Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

A spectacular book, as good or better that his 1st book, The Spell of the Sensuous. A sensuous ethnography of the biosphere, but actually of the whole earth (rocks, too). If you have read Bateson's Mind in Nature, Lovelock and the debate about Gaia, either of the Tedlocks or ethnographies of shamanism, LaChapelle on sacred earth rituals, or books on deep ecology or Buddhist ecology (like Dharma Rain or Seeing God Everywhere), then you should read Abram. In Becoming Animal, he presents a coherent, unifying thesis that I believe ties the ideas from many of these books together in one worldview, including beauty, aesthetics, and the sacred. From his field experiences living with magicians in several cultures, he puts certain "animistic" aspects of their perceptive strategy and worldview at the center of understanding our humanness. Very Buddhist, and yet literate and philosphical. Presents an interesting intellectual or cognitive history of science, the Copernican revolution, and literate v. oral cultures. He hopes to heal "Descartes Error."For me, Abram's book integrated themes in my most favorite authors and thinkers, Bucky Fuller and Bateson, and the book by Barbara Tedlock, The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. Bucky often said "Unity is plural and at minimum two." Bateson said that all living things participate in "mind," and many of his ideas are found in Abram's long chapter, Mind. Bateson argued that the essence of meaning and of explaining our lives was relationships and communication about relationships between two persons or a creature and its environment. Pathology was very often broken relationships. All of those ideas fit in perfectly with Abram's ideas about learning to reconnect with animals and our own animal nature.His chapter, The Real in its Wonder, is completely relevant to anthropology, describing the only way ethnography can be pursued whole-heartedly today, I think. He perhaps oversimplifies the complex interplay between old and new, natives and anthropologists and others, that is transforming, reshaping, and using for new purposes the old oral traditions in many places. But he made me think with this exhortation: "the rejuvenation of oral culture is an ecological imperative." So go out and talk, sing, and tell stories with your neighbors to save the earth!! Wendell Berry has been preaching and writing novels about this for decades.The only slightly critical comment I would make about the book is, I think he underestimates the distinctive character and power of language in his enthusiasm to rebalance it with other means of communication with non-human beings. I have long believed that language is the fundamental and distinctive characteristic of our species. Not because it makes us smarter, better, of favored, but because of what we do with it: play, write poetry, eventually do science and understand the world, develop and continually create culture in all its complex, divine glory. So he undervalues what Homer and Shakespeare and Pushkin have done, and he undervalues the way storytellers and poets play with words and in stories in spectacular, moving, ironic, inspiring, joyful ways.Actually, Abram tries to keep his argument in balance, giving credit to writing, books, and even the new digital society that appears to be global and not local, not grounded in the way he and Berry believe is critical to our species and to the earth's survival. The whole point, the core challenge today, is how to rebalance the new with the traditional, how to decide what to preserve and what to change or leave go to make way for the new.So, as you can see, I loved the book. Good medicine, good food for thought, maybe even soul food.

