On this Voices from the Heartland segment, Chickasaw novelist and poet Linda Hogan reads about the langauge of corn and the land.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) When Barbara McClintock was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on Gene transposition in corn plants the most striking thing about her was that she made her discoveries by listening to what the corn spoke to her by respecting the life of the Corn and as she put it letting it come she says that she learned the stories of the plants. She heard them. She watched The Daily green journeys of growth from Earth towards sky and Sun she knew her plants in the way a Healer or Mystic would have known them from the inside the inner voices of corn and woman speaking to one another as an Indian woman. I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people that it has a story to tell that the world is alive both in oral traditions and mythology the true language of inner life account after account. Out tells of the stones giving Guidance the trees singing The Corn telling of inner earth the dragonfly offering up a tongue. This is true in the European Traditions as well psyche received direction from the reeds in the ants Orpheus knew the language of Earth animal and birds this intuitive language. This common language is what I seek for my writing work in touch with the mystery and force of Life work. That speaks a few of the many voices around us and it's important to me that McClintock listen to the voices of corn. It's important to the continuance of life that she told the truth of her method and that it reminded us all of where our strengths are knowing and our sustenance come from I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision there is telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living breathing bodies. And in these theories or maybe they should be called Stories We Begin to understand how we are many people including the Stars. We once were and how we are in essence the earth and the universe how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns in a single moment of our living there is our ancestral and personal history our future even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there and like all the rest. We are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world Collective.