A Deep Sense of Place - David Abram

I thrill when I read beautiful writing about the earth and wild places. I cherish heartfelt words that speak of the deep feelings that certain outdoor settings engender within us...

And so, I want to share with you a paragraph from the book, 'The Spell of the Sensuous' by David Abram.

He has been called, "one of the hundred visionaries who are changing the world." I guess, for that, you should know of him.

His writing is intensely lyrical, calling up another favorite writer, Loren Eisely. The book's concepts are dense but certain passages read like poetry. I've taken one of Abram's paragraphs and spaced it out as a poem:

"Each place has its own mind, its own psyche.

Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone,

a certain scale to the topography,

drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams -

all these together make up a particular state of mind,
a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein,

but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys,

by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders,

by all beings who live and make their way in that zone.

Each place its own psyche.

Each sky its own blue."

David Abram

The Spell of the Sensuous

p.262

 Here is the book:

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