Becoming Animal

spoken words are heard, or sensed, by the other presences that surround.

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.

we dwell in the earth, rather than on it?

We talk, after all, only by shaping the exhaled air that rushed into our lungs a moment earlier. Human speech, too, is really the wind moving through …

Since no such translation is available (since each scientific investigation builds on previous investigations without translating the results of those prior studies into the language of direct experience), a host of abstract, provisional worlds is gradually built up by our diverse sciences, a multiplicity of arcane dimensions hidden beyond, behind,

By conceiving of itself as something entirely distinct from palpable nature, the rational mind of the Enlightenment was empowered to pursue its giddy dream of comprehending, and mastering, every aspect of the material cosmos.

For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings.

Everything that we animals understand of movement and stillness was first acquired from our bodily experience of being in motion or at rest relative to the ground of this Earth,

freeing my awareness to witness the unique intensities of particular textures, smells, and sounds as these registered along my skin or in the depths of my viscera.

Feelings and moods are mercurial powers; they require at least a provisional sense of enclosure to hold them. Once they could no longer be contained by the sensuous cosmos, no longer held inside the curved embrace of the spheres, these fluid qualities quit the so-called outer world entirely, taking up residence within the new interiority of each pe