For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality… — 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
