On every walk, at some point, I notice that the conversation in my head is simply me  naming the plants and the trees I am walking past. Echinacea. Oakleaf hydrangea. Rugosa rose. White pine. Hibiscus. Kousa dogwood. Sycamore. Copper beech. One of my neighbors has a Dawn redwood tucked into a city backyard that brings me joy.

I don’t notice the naming at first. It’s automatic, and I probably notice when the naming doesn’t come automatically. When I have to think about the name of the plant or decide between two options. Once I notice, I am aware that it’s hard to stop. My mind wants to put words to things. Wants language for what I am seeing and hearing. But the language that seems most comforting are the names. Some of the names I have are the common names: Daisy. And some of the names I have are the Latin names—like the Latin for lady’s mantle-- Alchemilla mollis.

I notice the naming too when I am in a different country. Walking around the fields in Germany where I lived as an exchange student—looking at the same wildflowers and naming them in English, while my brain searches for their name in German because I know that these plants and trees are connected to their place, and their language. And learning their names in German, and then, when I come home, finding myself sad that some of the German names are prettier, and the flowers and trees should know their other beautiful names, which is what I think when I pass a Chestnut in bloom and think it would like to be called Kastania instead. And when I was hiking in Alaska I took pictures of the flowers I didn’t know to look up later—unable to imagine knowing a place, if I don’t know the names of what is blooming.

I think I find the act of naming comforting. It’s a small act ordering of the world and ordering of my thoughts that I can control: I can know in that moment that the thing I am looking at is a hardy geranium. Or a lemon lilly. Or a cornflower. In a world that is complicated, and with so many problems I can barely understand, and even fewer that I can fix, I can know something and feel a small, fleeting sense of certainty.

It mirrors my fascination with maps-with being able to see clearly where you are located in space. What is near something else. With the ability to try to understand a place that is new or a place you’ve never even seen.

And maybe I find the naming comforting because there is actually a word, or language to describe what I am looking at with some specificity—which isn’t always the case for other things, like processes. When you are trying to describe internal feelings or internal places or experiences—or areas of grief, or healing or growth—there are simply not words that are exact: that map to the place, or the specific nature of that experience.

For example, when you are trying to learn attachment in adulthood and you experience the feeling of rage that goes with toddlerhood, but which your adult brain knows is out-of-proportion to the situation—you aren’t experiencing true rage, nor, are you distant from it. You can try metaphor: I feel like a toddler. But that doesn’t really capture it. And without language, without map coordinates of where you are, it’s hard to feel found. It’s hard to feel like anyone else can actually understand.

And sometimes this lack of exact words or language can make it hard for us to even understand or have compassion for ourselves—especially in the areas of growth and healing. The language for the space between two states is so limited—yet the experience of being between two states takes up much of our lives. We have language, perhaps, for deep grief, for sorrow, for heartache. But what of those moments when you momentarily forget your grief—you begin to feel the world again—only to fall back in more deeply for the forgetting. Certainly, that space should have its own word?

Or what about the in-between spaces of growth—not where you are forging ahead, or mastering something new, but where you are learning to inhabit an old place you worked hard to get to, or slowing down and gaining strength in a place that is allowing you to grow. If there were actual names for these places we might rejoice when we arrived there, and we might feel proud of the work that we are doing there and be able to describe it better for people who are wondering how to get there.

But silence—not having words—is also protective. You can be safer if you are not found. You can navigate your own experience without interference or judgement. Too often human experience has been described only as a means to diagnose or create distance—such as depression or complicated grief. Or diagnose so that it fits into an insurance based system such as post-traumatic stress disorder.   

But I still believe that more words and language for these spaces and experiences would give us power and agency and hope. They would give us the ability to connect. But the words and language I am looking for aren’t clinical, or scientific, per se—but rather art. They are sketches and color studies. Lines of music.  Movements of dance. Fragments of poems. Like the murmurations of birds, flowing and beautiful, and ever on the move. You know what it exactly is, but it is never the same.

 © 2024 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD