Psyche and the Ecological Crisis: Dave Abram at the C. G. Jung Institute
In the winter of 2012, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco sponsored a public conversation between David Abram and Patricia Damery (farmer and Jungian analyst)
Subsequently published in Jung Journal volume 7, number I
Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet
Patricia Damery: It is a pleasure to have you with us, David, and particularly on this topic of the environment and psyche. The environmental crisis is certainly registering in the collective. The last couple of months in the San Francisco area have been very dry, as well as too warm and then too cold. It used to be that we would think this was a normal variation, but now you can feel the often unspoken question: is this a part of some larger climate change for which we are ill-prepared? Since the science is addressed elsewhere, tonight we will talk about the impact of what’s happening in the environment on all of us. I think that the environmental crisis is really a crisis of consciousness. We want to talk about what that might be, and what we might do.
David Abram: Where I live in northern New Mexico, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, we had our largest forest fires in recorded history this last summer. First, the Arizona fires were darkening our skies and turning our afternoon sun blood-red. It was beautiful, but there was ash everywhere, and this was many hundreds of miles away from the flames. Then fires sparked up in New Mexico, first on the slopes right behind our town, and then an immense fire across the valley from where we live Soon they sparked up in Texas: there too the largest fires in recorded history. It’s an extraordinary moment. Forest fire is nothing new, but on this scale, it does seem like a time of mounting catastrophes: the snowballing extinctions, intensifying droughts in many places, evermore mammoth forest fires, never-before-seen hurricanes with huge oils spills, nuclear meltdowns, great gaping wounds in the body of the earth left by mountaintop removal, tar sands mining, and other forms of extreme energy extraction that ravage the soils and poison the waters. So many other species, other shapes of sentience and sensitivity, are being pushed to the brink of extinction by our lifestyles, and then being shoved over that cliff into oblivion. Their many-voiced eloquence is dissolving into the silence, or into the sometimes clamorous monotony of a single species talking to itself.
At such a moment it feels as though we have to drop underneath the clatter of our technologies and the bluster of our politics, in order to listen into the depths of the spreading silence. We need to listen into that silence beyond the words and begin to respond with our voices, and with our actions, carefully, creatively. Not being afraid to sound a little strange, or to act a little odd, or to speak in ways that are curiously different. To be perhaps more than a little outrageous, or even out of our minds — which is to say: out of the self-enclosed, interior, hermetically-sealed human minds that we were educated to believe in. I think that’s where you and I are both coming from and where we’re both sitting.
Patricia: David, your work feels to me like a Celtic knot. When you read both The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, there are all these threads that intricately intertwine, but they’re of one piece, and that piece is sacred. This evening, it feels to me that any thread we choose will take us to the sacred piece, which is the earth, the consciousness, and the needed shift in consciousness.
David: Yes. It sometimes feels as if there’s a new shape of the Sacred that is trying to be born. In this time, the work of probably each of us in this room carries its own curious piece of this new shape, no one of us quite knowing what it’s full shape looks or feels or tastes like. It seems that that is also an aspect of what we’re pondering together this evening.
Patricia: When we were talking earlier, you asked if could I sense a great source of vitality living and pulsing at the heart of the earth? You wondered if this experience had to do with our sense of place.
David: What you’re recalling, and what I was struggling to articulate, is my intuition that one of the reasons that it’s so hard to call ourselves and our fellow citizens into a fully respectful relation to the more-than-human earth is because we have such a disdain for matter and materiality. Many of our colleagues would say that the problem of our time is materialism. But me, I think we’re not given to matter enough: to a sense of the lusciousness and weirdness and wonderment of the flesh, the dense thickness of our lives and the life of the earth. As well as the subtle aspects of the material or sensuous world: the wind and the air gusting around us, the play of moonlight on the water’s surface. For many of us, given the ways we’ve been educated to speak and to think, everything good comes from on high, slipping down into the material world from somewhere above and beyond this world. Matter itself is assumed to be basically inert, inanimate, or problematic, something we’d do better to avoid. Gravity is a drag. It pulls us down toward the center of the earth, toward that fiery center -- at the heart of matter itself -- that in our mythic traditions and in our collective unconscious, is the very home of all that’s problematic: the Devil, Satan, Hell. While everything really good has a celestial origin, and comes down to us from on high.
One thing that struck me in The Red Book that Jung was working on privately for so many years is a full-page image that he painted of a boat, a barge, carrying the sun across the waters. Beneath the surface of those waters is a huge fish about the same size as that boat. This image, very beautiful, is an allusion to this mythic theme that Jung sometimes spoke of as the Night Sea Journey of the Sun. One finds an analogous motif in many of the old mythic traditions, and the old indigenous, oral traditions, although it appears in various forms and shapes. In its most general form, it’s a tale of the fiery sun traveling, at night, through the density of the ground far beneath our feet. The very sun that people worship overhead by day — that luminous source of radiance and radiant life — is shown, in these old tales, journeying at night through the depths, making its way through the thick darkness underfoot.
