30 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 3-9, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com LIT Have you ever thought about how language and its structure affect our reality? We live in a world divided into extreme opposites: war and peace, black and white, true or false. While this dichotomy helps us to organize our world, we lose something in the process. Since college, Carmel-based Lisa Maroski has been fascinated with deep structures of languages and their influence on collective human unconsciousness. Many decades later, she finally was able to gather her thoughts into an intriguing interdisciplinary book, Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language, a winner of the 2025 Nautilus Book Awards, which support conscious living and social change. “We learn the language of our culture with different built-in assumptions based on what the culture considers important,” Maroski says. “We learn it before we learn to question it.” She starts with the paradoxes we encounter in language and beyond. As an example, she uses the concept of freedom. “The current discourse is, ‘We want freedom, freedom is good,’ but nobody talks about responsibilities that come with it. You have freedom to drive a car that comes with a responsibility not to kill people with it.” Early in her book, Maroski discusses the Möbius strip, a one-sided surface with only one boundary, embedded in three-dimensional space. Its graphic representation blows our minds. “The Möbius strip allows us to hold opposites together,” Maroski says. It seemingly has two sides “that seem separate, but they are not. That’s the kind of complexity I want to build into language, so that we can hold freedom and responsibility as both separate and together.” Part of Maroski’s message is environmental. New ways of thinking could help to save Earth, she claims. “Let’s take the lettuce I eat,” she offers. “It’s a combination of nutrients and now I’m ingesting it, and it will become part of my muscles and lungs. That lettuce and I will become interconnected as intimately as yin and yang.” When she is not thinking deeply, Maroski practices tango. “Tango takes two,” she says. “It’s very much like the concepts I’m trying to get across. Dancers do distinct moves, but they function as a whole, moving around the dance floor.” Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language by Lisa Maroski can be purchased at untimelybooks.com. Paradox for All An award-winning local writer suggests a linguistic shift to help save the planet. By Agata Popęda Presently, Lisa Maroski argues, humans think of things being one way. “We need to allow interdependent concepts to follow their natural rhythm and flow,” she says.
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