27 Quotes by David Abram

As nonhuman animals, plants, and even ‘inanimate’ rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless – as mysterious as a talking stone.

We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute.

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth – our larger body – to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours, stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles.

The world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of position and of mood.

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.

The friendship between my hand and this stone enacts an ancient and irrefutable eros, the kindredness of matter with itself.

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.

Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.

If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us – we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.