture that emerges is a universe that looks like a choppy sea.”
I love that bobbing in the black sea of our universe is our astrophysical nature. That whale song, despite our inability to translate it, fosters such awe we’ve brought it into our homes, echoed it off the cold marble walls of the US Capitol, and set it adrift in the choppy sea of space. The universe’s oceans. Earth’s oceans. My oceans. When I feel myself disintegrating on top of a cliff surrounded by sea, it’s a homecoming I feel.
Quieseed, kwee-sēd: A seed that stays dormant due to an intuition not to seed until it finds a fertile environment.
I once planted myself for half a year on an Ecuadorian coastline where I dragged around burlap sacks, machetes, empty jugs, and shovels as my work on a reforestation team. My favorite of the little trees in the plant nursery was the ceiba. Under the plastic tarp of the greenhouse, the ceiba sapling grew to the same height as the other saplings swaddled in cups of soil. You could not have guessed that the little ceiba tree would grow to more than 230 feet in height. Yet there was already stature in her trunk, and in her sparse leaves of strong sloping lines. As the ceiba sapling grew into a juvenile, her trunk became thorny. Every time I found a teenaged ceiba in the forest, I stopped to touch the shield of her spines around her trunk with my gloved palm. I admired the ceiba for how she put a hand to the world in order to protect what was dormant inside her.
Looking back upon the non-funny revelation I shared with my non-laughing boss, I see now the tension of the dormant quieseed within me. My buried love for atmorelational ways of knowing that didn’t fit into traditional academic or IQ boxes. And also a hint of my future, where the jumping of linked metaphors in a long letter was more vital than the bullet points of a résumé. Of lyricism, Rachel Carson once said, “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” Poetry, too, lights up the right brain. Tills the liminal. Prepares the land for holosonic visions that might collapse the complexities that no longer serve. Leaving space for something new to sweep through.
By the time a ceiba tree sheds her thorns, the forest has already learned to allow space for her trunk that can span ten feet in diameter and undulates like a vertical wave bridging earth and sky. Ceiba trees, in maturity, send their branches over the top of the forest, bursting thousands of brown pods every spring into white silk fibers that are so soft I once collected them to stuff my pillow. The ceiba tree embodies what every woman knows of what she’s birthed from her body, be it babies or poems or art: that she can grow beyond limits, that she can be pulled into liminal places, that her toes can curl in cold earth underworlds while her fingers twist manes of clouds.
That she can blow seeds of a new future in a breath of wind.
Copyright © 2025 by Christina Rivera. Published 2025 by Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Christina Rivera is the author of MY OCEANS: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, March 2025). Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and appeared in Orion, The Cut, The Kenyon Review, and Terrain.org, among other places. You can learn more about Christina and My Oceans at christinarivera.com.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/language-words-climate-crisis/
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