The Spell of the Sensuous

In the process of reading The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

"The animate earth – this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity." p. 34

"The everyday world in which we hunger and make love is hardly the mathematically determined "object" toward which the sciences direct themselves. Despite all the mechanical artifacts that surround us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to calculate and measure it is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses.

An interview with David Abram.
http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/abram.html

Writing Nature

Writing Nature (To the Best of Our Knowledge)
09.16.2012(was 11.06.2011)

Nature writing conjures up images of remote mountains, exotic birds, and the solitary hiker in pristine wilderness.  But maybe it’s time to rethink our notions of what it means to write about nature, so that we also look at the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and the curious fact that mostly poor people live near hazardous waste sites.  A new generation of nature writers calls for a messier and more human take on the natural world.  Also, a conversation with renowned poet Gary Snyder on nature, Buddhism and "the practice of the wild."