If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which we find ourselves engaged. To the sensing body,… — David Abram Copy Share Image
Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world. — David Abram Copy Share Image
Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on… — David Abram Copy Share
“Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable… — David Abram Copy Share
Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then… — David Abram Copy Share
Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography,… — David Abram Copy Share
What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself… — David Abram Copy Share
Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies. — David Abram Copy Share
The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that… — David Abram Copy Share
Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is… — David Abram Copy Share
“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with… — David Abram Copy Share
A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur… — David Abram Copy Share
If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the… — David Abram Copy Share
The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both… — David Abram Copy Share
To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience… — David Abram Copy Share
Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. — David Abram Copy Share