Patricia: Those experiences are with the same sun. What does that mean, because we think of the sun as illuminating the above-ground world, but what is the experience of the sun when it’s under the ground?
David: One thing about this story is that it deeply draws us back to our senses, shaking us out of whatever abstractions we tend to tarry in. Our direct sensory experience of the sun at dawn is of a fiery power that slowly emerges from the eastern horizon and then soars in a broad arc across the sky; at evening we watch it slipping down past the horizon to the west. Actually, to be precise, we don’t really see it slipping beyond the horizon. Rather, when we really look with our animal eyes, what we see is the sun sliding down into the ground far to the west, or sinking down into the western ocean. . Then, in the morning we witness the sun climbing up out of the ground off to the east, soaring slowly across the sky, and then climbing down and immersing itself in those waters once again.
How simple and obvious , then, for the human animal to assume that at night the sun is walking through the density underfoot, and taking its rest there at the heart of the earth, before making its way toward the eastern lands where it will slowly climb above ground and launch itself into the sky? During the summer it’s got a long time to journey across the sky, so it doesn’t have much time to hang out below. During the shorter days of autumn the sun lingers much longer in the ground, and especially during the long nights leading up to the winter solstice, when the sun sleeps in late at the heart of the earth, feeding and seeding the dense ground with its dreams, seeding the deep earth with the manifold life that will then, after a few months begin to peek up and poke out, as leafy shoots, through earth’s surface.
That the fiery sun sleeps at the heart of the earth is something very, very old. It’s a mythic insight that has left its ancestral traces in tales found on every continent. That the sun lives, and makes it’s home, within the earth. I find this at once uncanny and strangely beautiful, since it suggests that there’s a luminosity that lives at the heart of matter itself, and that very same radiance that illuminates our days from on high, also sleeps and dreams within the ground underfoot, reaching up to us from the depths far below.
Patricia: I think the lumen naturae of Paracelsus is some of that radiance that is in the earth. In the alchemical series Splendor Solis, the last painting of the last series has this sun that is part in the earth and part above, and it’s golden: the dark sun. It’s a suffering sun, one whose illumination comes through suffering.
David: Yes. There’s a forgotten but necessary kinship, even an identity, between these two suns, between the light sun and the dark sun. The story that we’ve been speaking of, though, can seem very weird to most of us born into the modern moment, especially after Copernicus and the Copernican revolution, which taught us all that the sun isn’t moving. We now take for granted that it’s not sinking down into the ocean. The sun is not sinking down anywhere. Rather, it’s the earth that’s moving. The sun is basically standing still.
Yet I don’t think we realize how huge a rift, or cut, the Copernican revolution made between the sensing body and the thinking mind. Because after Copernicus (and Kepler and Galileo) we stopped trusting our animal senses. Our creaturely senses still see the sun rising up in the morning, and slipping down in the evening—in fact we all still say “the sun is rising” and “the sun is setting” whether we are farmers or physicists. Right? We can’t avoid our body’s sense that the sun is climbing up, that the sun is slipping down. However, after Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo, it was incumbent upon us to understand that the senses are deceptive, and that our thinking selves were not to trust the evidence of our animal bodies and of our senses. The sensory world – we were taught – is illusory. This gushing river, these flapping and screeching animals: that’s just the world revealed by our senses, which really isn’t all that important. It’s not really true, it’s not really real. The Real, the deep Truth of things is hidden behind the scenes. We gain access to the real Truth only through number, and measurement. The real is a realm which we can glimpse and gain access to only through mathematical expertise (or through increasingly complex technological instrumentation).
Yet sensory experience is our most ancient and intimate connection to the land around us, to the other animals and the plants, to the more-than-human earth. Today, we are living into the consequences of this huge cut, or wound, in the human psyche, this distrust of our senses and our consequent detachment from the palpable, flesh and blood earth that we share with so many other species. We seem to have exchanged our bodily rapport with the living land for a set of abstractions. And for a set of (admittedly nifty) technologies fostered by those abstractions. We are now living into the consequences of our long distrust of the senses and our disparagement of the sensuous. .
Patricia: Let’s talk about embodiment and the embodied psyche.
