“Owning up to being an animal, a creature of earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain…. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place…. This vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled. Becoming earth. Becoming animal, Becoming in this manner fully human.”

Becoming Animal, David Abram

I’ve discovered that it is the artists who know.

Whenever I try to describe somatic work, (and I do not have a perfect ‘spiel’ yet,) it is always the artists that catch on first. They are the people who say “space” and don’t mean “empty,” or hear the word “place” but don’t think ‘building’ or ‘city.’ They are the people who recognize that there is an inexhaustible fullness and richness in life accessible by the powerful will of humanity. And what is most amazing, these artists come from every corner of the world and from every area of expertise. They are environmentalists, dancers, physicists, philosophers, therapists, and scientists. They are the people who recognize that we live on this world and not on any other. Ours is a physical existence and there is absolutely no escaping that fact.

The passage above is excerpted from David Abram’s Becoming Animal, An Earthly Cosmology. I’ve yet to find out what this guy really does for a living, he is clearly an environmentalist, but look at the way he writes. He prompts you to imagine, ‘What if the world was sentient?’ ‘What does that mean “the earth’s flesh?”‘ He draws a connection that implies a more full relationship between humans and earth than we, as readers, may have previously realized or appreciated, and that is the kind of artist I refer to here. Thats the kind of artist who knows.