Aloft at the center of the world mandala, turning it beneath us, the whole planet rolling this way or that at the whim of our muscles.

Far from offering an untrustworthy account of things, our senses disclose an ever-shifting reality that is not amenable to any finished account, an enigmatic and encompassing field of relationships to which we can only apprentice ourselves. This ambiguous order cannot be superseded by reason and the careful practice of our sciences, since it

Our experts construct a hypothetical image of what’s unfolding at those other scales only by extrapolating from their fragmentary findings, and creatively filling in the holes between them. Yet the manner in which they fill those vast gaps in the empirical data is inevitably shaped by intuitions, expectations, proclivities, and perceptual habits

come up against the cold stone of reality.

Within the humanities, some of the key theorists drew inspiration from the writings published at midcentury by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had analyzed, with stunning lucidity, the body’s influence upon even our most rarefied cogitiations.

Most important: Can we begin to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without restorying the local earth.

We lend ourselves to gravity, becoming adjuncts of the ground itself. Only by thus renouncing the vertical stance—dropping away our upright individuality and leaning back upon the earth, letting our gaze become the gaze of Earth itself—do we make some sense of the endless depths in which Earth dwells.

We can be fairly certain that such oral stories were not taken literally by those who told them, or even by those who heard them. For literal truth is a very recent invention, brought into being by alphabetic literacy. The word “literal,” after all, derives from the Latin word for letter.

Every material body or thing, for Spinoza, had its mental aspect—all things were ensouled. The human body was the outward, material aspect of the human mind, as the mind was nothing other than the internal, felt experience of the body. “The mind and the body are one and the same thing …”Ω