A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events… — David Abram Copy Share Image
In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the… — David Abram Copy Share Image
Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings… — 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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies. — David Abram Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. — David Abram Copy Share Image
![“Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper rapport with the beings around us, or of calling the living land into resonance with us. It is a power we still brush up against whenever we use our words to bless and to curse, or to charm someone we're drawn to. But we wield such eloquence only to sway other people, and so we miss the greater magnetism, the gravitational power that lies within such speech. The beaver gliding across the pond, the fungus gripping a thick trunk, a boulder shattered by its tumble down a cliff or the rain splashing upon those granite fragments -- we talk about such beings, the weather and the weathered stones, but we do not talk to them. Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. We've lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us .” quote by David Abram](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/037/david-abram-15943_communication_human-language-for-us-moderns-has-swung_378242.jpg)