Mary Oliver advises us to `let the soft animal of your body love what it loves' in her oft quoted poem, `Wild Geese'; to open ourselves to the restorative, nurturing `rain' of sensory experience that waters us at our roots. Great advice but advice that many of us seem too busy or too scared to take at a time when I would argue we need to apply it most urgently.Hopefully you can recall the sensual wonders of your early childhood: the feeling of sun on your face; the smell of flowers and the dirt in the garden bed; the taste of raspberry jam; the feeling of a pet's ear as you stroked it; the sounds of cooking in the kitchen and birds in the trees; and the sensory extravagance of climbing under air-dried sheets and a wool blanket on an autumn evening. But if you are like most adults in the world today, you can't or these are only vague memories. As adults, many of us feel cut off from this deep engagement with the world, and this lack of bodily engagement with the world is a major factor in our bravely soldiering on through our days and nights feeling empty, unfulfilled and curiously detached from daily life. It is ironic that in a time when we can reach into our pockets and pull out a device that will put us in contact with someone half-way around the world or tell us exactly where we are on the face of the planet, that so many of us feel strangely isolated and alone and disconnected from the very places where we live.To help set this right, let me suggest that you obtain a paper copy of David Abram's `Becoming Animal' in which you can fill the margins with comments and notes or at least bend down the corners of the pages for a return visit and read what he has to suggest for finding our ways back to the sensual little creatures we were as kids and to regain a vibrant sense of being in a world that is waiting to engage us a every turn. This is a juicy, ripe pear of a book full of the sweetness of life that is a pleasure to taste as you turn the pages.In `Spell of the Sensuous,' David reminded us that our senses are `our most intimate link with the living land, the primary way the earth has of influencing our moods and guiding our actions' and that our senses provide `the way our body binds its life to the other lives that surround it, the way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams. Sensory perception is the glue that binds our separate nervous systems into the larger, encompassing ecosystem.' He cautioned `If we ignore or devalue sensory experience, we lose our primary source of alignment with the larger ecology, imperiling both ourselves and the earth in the process.'In `Becoming Animal' David literally immerses the reader in the subtle sensory/sensual aspects of `the more-than-human world' and how they are there for us to savor and demonstrates how we can restore a sense of joyful participation to even the most mundane of daily tasks be it waiting for a bus, walking to the mail box or cutting vegetables. With a poet's skill and a tracker's eye he lets us experience how feelings pool in certain places, how shadows are three dimensional presences not flat absences on a wall or the ground, how the fluid movement of water in streams, the roiling vitality of water vapor in clouds, and the delicate unfurling of a fern frond all speak to a dynamic force in the world, how the weather colors our moods and acts as a perceptual filter, and how vitally important it is to find ways of connecting with the place that you live such that you can move, act, speak and behave in a way to carries a sense of the place with you and literally grounds you and what you do in the truth of your home ground, David allows us to re-examine our lives, to reopen ourselves to the richness of experience we had as children, and to craft lives in which we feel more alive, more connected and more `placed.' As a final enticement to read this book, let me leave you with the following quote from the book (page 224): "Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your [rational] explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine - to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it."It has been noted that `The best things in Life are not things' and in this book David makes a stunningly beautiful case for this assertion. Buy this book!

This is truly a remarkable read, and worth all the patience. Take your time with it, it is worth it. The audio book is also great as it is read by the author himself. Nice to listen to when you are driving through wilderness.

One of the very good and rare book I come across

This is a magical book in the truest sense. Abram's writing is lyrical and clear. His insights are stunning for their simplicity. A book like Spell of the Sensuous that I will go back to again and again.

This book found me at a peculiar time in my life. I had begun to feel very detached and isolated—a deep feeling of disillusionment with the world as I dealt with increasingly stressful issues in my personal and work life. I couldn't shake the sense that I wasn't living life to its fullest potential, that I had long since numbed myself and forgot how to truly experience everything around me. A friend of mine lent me their copy of this book after I opened up and shared how I was feeling. The effect it had on me was really quite remarkable.Through his stories of his own experiences and those shared with him, Abram teaches us how to re-establish our connection with everything else that we share this existence with. Abram reminds us that we are not detached, we are simply deafened, "...[i]f we no longer call out.. well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us--and if they try, we will not likely hear them..." and he invites us to reopen ourselves to the richness that surrounds us.I believe this book is best read when you are easily able to set it down between chapters and enter into nature to reflect on its teachings. I found the book to be quite powerful, not only when I was reading it, but when it encouraged me to physically step out and engage with the world around me. I suggest taking it with you on your next trip into the wilderness and losing yourself into the sensational kingdom that surrounds you.Sadly, I had to return this book to my friend, but purchased a copy for myself. I know I will be needing to revisit this over and over again to re-ground myself with the beautiful simplicity of the world.

I am absolutely enjoying this book. It’s full of amazing descriptions of how the author connects to Nature, and how we would all FEEL this connection if we hadn’t become so smart (and minimalistic). It’s provoking, beautiful, slow…like walking through the most magnificent jungle. I can’t explain. Truly mesmerizing, passion-inducing and thought-provoking.Anybody wanting to save the planet should read this book to remember how our hearts are naturally connected to the planet and all living things.

This is a great read even if your focus isn't ecology. David Abram writes with heart and intent. He gives nature an eloquent voice and calls forth the beauty of the world in which we live. I would highlyrecommend this book to anyone with a deep love of nature and an interest in ecology.K.