David: Okay. But the word “embodiment” feels a little problematic to me, because it suggests that the psyche is first of another dimension, and then it becomes “embodied.” It seems to me that this flesh is a psyche, that the body is already psyche. That, in some sense, matter is already spirit. The word “matter,” when we listen with our animal ears, sounds pretty much the same as “mater” (or “mother,”) yes? It’s largely the same word. Both materand matter are related to “matrix” the ancient Greek word for “womb.” There is a sense in which matter is the womb of all things. The more conventional notion that matter is inert until it’s animated by spirit seems a fairly flawed notion (and a vaguely sexist one, akin to the idea that “mater,” or mothers generally, are inert or inanimate). Similarly with the body and the psyche. I’m unable to think of the body as an inert or empty vessel, nor of the psyche as some insubstantial fluff that at some moment decides to enter a body, and become embodied. Isn’t psyche already bodily, doesn’t psyche have sensuous qualities from the get go?
Yet our language, today, doesn’t offer many clear ways to speak of these matters. What’s your sense of it?
Patricia: Well, I wonder if the process of becoming more aware of the energies is a felt experience of embodiment. Maybe we’re embodied before but we don’t know it.
David: Ahh, that’s nice, yes. I think one thing I might add is that if I identify deeply with this creaturely animal organism, if I take this breathing body as me — this fleshy being of two arms and two legs with this knobby nose in front of our heads — after a while I can’t help but notice that the body is not a closed thing. With every out-breath I’m sort of slipping out of myself and with each in-breath, other aspects are filtering in. I’m taking in nourishment through my mouth, eating the flesh of plants, sundry animals as well, drinking the local waters, while my senses, too, are being nourished and fed by so many aspects of the world around.
Slowly I realize that it can’t just be this body that is psyche, that somehow this flesh is always in an interplay or kind of intercourse with this much larger Body that surrounds and enfolds: it’s huge; it’s vast. What I am is not just this. Rather, it’s as if this is my small self and Earth is my larger self or soul. Who I am is this interplay and exchange, back and forth, between this small body and this larger Flesh that we all share, this common Body which is perhaps not just body but also Psyche.
Patricia: Like the Lakota expression we all are relatives, that feeling everything is related?
David: Yes.
Patricia: Yes, “Mitakuye Oyasin.”
David: All my relatives, all our relatives, one Flesh. Yet this body takes so many different forms and shapes. Each creature experiences the broader Earth through a unique ensemble of senses, as indeed each person experiences the common field of the sensuous through her own skin, according to the style of his own flesh. The biosphere -- this blooming, buzzing mysterium that we inhabit — is no doubt very different for each of us, and surely outrageously different for other animals and plants, and yet it’s the same biosphere in which we each participate from our own angle and style. Hence differentiation and difference seem utterly integral to this strange thing trying to articulate itself here.
Patricia: Do you think that the different forms that things are in are different consciousnesses?
David: Consciousness: another term that flummoxes me. I think the different forms—an earthworm snuggling its way through the soil, a raven soaring on the gusts, a grove of aspens drinking the sunlight with quivering leaves while searching out water with their roots, a person sitting in this auditorium drinking my phrases through her listening ears— each being experiences the mystery of consciousness differently. But consciousness— does each being carry its ownconsciousness, its own psyche? Such is our conventional assumption, at least with regard to human beings: that I have a little consciousness inside my skull, and you have another consciousness inside your head, and so on.
Yet this assumption is exceedingly problematic, bringing with it a host of confounding conundrums. Like the mind-body problem: how does this little immaterial consciousness communicate with, or interact with, my material body. Or the problem of other minds: exactly how does this little consciousness, or mind, inside my head recognize that there is another mind over there inside you? And what about that howling coyote -- does it carry consciousness within it as well? What about the hummingbird, or the earthworm? And what of an apple tree, or that aspen grove?
These days, I find myself experimenting with a somewhat different way of speaking, and hence thinking, about these matters. I wonder if it isn’t much simpler, and more elegant, to assume that consciousness is not at all a property of individual persons, or even creatures. It feels much more pragmatic, and useful, to allow that awareness is a quality of the encompassing biosphere. Sure, there is an interiority to the psyche, something inward about the mind. Yet that inwardness is not because the psyche is inside us, no: rather we are inside it. The interiority of consciousness results from the fact that we are bodily situated within it, corporeally immersed in awareness with the whole of our animal organism. We are carnally embedded -- along with all of the animals and the plants and even the drifting clouds -- in a psyche that is not ours, but is rather the Earth’s.
To this admittedly unconventional way of thinking, the so-called “inner world” is not inside our individual body or brain. Rather, this shared space out here, where we encounter one another – as well as hummingbirds and frogs – this shared terrain, here, is the inner world. The inner world is world we are in.
This deceptively simple notion entails noticing that we and the other animal don’t really live on the Earth. After all, this invisible air we’re continually imbibing – this unseen atmosphere that we exchange among ourselves here in this room but also with the herbs and the trees outside the building -- this gusting medium of air is entirely a part of the Earth. The space between us is not a void, it’s not an empty space continuous with the space between the planets. Rather the air is a thick, meaning-filled plenum – rich with whiffs and pheromones and unseen clouds of pollen drifting this way and that, thick with messages moving between the bees and the blossoms. That is, although the medium around us cannot normally be seen, it is nonetheless palpable, tangible, and filled with consequential happenings. The unseen air has its flavor and its ever-shifting smells, its turbulence and its calms. The atmosphere is a planetary membrane that extends right up to the clouds and beyond, an invisible layer of the Earth.
