more than logic

Prompt from Seminary of the Southwest’s T4325, “Theopoetics: Theory and Practice”:
What passage or idea from this week’s readings made your heart sing?

“I circled back right back to where I had begun, to the question of beauty. Back to the questions that science does not ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.”

—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Planting Sweetgrass, p44-45

“Native scholar Greg Cajete as written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.”

—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Planting Sweetgrass, p47

I am the daughter of a PhD. chemist and an accountant who originally thought she might be a nuclear biophysicist. I began my adult life working in a semiconductor company, learning the ins and outs of networked computers. I married a chip designer. So I’ve operated inside a science-primary bubble my whole life. Yet I’ve been a writer since before I can remember, and claimed myself as a poet as I reached my teens. Like Kimmerer, I’ve had this sense of narrowness, of incomplete articulation, my whole life. I love science-things, and at the same time keep pushing toward multiple ways of knowing. In fact, I recently had an impassioned conversation with a total stranger about how feeling-knowing and what I was calling transcendent-knowing are equally essential parts of ourselves individually and in community.
I think if we don’t articulate all our knowings, at least to ourselves, we explode.

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