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Each thing, each being, is in steady intercourse with the entities and elements around it, negotiating its passage and exerting its participation in the ongoing emergence of what is.
If we allow that matter is not inert, but is rather animate (or self-organizing) from the get-go … we are left with a diversely differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has gifts relative to the others.
And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this living field, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.
We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because—by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism—we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous.
We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight.
Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, and touched by the beings around us.
—David Abram
Becoming Animal, excerpts
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