Hence we don’t really live on the Earth; we live in the Earth. Or maybe we should say, spelling it a bit differently, in the Eairth. Placing an “I” in the middle of the word – e-a-i-r-t-h – in order to indicate that the “I”, the self, is entirely immersed in the air – a-i-r – and the air is completely a part of the Eairth. (I often think of the letter “I”, which is really just a vertical slash, as a stand-in for the upright spine of this curious mammal who, like most others, used to crawl around on all fours, and then at a certain point, began balancing on its hind legs and walking around upright. The upright spine is quite a unique thing among animals. Of course all of the trees know it very well, and are our primary allies in verticality!) So my body is embedded in the air, which is entirely part of the breathing Eairth.
So I’m suggesting that awareness, instead of being an entirely non-sensuous quality, or property, is rather more like a unseen medium in which we find ourselves immersed – indeed that psyche, itself, is akin to the unseen atmosphere. Mind as Wind! The air itself aware… It can seem like a loony notion, yet it’s right there in our language. The word psyche derives from the ancient Greek term, psūkhê, which originally signified “a breath” or “a gust of wind.” It’s an old, old notion, one that calls us back to our ancestral, animal experience of consciousness. .Of course our modern word “spirit,” similarly, derives from the Latin term spiritus which once meant ”a breath” or “a gust of wind” (our word “respiration” shares the same origin) Likewise the Latin word for the soul, anima,from which we get words like “animal” (an ensouled being) or “unanimous” (being of one mind or one soul). The Latin anima actually derives from the older Greek word anemos which meant “wind”. So, maybe we’ve been overlooking something by taking the air so much for granted as just empty space.
Now this notion of mind is obviously very different from that which is traded around and argued about by our experts, by the philosophers and cognitive scientists trying to work out how the immaterial mind interacts with the material body, or how the sensuous body interacts with an entirely a-physical mind. I’m suggesting, instead, a notion of mind as an element, or medium, to which I have access to only by being a body. This creaturely flesh is my very access to the mystery we call mind. Only by being a body can I engage and participate in this invisible flux that all these other bodies, too, are inhaling and exhaling, the plants breathing out what all us animals are taking in, us animals exhaling what the plants take in in turn. Since your body is curiously different from mine, so your experience of awareness is richly different from my experience. And the coyote’s experience of mind is that much more different from each of ours. A cypress, too, participates in mind, and a blade of grass. Yet their encounter and interchange with awareness is as uncannily different from our experience as their bodies diverge so wildly from our own. All of us implicated in this exchange with the storm clouds and the soils and the seas, this outrageous reciprocity between our bodies and the breathing Eairth.
This way of understanding consciousness through a fierce light on the deepening reality of climate change, this huge torsion in the invisible. From this curious angle climate change is nothing other than what Freud spoke of as the return of the repressed. The upsurge of a long taken for granted dimension of the real. An elemental dimension that was once, for our oral ancestors, incredibly mysterious and sacred – the invisible wind, the rushing spirit or ruach – became, in the modern era, the most vacant and taken for granted of dimensions: since we couldn’t see it, we assumed that there was nothing there. Notice: we don’t speak of the air between us, we just speak of the empty space between us. It’s empty, a void. And hence a perfectly convenient dumpsite for the toxic effluents of our industries, the perfect garbage can for anything we wish to a-void. We’ve treated the unseen atmosphere like an open sewer, and now we are living into the consequences -- the invisible beginning to make itself much more insistently palpable. What is climate change if not the simple consequence of our taking the unseen atmosphere for granted? The elemental medium of air -- the ancient, but forgotten origin of our notions of spirit, anima, and psyche -- is now whirling and rampaging its way back into the cultural imaginary. With a vengeance.
Patricia: There’s no way out.
David: Yeah. No way out. The so-called outer world turns out not to be outside at all; it’s a huge interior. We are inside of something palpable and vast. And this mystery we’re inside of is getting more and more turbulent, plunging our culture, our species, and other species as well into huge, and hugely difficult, changes.
Patricia: There is a passage in Becoming Animal that I would like you to talk about:
When oral stories are no longer being told in the woods, or along the banks of gushing streams — when the land is no longer being honored ALOUD as an animate, expressive power — then the human senses lose their attunement to the more-than-human terrain. Fewer and fewer people are able to feel the particular pulse of their place, many no longer notice, much less respond to, the fluent articulations of the land. Increasingly blind, increasingly deaf — increasingly impervious to the sensuous world— the technological mind progressively lays waste to the animate earth.” (Abram 2012, 287)
It feels like this is very much of what you are talking about, this lack of sensitivity to air and what we’re in together [or: this lack of sensitivity to the unseen medium that binds our lives], but you’re also talking about oral stories [and what the oral stories] being told in the woods, in the place where the stories come from. I would like you to talk about that, and the importance of it.
