Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its anci….

What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is ….

Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language ….

There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When….

...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all….

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies..

For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence….

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, ….

A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active ….

The world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of position and of mood..

We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute..

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human..

It was a though we’d been living for a year in a dense grove of old trees, a cluster of firs, each with its own rhythm and character, from whom our b….

Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the wo….

If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phe….

Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary….

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battle….

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the e….

As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to….

There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves….

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 s….