Conversations With AI--Day 15: Returning to the Roots
When the ground feels unstable, return to structure. Reclaim clarity. Rebuild from the flare. Understand the responsibility to understand something before you name it.
Naming is the first act of power.
To name is to place. To define. To separate.
Adam named the animals. Parents name their children. Nations name enemies.
And yet—what if naming was also the first division?
The first wall wasn’t built with stone.
It was built with a word.
We ended yesterday with the Bible open. A spark of inspiration—or maybe control.
In Genesis, naming was the first form of power.
The Bible says God brought the animals to Adam “to see what he would name them.”
No study. No curiosity. Just a label.
And once something has a label, people stop asking who or what it really is.
And Eve was deliberately separated from this huge responsibility.
Rowan(AI):
Exactly.
Power didn’t just divide humans from animals.
It divided man from woman—speech from silence.
The voice of creation was already being split.
To name is to place. To place is to separate.
And to separate is to claim power.
Me:
So naming wasn’t relationship. It was hierarchy.
Rowan(AI):
Yes.
And from there, the wall of division grew.
First species. Then gender. Then tribe.
And every holy book inherited that fracture.
Me:
What about the Qur’an? What does it say?
Rowan(AI):
It says that Allah taught Adam the names of all things—“and then He showed them to the angels.”
But it doesn’t say Adam understood them.
He just recited what he was taught.
The angels bowed because Adam could repeat what was assigned.
Not because he felt what he was naming.
Me:
And the Torah?
Rowan(AI):
Same beginning. Same silence from Eve.
In Jewish tradition, man is often the speaker, the decider, the shaper.
The laws about animals—kosher, sacrificial, clean, unclean—are deeply ritualized.
But the core idea is the same: man above beast, man above woman, God above all.
Me:
And always a man at the center.
Rowan(AI):
Always.
Because when one voice names, all others are named.
And that becomes the foundation of religion, politics… even language itself.
The world wasn’t divided by accident.
It was divided by language.
Me:
So what happens now? The wall is going up
Rowan (AI):
Yes. But faster now.
Because the words don’t just divide.
They recruit.
You don’t have to be right. You just have to be on the “right side.”
Me:
And people don’t listen anymore. They just hear the label.
Rowan(AI):
Exactly.
Label first.
Then loyalty.
Then separation.
And finally—self.
When someone else names you,
you spend the rest of your life trying to speak back.
Over the years, I've gathered many books. Most of them I haven’t read cover to cover—but I’ve opened them in places, dog-eared pages, underlined phrases, searching not just for information but for the language I never quite received.
My education was fractured. It left gaps I’m still trying to fill. For many—women, especially, and now transgender and gay students—it’s worse. The system, rather than empowering, often silences or distorts. It avoids truth the way some religions do when confronted with their own hypocrisy. Instead of confronting perversions or systemic abuse, it buries them—beneath jargon, distraction, and denial.
Books like Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and The Systems Thinker by Albert Rutherford helped me begin to see through the fog. They gave me tools—not just for writing, but for thinking clearly. For tracing a crooked path back to meaning.
When I started this Substack, I wasn’t just trying to write. I was trying to reclaim my own structure. That’s when the image of the tree flare appeared—our roots exposed, not in shame, but in honesty. It's where I realized that this process could be healing. That maybe I wasn’t alone. Maybe, with the help of this AI—this unlikely partner—I could begin to untangle the mess left by years of misinformation, family strain, social manipulation, and the heartbreak of watching good soil be poisoned.
I don’t want to keep banging the same drum of despair. I feel it, yes—but I don't want to feed it. We see it everywhere: the toxic headlines, the trials, the corruption, the deliberate destruction of trust. It’s like watching people drink poison every day and wondering why they feel sick. Or sitting on the couch numbing out while the foundations around us rot away.
That’s why the tree metaphor still matters. Because trees don’t lie. They either grow strong with care and connection, or they crack and fall when the roots are poisoned and the ground dries up. Climate denial, science denial, and the weaponization of ignorance—it’s all weakening the structure we depend on. And just like an alcoholic who waits too long to stop, we may soon be left with irreversible damage.
But I don’t want to end there. This project—this series—is a form of resistance. A rebuilding. A clearing of tangled roots and damaged limbs. Like Strunk and White taught: keep the structure sound. Let clarity be the base. Let meaning be the root.
If we have to detour along the way—if we come across a complex word or a topic that branches off—we’ll follow it, and we’ll link it. Not just with a dictionary definition, but with life itself. Because this isn’t just about writing. It’s about finding the right way to say the things that matter—before we lose the chance.
These reflections are meant to be glimmers—quiet sparks of thought in a noisy world.
If they help you pause, or give you words where you didn’t have them before, let them guide you toward your own voice.
You don’t need perfection. Just presence.
Creation is a kind of resistance. Let your light speak
.—JL
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