David Abram

Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms?…

— David Abram

“Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human…

— David Abram

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And…

— David Abram

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to…

— David Abram

What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that…

— David Abram

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.

— David Abram

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of…

— David Abram

Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory…

— David Abram

“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we…

— David Abram

A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events…

— David Abram

If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking…

— David Abram

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

— David Abram

The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love -…

— David Abram

To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we…

— David Abram

Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.

— David Abram

Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension…

— David Abram

“Our surmises regarding the subtle functions of neural processes within the brain are profoundly constrained by the fact that the brain did…

— David Abram

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the…

— David Abram

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment…

— David Abram

The world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of…

— David Abram

There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to…

— David Abram

What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world!

— David Abram

“For too long we’ve closed ourselves to the participatory life of our senses, inured ourselves to the felt intelligence of our muscled…

— David Abram

“One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence…

— David Abram

“Fiercely intelligent, yet bearing a sensibility far more porous than most, Van Gogh was unable, or unwilling, to abstract his intellect from…

— David Abram