Tuesday, November 19, 2024

what does "gikinawaabiwin" mean?

Hello frens. The title of this post includes the word "gikinawaabiwin," which means "learning by seeing" (as a noun) in Ojibwe. This is the title I came up with for a poem I wrote recently. I won't share the whole poem, only the first few stanzas here. If you guys remember my post on knowledge acquisition, it's basically a poetic version of the themes I discussed in it. Here is the post I'm referring to: https://freyathefrypan.blogspot.com/2024/09/when-you-want-to-acquire-more-knowledge.html

Here are the first three stanzas of my poem :) and honestly, since the rest of the stanzas suck I think I'm just going to leave it at this and say this is the final version:

I met disciples in an ashram on the edge of the jungle 
who said they sought moksha and spent their days 
fasting, praying, meditating, 
But in twenty-five years of abnegation 
they still had not received a vision, 
Their souls had not been liberated 
and they seemed to live in fear of the world. 

I met black-robed scholars who thought that Knowledge 
was something one could conquer, 
It was what they sought to master, 
They thought Nature’s secrets could be wrested from her 
that Wisdom would visit them during their candle-lit study in their stone towers, 
But She never came 
And they did not feel the Sun’s warmth in a year. 

In Mikinaakominis, Knowledge surrounded me 
in a land where the branches of evergreen trees 
looked like peacock feathers to me when I first beheld them, 
In Anishinaabewaki, the land is a teacher 
if one is willing to learn by seeing.

--

I am quite happy with this, especially with the second stanza which I consider to be a banger. 

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