Discuss: The Air Aware

As one would expect, since it comes from the pen of a magician, this is a spellbinding article. Thank you, David, for putting into words these things that seem so intangible and yet are so much a part of my own, felt experience. And thank you, Orion, for making these beautiful words available.
Many years ago, when I was running weekly ‘wellness’ groups for women, I used to be amazed at what seemed, back then, to be an extraordinary similarity between members’ internal ‘weather’ on any given day. As though we were all part of some invisible, ever-shifting pattern. The astrologers in the group ascribed this phenomenon to the movements of the planets. But of course, if the entire Universe is one consciousness, then it is systems within systems, all the way through. Like Russian dolls, each nested in the next.
So if each tiny cell in my body is affected by my mood (which I know it is) and I, being one tiny cell in the body of the Earth (which I know I am) reflect the moods of the Earth (i.e. its weather), then maybe Earth, being one tiny cell in the vast body of the Universe, is reflecting ‘weather’ too vast and unknowable for my finite mind to comprehend. All I can do is marvel. And breathe ‘yes’ to the Mystery.

This is absolutely stunning considering the limited ability of the English language to adequately capture the essence of spirit as expressed by ancient languages. Although no words, ancient or otherwise, can fully capture the feeling one may experience at those times when we observe a connection to the vast mystery, you have come as close as any author I’ve read. Thank you for the visceral experience that I otherwise would not have had this morning in my inanimate office space.

Since connecting with “The Spell of the Sensuous” many years ago, I’ve been on the lookout for more words from David Abrams.  My own feelings for the land (a physical need) and for the life there abounding have been silenced, in the presence of the ghosts of those wasted and restless things destroyed without honor or need—my own soul among them.

Abrams seems still able to see the jubilee in this year, in spite of the crass cruel weight of destruction.  For that I must thank him, and Orion.

Marian McCain’s blog posting speaks my heart.  I also echo her thanks to Orion for publishing more of David Abram’s work.

In this article David returns to a theme I remember him pursuing in his earliest days as well as in The Spell of the Sensuous.  It is a treat to read his unfolding elemental meditation here.  I am also struck by how he seems to be accomplishing the cultural task of undermining the idea of “the pathetic fallacy.”  I remember my dismay at being taught in high school that ascribing emotions to nature was a mere literary device and overreaching of the imagination.  Instead David restores true literacy and wakens the senses of the animal within.

Does this personal transformation accomplish any more than ...taking shorter showers?  I hope so.

I echo the sentiments of Marian, Mike, Willow and Amy. Thank you, David. Thank you, Orion. Deep gratitude.

Sentiment, sentience, thought, feeling. It can only be Oneness Now. What else can it be? Yet, Life still is only Mystery to me. My soul rests and is free in Nature.

My sentiment of the sentience of the Earth is given in color and form: http://www.studiodune.com/Gaia.html

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and feelings and for allowing me to share mine. In the Oneness of Life….

Yikes! I have to weigh in here, because I don’t think Abram’s piece is really about “oneness” at all - or “wholeness,” or any of those homogenizing notions - words that I’ve never seen in his writing and that seem very, very far from what he’s up to. On the contrary, for me this essay is all about MULTIPLICITY and OTHERNESS and curious particularity.

It’s about actually paying attention to all sorts of subtle DIFFERENCES, including the uncanny difference between the emotional feel of different places (and the divergent styles of thought that happen in different landscapes) and even between the variant moods that unfold in a single place. The essay helps me notice and acknowledge these discrepancies and strangenesses, and offers a new way to make sense of them. 

As in this passage early on in the piece: “Awareness, in this biospheric sense, is a quality in which we participate with the whole of our breathing bodies; as your body is different from mine in many ways, so your sensations and insights are richly different from mine. The contrasting experience of a praying mantis, or of a field of wild lupines, is as different from our experience as their bodies are different from ours. Each being’s awareness is unique, to be sure, yet this is not because an autonomous mind is held inside its particular body or brain, but because each engages the common awareness from its own extraordinary angle, through its particular senses, according to the capacities of its flesh…”

That’s a very cool and mighty embodied way to make sense of (and celebrate) the heterogeneity and, well, multiplicity of the world around us, and inside us as well. I think Abram is trying to counter the vague and vaporous “oneness” that infects our language whenever spiritual matters are discussed, and trying bring things down to earth, with all its peculiar oddity and diversity. And to our embodiment, with all its palpable particularity.

David Abram you are a brilliant magician as previously noted, your pen or rather your computer is the wand you use to produce the most elegant of thought forms.
Bravo! David, I look forward to meeting you in Albuquerque next month and hearing your magical words in the flesh.

I agree with Arjuna.  It is the glorious specificity of each of our perspectives, from the dwarf juniper of a desert landscape to that centipede in my backyard, to my peculiar personal/gender/ ethnic perspective (utterly different from my neiighbor’s) that make the wonder of the universe tangible to each of us (according to our abilities to perceive, to paraphrase Marx). We need less the fleeting experience of Oneness than the appreciation of multiplicity, since that diversity of experience and opinion is what we live with in our relative experience on a daily basis.  By the way, isn’t it just astounding that we have been missing the “big picture” of a 3 million mile wide ring around Saturn because it was too big and not dense enough for us to perceive before this moment?  That really sends home, to me, the message of humility in relation to the wonders of the universe. What hubris to believe that we can know it all from our particular lttle perches on earth!