This is from the linked interview in the posting below:
London: What happens to a culture bereft of magic?
Abram: One thing is that its relation to the natural landscape is tremendously impoverished. In fact, by our obliviousness, by our forgetfulness of all of these other styles of awareness — the other animals, the plants, the waters — we have brought about a crisis in the natural world of unprecedented proportions — not out of any meanness, but simply because we really don't recognize that nature is there. It seems to us, in our culture, to be a kind of passive backdrop against which all of our human events unfold, and it's human events that are meaningful and what happens in nature, well, we don't really notice it, it's not really there. It's not vital.
How different that is from the awareness of a magical or animistic culture for whom everything we do as humans is so profoundly influenced by our interactions with the earth underfoot and the air that swirls around us and the other animals....
...I don't think there is a way for those who work in service to the earth — for environmentalists, ecologists — to really woo our culture back into a reciprocal or sustainable relation with the land until we draw folks back to our senses, because our sensing bodies are our direct contact with the rest of the natural world. It is not by being abstract intellects that we are going to fall in love again with the rest of nature. It's by beginning to honor and value our direct sensory experience: the tastes and smells in the air, the feel of the wind as it caresses the skin, the feel of the ground under our feet as we walk upon it. And how much easier it is to feel that ground if you allow yourself to sense that the ground itself is feeling your steps as you walk upon it.
This reminds me very much of the explanation I gave for teaching people to climb and ski, and in particular, being paid to do so. A friend was saying it was unethical of me, because I would teach my friends for free. My point was that the people who felt they had to pay for such an experience were the most important ones to reach with a message that these activities could be done as sensual experiences about the Wild. These were precisely the sorts of people who saw wilderness as a back drop, and by taking on the role of (poorly) paid instructor, I found I was able to subvert that notion and transform their experience from an activity centered on the students to an activity centered on total attention to and oneness within a landscape.
ReplyDeletePut another way: it does no good to try to convert the converted!
Hope you're well, Adam! I hear you've moved?