David: Well, I think that passage comes from the simple recognition that almost all of the long-term sustainable cultures, those bioregional cultures that managed to thrive century after century, and sometimes for millennia, in particular terrains without seriously disrupting the ability for the land to replenish itself – all of these are, by and large, oral cultures. Which is to say, they are cultures that emerged and flourished in the absence of any formalized writing system.
And so that led me to wonder and ponder: “What is it that writing does to our senses and to our sensory experience of the land around us? And what is it that writing does to our sense of linguistic meaning, and to our feel for language itself?” The more I investigated, the more fascinated I became.
Mind you, I am somebody who loves to read and who also writes out of love: I dig the written word hugely. I’m not at all saying that writing is bad; rather I’m saying that writing is a potent form of magic, powerful stuff. Writing is not just a neutral technology for recording oral speech. No – rather it has all sorts of non-rational, transformative effects. But if we don’t recognize it as a kind of magic, we tend to fall under its spell. It’s not by chance that the word “spell” has that double meaning, right? To arrange the letters in the right order to spell a word— or to cast a spell. To learn to read, which all of us did at some point in our lives, was at first to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses. gazing at these little bits of ink on a page until they began to speak to us.
We concentrated our eyes upon the letter C until that letter spoke the sound “ka:” and we concentrated upon the letter T until it spoke the sound “ta.”. This binding of our eyes and our ears together at surface of the page is very recent. Traditionally, our senses were not captured by speaking pages because they were caught up in a participatory rapport with every aspect of the animate landscape. Our eyes and our ears co-evolved with all of these other shapes and forms, not just other animals, but desert whirlwinds, sandstone cliffs, and thunderclouds, with dragonflies and rain and lichen. All these things retain the power to engage us and draw us into relation.
Indeed, in the absence of any intervening technologies our sensing body easily and spontaneously slides into conversation with other facets of the surrounding terrain. Every aspect of the world seems potentially animate and alive, all things have the capacity to engage us, and to speak. Most things, however, do not speak in words. They speak in loopy cascades of song, or pulses of rhythm. They speak in gestures, and the sounds that they utter when the wind blows through them, or by the movement of shadows across their surface. To the animistic sensibility of our indigenous, oral ancestors, everything speaks.
With the emergence of writing – and especially with the advent and spread of phonetic writing, and the alphabet -- the written page of papyrus or parchment interjects itself between our senses and the sensuous. If I have learned to read, then as soon as I cast my gaze upon a set of written words or phrases, I see what they say. The page says things, it speaks. “Talking leaves” is the term that many the native peoples of this continent had for the pages of the Bible that the early explorers and missionaries all carried with them. And they were right, for the letters speak to us, and they speak compellingly, with great intensity. With the emergence and spread of writing, and books, humans begin enter into a conversation with their own written signs -- a reflexive loop that short-circuits that older, ancestral reciprocity between our senses and the sensuous surroundings. As the written page begins to speak with such clarity, the living land begins to fall mute.
Today, we come downstairs in the morning, pick up the newspaper from the kitchen table.and focus our eyes on the inert bits of ink on the first page. And straightaway we hear voices, even listen in on conversations happening in the White House, or in Iraq. We see visions, witness unexpected events unfolding in Libya or Taiwan or Trinidad, all just by moving our gaze across these ostensibly inert or inanimate bits of ink. This is magic, is it not? It’s hardly different from a traditional Pueblo man who, while wandering outside the village, finds his gaze caught by a spider weaving its fine-spun web. He focusses his eyes on that spider as it moves this way and that around the web, setting the silken struts of its design, ,and suddenly feels himself being addressed by that spider. Or from a Chipewwa woman out walking in the forest, who finds her attention drawn toward a patch of yellow lichen on a boulder, and abruptly feels herself being spoken to by that boulder!
We literate moderns (whether Native American or European or Asian) practice this participation with our own scratches and scripts, but our ancestors did it with patches of lichen and animal tracks, with the crescent moon,and shapeshifting cloudforms and splashing waterfalls and bent branches and pretty much anything else you might think mention. So reading a piece of writing is, in this sense, a highly concentrated form of animism, or magic. It involves an intense sensorial participation with our own written signs. Reading is such an intense form of magic – the written words speak with such insistence – that it effectively eclipses, or hides, all of the earlier forms of participation, or magic, in which we once engaged.
