The way the world actually is, is an enormously complex interrelated organism. —Alan Watts

   

  

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The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. 

It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.


—Henry David Thoreau

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Living forms are not in being, 
they are happening, 
they are the expression of 
a perpetual stream of 
matter and energy which 
passes through the organism 
and at the same time 
constitutes it.

—Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

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The starfish: it has pincers close to its mouth in order to feed itself, but these pincers function on their own account. The animal pinches everything found in its way; it would pinch itself if nature had not used a subterfuge by covering its skin with a chemical product that exercises an inhibitory effect. There is thus no unity of the living being which unfurls itself toward the outside. Phenomena of behavior are sewn together: it is a collective animal ...

[...] Let’s take the marine worm, which is crested by a mobile tube with a mouth and tentacles, and which anchors itself in the sand. Everything happens as if the animal were two: the animal that eats and the animal that moves. They never coexist: the animal that eats has an oval and flat form, muscles at rest, accelerated respiration, red corpuscles falling to contact the soil; it is incapable of movement. 

The animal that moves is activated by the contact of the skin on its back with the soil, affected by cyclones or by an overly intense sunlight. These are monotonous movements, very rarely swimming, above all foraging, in order to penetrate the sand, for hours at a time with regulations by external stimuli or by results. Such an animal doesn’t have enemies, in fact it lives very deeply in the sand. In transporting itself the body takes on another aspect: an elongated cigar. 


—Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Animality: The Study of Animal Behavior 

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You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless.


—Chuang Tzu
4th Century B.C.

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are you still happening there, in your body? 

—Joy Katz 

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