Becoming Animal

No wonder a civilization steeped in the polarization of Good versus Evil wreaks such havoc on the rest of nature. No wonder so many creatures are dwindling and disappearing, their homes ravaged with toxins, their forests transformed to stumps

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,

Upon hearing an alarm call, even birds from other, neighboring species halt whatever they’re up to,

But the primary lesson your organism steadily learns from

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.

Sentience is not an attribute of a body in isolation; it emerges from the ongoing encounter between our flesh and the forest of rhythms in which it finds itself, born of the interplay and tension between the world’s wild hunger and our own.

THE DISCOURSE OF THE BIRDS

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,

sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it—