"We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
Fog Spirit in the golden autumn sunlight. Lichen growing on quartz laden rocky outcrops drinks from the fog rising, twisting, whirling, dancing up off of the sea, speaking to us of the terroir's aliveness and offering to make its personhood known... Beings other than human call us to fully realize our humanity.
"Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy to forget our carnal inheritance in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth--our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
~David Abram from The Spell of the Sensuous
