Virginia Rodrigues — Uma Histiria De Ifa
When I listen to this song, given that I understand nothing of the lyrics, my mind wanders in imaginary directions. I feel the words and music, and imagine what it must be about. Often where my thoughts go to say a lot about where I’m at
Have you ever sat with someone and neither of you spoke the same language and yet you had a conservation. A deep one.
It’s happened to me a few times. You can’t be sure you really understood each other but you both walk away feeling that a communication happened under the sounds you made at each other.
It starts of as exhausting, grappling to connect and understand. This is where the mind tries to form the bridge of understanding by relying on what it is the most familiar with, words.
When it fails, you either smile awkwardly get up and move on or you sit with it.
And if you sit with it, and I mean really sit with it. Something happens.
A part of you says ‘well I’m just going to hang out’ and after a while you let something inside you go. I don’t know what that something is but I have felt it looking at art or reading poetry. Like a switch that flicks maybe or that ‘the must understand things in this way’ part of your brain throws it’s hands up and walks of.
But whatever happens the result is that a different part of you sits down behind the wheel. And little by little you start to communicate.
Those parts of us which feel, read the currents that flow between all of us, knows the body language, the vibes, the moods and something else deeper still, when they all slip together, it clicks.
And YOU. KNOW.
You really know what is being said. Not a word by word knowing but as meaning that just lands in you.
No I haven’t been drinking. It probably sounds odd unless it’s happened to you.
To look at it differently, I believe nature reaches out to us in the same way. When you are in nature and something reaches into you and you are touched, there is a communion of sorts and it shifts you. That part of you that gets it, I believe is the same part of you behind the drivers seat I mentioned above.
We do it with animals too. And as I said with art.
Linguists report that humans communicate digitally with language and analogically with things like I mentioned above.
It’s something to cultivate I think…. a truly global communication perhaps LOL.
Anyway back to listen to Virginia Rodrigues!
For seven years I taught English as a second language to kids from Central and South America, Vietnam, Lebanon, Eritrea, the Congo, Pakistan, Cambodia… the list goes on. I learned to communicate with everything I had… gestures, pointing to things as said their names, voice inflections, facial expressions, and most of all, laughing. Humor breaks down barriers faster than anything. Picture dictionaries help too. But you are so right. Communication is heart to heart, soul to soul, and language is merely one of the mediums of exchange.
Teaching English overseas especially kid, i can imagine many moments where the communication traveled along other lines than words! You expressed it beautifully 🙂
Thanks. I never taught overseas, though. It was all kids coming to Texas who did not speak enough English for the regular classroom.
Oh I see. I was in Japan for 7 years I taught kids for 3 years and adults for 3 years. Many moments where language was the secondary form of communication.