Becoming Animal

The fact that a person was too impressionable to be at ease in the fuss and tumult of the human throng was a sure sign that she should make her home on the periphery of the village, working as an intermediary between the human settlement and the wider community of animate beings.

The churning of words within my head simply fell silent when I was anywhere around Sonam,

The mysterious voice toward which monotheism opens the heart is neither monotonous nor a monologue: it speaks through every utterance of breath and beak and branch, through the bugling of an elk and the liquid blink of a robin’s eye.

much more responsive to our impatient cravings than the slow reticence whereby seedlings and weeds emerge from the dark depths to become visible against the surface of the soil.

we dwell in the earth, rather than on it?

As Copernican and Newtonian insights took hold, sensory perception was increasingly derided as deceptive; only that which could be measured and analyzed mathematically could be taken as true.

Contrary to modern assumptions, sleight-of-hand conjuring probably originates not as an illusory depiction of supernatural events, but as a practical technique for unlocking, and activating, the fluid magic of nature itself.

we constantly err by assuming our studies provide an objective assessment of the way those other scales really are in themselves, independent of the very partial perspective that we curious primates have on those dimensions.

THE DISCOURSE OF THE BIRDS