But wait – I’d better be more precise here. Writing doesn’t cause us to neglect the rest of animate nature, it doesn’t forceus to forget that wider life. It simply makes such forgetfulness possible, and for the first time. As we enter into this new magic, into this animistic exchange with these signs that so easily mirror us back to ourselves, it becomes possible to neglect that much wider conversation that always already going on between our breathing body and the limbs of trees and and the parched soil cracking in the summer heat. The written pages inaugurate a conversation that we can carry on entirely with ourselves.
Oral cultures are cultures of eloquence. Language lives in indigenous, oral cultures very differently from the way it lives in our goofy civilization, which tends to think of language as an exclusively human property, a power that distinguishes us two-leggeds from all the other animals.
Within a traditionally oral community, language is not used, first and foremost, to speak about the world, as we do. We talk about the sunrise or the sunset or about the mountain, about the wetlands, about the weather. Yet long before formalized writing — before words became a set of visible labels with which to represent the world — language was a way of calling oneself into relation with a herd of elk or with the dawn, or of calling the world into relation with onseself. Calling the sun up out of the ground in the morning or calling the moon up out of the ground, as I read in your beautiful book, Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation. Oral, storytelling cultures wield words in a very different way. For such folk traditions, language is not primarily a tool for getting at or figuring out the world, but more a way of binding oneself into the world.
Patricia: In your chapter, “Mind and Mood,” you described moving in this very sensuous way through nature. As you’re moving, do you make sounds? Do you talk to what you’re meeting?
David: Of course. Although if I’m tracking, I’m trying really hard to move in silence, trying not to let my body speak or announce its presence. (I’m not very good at this).
Patricia: When you’re tracking animals?
David: Yeah, just following some critters. In this winter season it’s so delicious to be out tracking! I’m sure many of you know the experience getting out in the snow with so many tracks going this way and that, so many crisscrossing stories recorded on the white page! Surely this is the original form of reading, tracking the prints of other animals across the fields and through the woods.. In winter the tracks are so crisp and visible!. I love to strap on a pair of skis, not to go down a big mountain or to follow any overt human trails, but just to follow the tracks of snowshoe hare and coyote, figure out what’s been going on. I’m really missing that right now, because my wife told me on the phone that there was a fresh snowfall last night there in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.. My kids and her are probably out right now, following tracks.
Patricia: In the moonlight?
David: Most definitely. Tell me though, when you wander the land, Patricia, do you find yourself singing or making sounds?
Patricia: Yes, I do. I feel like there’s just something that comes through me when I’m in nature. Now I have a bunch of goats that walk with me. (Laughs)
David: With bells?
Patricia: Well, they used to have bells but we had trouble with one of them getting caught and so they no longer have bells. I’m surprised sometimes when I find myself singing or sometimes poems come to me when I’m walking. There is this quiet. In a goat herd, there’s an order and they really trust me as being the leader. There comes this quiet where there are no words and that we’re all aware of what’s going on. If there is a noise, they look to me, What is that? If I go Shhh!, they all stop. And you begin to get this feeling of a whole other consciousness where you’re one with this group.
Once we had a dog come after us. My instinct was to go after the dog, but all of the goats went with me. I remember my husband ran up; it was quite a scene! I was grabbing, the dog, barking, the goats were butting the dog. [maybe clarify this scene – the last few sentences -- a bit?] The dog was a bulldog so it was little bit dangerous. But I realized: thinking as a goat means you don’t go after something, you run. One of the more dangerous things I could have done with our herd was to go after the dog. That idea of mind, of being trusted by an animal to perform a certain function in that herd means you are in a different mode.
David: Yes. So let’s bring these other animals into our conversation. As a farmer you’re interacting quite closely with other creatures, the goats for instance, and you come to know them quite well, as you do the bees on your farm. Could you talk a bit about magic, if you would, from your own angle? I mean, have you too tasted something of this strange experience of entering into a felt rapport and reciprocity with another species, another weirdly different shape of intelligence?, Such interspecies communication often seems to me the most primordial form of magic. There’s nothing even remotely supernatural about it, and yet it’s a most uncanny and transformative experience, to find oneself exchanging meanings with an awareness profoundly different from one’s own. Indigenous magicians often have close alliances with particular animals and plants, and are sometimes called to apprentice themselves to certain wild creatures. Through such apprenticeship, by becoming a student of Raven or Spider or Mountain Goat, one gradually gains access to an ensemble of senses that are very different from one’s own. By carefully observing the actions of this other animal, our human senses link and extend themselves into another, different set of senses; we gain a whole other angle on this bizarre world that we inhabit together.
Patricia: Yes. Because a bee is quite different from a goat. (Laughs)
David: Indeed.
Patricia: And a butterfly is quite different from a bee. It’s really quite something to really be with what is there. There’s a whole different feeling.
