Vanessa Machado de Oliveira : Hospicing Modernity

"Within modernity, we are conditioned to want to cover everything with a heavy blanket of fixed meanings, to index reality in language, to word the world. Carl Mika, a Maori philosopher and friend, suggests that instead of "wording the world," when language manifests as an entity, it "worlds the world" and this opens other possibilities for experiencing existence within the world. There are significant implications of working with language to world the world, especially in relation to our relationship with stories. 

In wording the world, we are socialized to treat stories as tools of communication that enable us to describe reality, prescribe the future, and accumulate knowledge. In worlding the world, stories are living entities that emerge from and move things in the world. Some of these stories are meant to exist for a long time, others expire early. Some stories are meant to remain as and where they are and to work only with a very select group of people; other stories are meant to travel the world, and to transform and to be transformed by other world-entities, including the storytellers and those who receive the stories. These are the types of stories you will encounter in this book." 

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira shares more in this excerpt from her book, " Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanitys Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism."

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