Jeannette said, "Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor." She paused, then continued, emphatically, "It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is." I looked at the river. It would be easy to observe the eddy and make up a half-dozen lessons I could learn from it, for example, the obvious metaphor of the logs traveling in circles, like people trapped in a confining mindset that doesn't allow them to reenter the free flow of life. There's certainly nothing wrong with fabricating metaphors from the things we find around us, or from the experience of others—human or otherwise—but in both of those situations the other remains a case study onto which we project whatever we need to learn. That's an entirely different circumstance than listening to the other as it has its say, reveals its intents, expresses its experience, and does all this on its own terms. Certainly it would be a step in the right direction if our culture as a whole could accept the notion of listening to the natural world—or listening at all, for that matter—even if they thought that "listening" was merely a metaphor. I once heard a Diné man say that uranium gives people radiation poisoning because the uranium does not like to be above ground. It wants to remain far beneath the surface of the earth. Whether we view this statement as literal truth or metaphor, the lesson is the same: digging up uranium makes you sick. But to view this metaphorically is to still to perceive the world anthropocentrically. In this case the metaphorical view expresses concern for the people poisoned by uranium. The Diné man's observation, on the other hand, is a comment on the importance of maintaining the order of things.