David: Yeah, beautiful. And this touches on something that I feel is terribly important to the earthly form of the Sacred that is straining to give birth to itself at this time. For a long time, many folks in our culture have given pride of place to “unity” and “oneness,” proclaiming the importance of experiencing oneness with all things. But as you were articulating it just now, it’s the differences that make this mystery so rich. As I said before, it’s as though we and the black bears and the river otters all inhabit a common psyche (from an oral perspective we might say that we all inhabit a common story) – the intelligence of this breathing biosphere. Yet since our bodies are so different from one another, each of us experiences this mystery from our own angle, through our unique senses, according to the proclivities of our particular flesh. So there are similarities, sure: the bear’s experience of awareness is a distant variant of my experience, or rather, my felt consciousness is a distant variant of its. And yet, although the bear’s trajectory and mine may glancingly intersect, and we might even trade sensations with one another, the differences between us cannot be annulled. How much more divergent is the felt intelligence of a salmon plunging upstream from my own intelligence, or from that of the bear who whacks that fish out of the water! Or the collective intelligence of a thrumming hive of bees before it’s smashed by the bear’s honey-cravings. Wow. That’s so outrageously alien to our style of mind! Or is it?
Patricia: Yes— have you worked with bees?
David: Never.
Patricia: They are quite something. Many people are afraid of them. Our vineyard worker has worked a lot with bees and I’ve worked with him. He doesn’t wear gloves when he goes in and he stays very calm. If you get angry or frightened, the bees know it and they go after you.
So, it really is this kind of training where you learn to calm yourself and not do something that will, as he says, “Train the bees in aggression”. You can do that by being afraid or slapping at them and then they come after you. I wear gloves. I’m not quite to the point where I’m ready to go in there without that. But it is quite something because you really feel that hive and how the bees all work together. It’s a whole other consciousness. The bees are really some of the first shamanic animals, [ as is evidenced by ?] the shamanic beekeeping in Northern Europe.
David: Yes, and reading about bees in this book of yours, Farming Soul, their magic really comes across. You’re a wonderful writer.
Patricia: Thank you.
David: Your phrasing very pellucid and clear, and so the experiences that you recount so directly bring the reader through his own variant of those events. One undergoes a sort of initiatory experience with you as one reads it – I expect it could be quite wrenching for some readers. Powerful. Anyway your beekeeper, Natalio, clearly has a very potent relation with the hives, as though the bees are a part of him. He seems like quite the magician, in the sense of being a person who regularly slides out of the purely human style of perception in order to enter into some kind of relation with another shape of perception.
Patricia: That’s right.
David: It’s what I’d call magic. Again, there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s utterly immanent and this-worldly, and yet it’s utterly uncanny, that experience. IT awakens your readers to the reality of magic, to the reality of living inside a world that is, itself, alive — a world that has many, many other styles of intelligence within it besides our own.
Patricia: And Natalio’s huge respect for all of it. In your book too—as you interact in these ways, respect grows. It becomes more and more painful when things are not going well around you. We have a meadow that I’m very worried about people developing. It is something that is with me almost all the time. In some ways I feel like it is the landscape of my soul. If something happened to that, and I know this sounds very dramatic, I feel I could die. It is that connected to me. That’s what happens when you start loving, that Eros.
David: Eros, yeah.
Patricia: Yes, and it is very, very painful.
David: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you used the term Eros. It certainly is one of the ways I could characterize my work as an educator and as an author: I am trying to open an erotic relation to – well – to everything.
Patricia: Yes. Yes.
David: Otherwise, we’re stuck trying to satisfy all of our craving for otherness – our organism’s ancient need for sensuous contact and interchange with the more-than-human earth – we’re stuck trying to satisfy that deep longing entirely through our human relationships. Which, I think, blows apart so many marriages, and indeed makes all of our human relationships very brittle. ‘Cause we’re trading all of this intense, erotic energy around entirely among ourselves, forgetting its ancestral source and spark in the broader interchange between the human animal and the animate earth. For almost all of our cultural evolution, we humans lived as hunters and foragers in a thoroughly animistic context, negotiating rich and often difficult relationships with myriad facets of the multiplicitous surroundings. It’s only very recently that we’ve been born into a civilization that defines the rest of nature as a set of inanimate objects and determinate, mechanical processes. Which blocks the possibility of real relationship with those things.
Patricia: Yes.
David: But as soon as you begin to allow that the ground itself has its own vitality and life, to say nothing of the animals that run and leap across its surface, and the plants sprouting from that ground, well, then our bodies feel themselves in relationship, once again, with that wider community of active agencies. Suddenly, all that instinctive longing is not cooped up within a purely human sphere. Those erotic energies begin to loosen themselves, and spread out into our felt relationships with other creatures, with mountains and rivers, with the cool night breeze. And as a consequence, many of our human problems -- our challenges with intimacy, and our family relations, our community problems and our social injustices begin to ease and become more fluid, now that they’re held, or nested, within the wider, more-than-human field of relationships. Expanding Eros outward – “falling in love outward,” as Robinson Jeffers said -- eases much of the fragility and brittleness of our human interactions.
