This morning, as I was sitting in the dentist’s office, my phone randomly showed me a collection of photos I took while walking through the Mont Bruno park in August or early September last year. I remember being quite fascinated by different mushrooms and seeing a garter snake. I remember that the trees were still green, but the ground was orange, brown and yellow with the fallen leaves, as it always is in the forest, even in spring. I remember the day being long and generous, in the shadow of the trees, between the lakes, in the luxury of the solitude.

As I was looking through the photos, I thought “so much beauty happened to me that day.” And then I paused, delighted by the fact that I was able to think for a moment in Mohawk way. See, in the Mohawk language, everything exists in the relationship to something and in order to say something, anything at all, one must establish that relationship. There are 86 pronouns, most of them can only be used in a connection with the verb. One of these pronouns, wake- shows that “I” am the object and something is the subject – something happens to me. Wakatshennò:ni means I am happy, or, if one wants to be precise, that happinness happens to me. I do not know the root word for being beautiful or even if such word exists, but I thought it would be so right to use it with a pronoun wake- “the beauty happens to me.”

Maybe, in a similar fashion, hope, inspiration, creativity, insight are the things that happen to us, so we can know ourselves as parts of a much bigger story.