Between the Body and
the Breathing Earth:
The Ecology of Wonder

David Abram

Feb 19-22, 2010

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At this curious moment in the world’s unfolding, when human violence toward other humans is matched only by
our violence toward the living earth – with terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems rapidly collapsing under the weight of our steady assaults, and with countless species tumbling into oblivion as a result of our arrogant disregard – it is now evident that our own species must undergo a sea change if anything of beauty is to survive.

If we wish to bring humankind into a new reciprocity with the rest of the biosphere, then we will need to release ourselves from the tyranny of outmoded concepts, and remember ourselves as a part of this breathing planet. We’ll need to renew our felt experience of the land as a complex of sensitive and sentient powers, as a boisterous community of beings in which our own lives are participant, and to which we are beholden. This primordial form of experience, which returns us from the pretense of disembodied detachment to our corporeal situation in the midst of the here and now, engenders a new respect and restraint in all our actions. Divesting ourselves of our abstractions, acknowledging the enigmatic otherness that things display when we meet them in the depth of the present moment, enables an attentive and ethical comportment in all our endeavors, an empathic attunement to our surroundings and a compassionate intention to do least harm.

For too long we humans have withheld our allegiance from the sustaining earth, reserving our faith only for a mystery assumed to reside entirely beyond the sensuous. To return to our senses is to remember an older, indigenous faith that we have never completely lost – our breathing body’s implicit faith in the solid ground underfoot and the renewal of light every dawn, its faith in mountains and rivers and the cyclical return of the salmon, in the silent germination of seeds and the unseen, imperturbable wind. It is this animal fidelity to the breathing earth, so easily overlooked or forgotten, that unites us with countless other species – and it remains the ground of every lasting ethic between persons, and between peoples. A faith in the wild and shadowed goodness of the Earth.

Come to explore these notions, to experience and replenish your wild rapport with animate nature, in tandem with one of the Earth’s leading advocates. This retreat lasts an extra day and costs an extra $95.

Click if you would like to read an article we published in our newspaper The Center Post.

Cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram is creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), and author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World  — called “revolutionary” by the LA Times, “daring and truly  original” by Science. An accomplished storyteller, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents. Named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, David’s work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory experience, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth. He lives with his family in New Mexico, where he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication and in the rejuvenation of oral culture. His new book, Becoming Animal, will be published by
Pantheon in 2010.