Ancestor Quote by David Abram

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

“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

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

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

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

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 speech that…

— David Abram

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

“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

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

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

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

— David Abram