Becoming Animal: Book Suggestion for Nature Lovers (It Is Wild)

Ode to the living land.

What a precious magic is a wild book? I remember reading it for the first time back in 2018. It crushed my world! After a few years of meditation, there were many things I was in need of expressing, even to myself. However, books like David Abram’s Becoming Animal arrived as miracles in my life.

At that point, I remember moving from a

It is unthinkable to think how we evolved merging with nature in a billion ways — the earth, the wind, the breath, and the air, unfolding as an ethereal miracle through the ages —informing, transforming, and forming more intelligent connections— neurons, ideas, and heavens. This book conveys feelings and ideas that are so primal and embodied in us and yet forgotten and unforseen.

Flesh in The Ether

We are all of us, at the present moment, interdependent constituents of a common biosphere, each of us experiencing it from our own angle, and with our own specific capabilities, yet nonetheless all participants in the round life of the earth, and hence subject to the same large-scale flows, rhythms, and tensions that move across that wider life. The world we inhabit is not in this sense, a determinable set of objective processes. It is our larger flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience.

Language Magic

While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral people sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation. Obviously, these other beings do not speak with a human tongue; they do not speak in words. They may speak in song, like many birds, or in rhythm, like the crickets and the ocean waves. They may speak a language of movements and gestures or articulate themselves in shifting shadows. Among many native peoples, such forms of expressive speech are assumed to be as communicative, in their own way, as the more verbal discourse of our species (which after all can also be thought of as a kind of vocal gesticulation, or even a sort of singing). Language, for traditionally oral peoples, is not a specifically human possession but is a property of the animate earth, in which we humans participate.

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.”

Eternal Eros

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

Grounded Magic

“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.”

Inevitable Aliveness

We speak of things “catching our gaze,” “calling our attention,” “grabbing our focus,” and those are all quite precise ways of speaking, because as we’re wandering the world, things solicit our attention, draw us into a dialogue, a kind of conversation without words. A fallen leaf on the ground calls my attention, and so I slow down to stop and gaze at it. And so, in my experience, this leaf is not dead, though it’s been lying on the ground for days. It has its own agency. It has its own power, its potency. And so, it is with everything we experience. This has become a very basic insight to me: that our bodily senses, left to their own devices, are inherently animistic; that sensory perception is participatory; that the senses are gregarious organs that actively participate in the surrounding terrain; and that when we speak of the world around us as a set of objects or objective mechanical processes, we actually frustrate our senses and force our awareness to withdraw from our skin and from our eyes and our ears, and we climb up into our heads and live in a set of verbal abstractions—because the human-animal cannot help but experience the world as animate and alive through and through.

Complete Aliveness

“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.”

Ethereal Mirror

After all, anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear, and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

Thank you for reading.