Patricia: I have a question: when you walk or ski through the same area over and over, do you think that area develops a feeling for you?
David: I reckon that depends on how I’m walking. I mean, if I’m walking in that distracted manner, caught up within the buzz of worries and concerns about this or that, everything steps out of the way.
But if I am attentive and awake in my animal senses, then yes. And I think that the simplest possible tool for waking up one’s animal senses is just to allow — for at least the length of a meandering walk through the fields — to allow that everything is alive. Everything. Not just the other animals and the plants, but the ground itself, the rocks and the windblown pond., because then you’re looking much more attentively, listening to every small sound. Suddenly all those sounds are voices and they carry meanings — although those meaning can’t often be translated into words. Still, your body picks up something and is able respond, especially if you have returned to that place over and again, and made yourself a little part of that place, and so are not just a tourist clomping around, like an alien dropping in from outer space.
So yes, sure, I think places feel. I reckon it makes most sense to speak not of the individual mind, or psyche, of each being in that valley, but rather that the valley itself has its own style of sentience. If we allow that awareness is not an exclusively human property, but rather a quality of the earth – a mystery that we are in rather than something situated in us -- then each place, each region or realm has its own style of awareness, its own state of mind.
And so, when I journey by airplane as I did yesterday, taking off from the high desert of northern New Mexico (loudly levitating up out of that ecosystem), soaring for several hours above the clouds and then dropping back down into this very different ecosystem, the effect on my animal body – on any animal’s body – will be really jarring. There, where I live, is a mile and half above sea level. . The quality of light here, the tastes in the air, the scents — all these bodacious plants around here that we don’t have there. The whole state of mind – the sentience of this place -- is dramatically different and it takes a long while to adjust if one has not made the journey by by land, experiencing all of the subtle shifts in the terrain as one travels from the high desert down to this broad inland sea.
Travelling by plane is pretty discombobulating to the human animal. We think we account for it all by calling it “jetlag.” But no, that hardly gets at it. I mean, you’re plucked out of one state of mind in which you were carnally immersed, a state shared not just by the other humans there, but by the coyotes and the swooping ravens and the cottonwoods lining the arroyos, and then you’re plunked back down a couple hours later into an entirely different state of mind inhabited by all of you two-leggeds here but also by these incredible trees and these grasslands, and the fish in these waters! The ocean rolling in and out, the tidal thing, it all adds up to a very different style of sentience — a subtly different array of weather patterns, or moods, from those undergone where I live -- but it’s a style common to all the beings of this bioregion.
We need, I think, to replenish our sense of the goodness that dwells deep in the ground, to renew our feel for the sentience inherent in matter. The Good doesn’t just shower down upon us from on high; it also pulses up into us with every footfall upon the ground, our bodies fed from below. And that food, that nourishment, is utterly necessary to the heart beating in our chests. Our heart is in a kind of resonance with the dark sun asleep in its hearth at the heart of the earth.
We need a more ample sense of the Good, a more ample sense of the Holy, one that has room for shadow and density and difficulty and grief. It’s not easy, today, to invite people into their full-bodied love for the earthly world. We all have such a sense that the losses are too huge to bear. The wounds are so manifold now, and they’re intensifying month-by-month, and day-by-day. “I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to feel those losses.” We don’t really want to wake up our animal senses; we prefer to live more and more in abstractions, navigating our way through virtual worlds of our own invention… Even my environmentalist friends are increasingly relying upon GPS systems and satellites to orient themselves on the land, spouting more and more statistics as a way to articulate the real. Sure, these technologies and those statistics have their uses. But those numbers are not the real. The real is what you feel. It’s the taste of the rain on your tongue and the way you taste to a thirsty mosquito.
Patricia: David, in closing, could I ask you to read a passage on grief from the end of Becoming Animal?
David: Sure…
“Tonight is the winter solstice, the dark of the year. This book is completed. Too many species have slid into extinction during the writing, too many forests felled and wetlands filled; so much beauty’s fled the world.Life’s become cheap: with more and more of us piling in, humans keep bashing each other in ever more creative ways — car bombs bursting bodies and missiles dropped from unmanned drones splintering families, searing the land and splattering it with blood. An addled and anesthetized numbness is spreading rapidly throughout our species.
There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief; dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree, or their palms into the hand of yet another child who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss, their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away.Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from under the ground…
Patricia: Thank you.
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The image referred to is from Jung, C. G. The Red Book: Liber Novus, p. 55.
The closing excerpt is from: Abram, David. Becoming Animal, New York: Pantheon, 2010. pp. 308-309.