Blog 7 Outside reading Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram

 Blog 7 

Outside reading Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram


This outside reading is one I used when writing my final paper because I fell in love with the Spell of the Sensuous.



“Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.” 


“To our indigenous ancestors, and to the many aboriginal peoples who still hold fast to their oral traditions, language is less a human possession than it is a property of the animate earth itself, an expressive, telluric power in which we, along with the coyotes and the crickets, all participate. Each creature enacts this expressive magic in its own manner, the honeybee with its waggle dance no less than a bellicose, harrumphing sea lion.


These parts reminded me a lot of his sentiments in the spell of the sensuous...

And his reminder to dismantle the false separation of humans and nature that we are intrinsically connected, and there is no difference in oral language between us and a plant or bug or animal that interaction is there and ready if we are open to it, the earth speaks if all our senses are engaged and we can receive and reciprocate.


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