Becoming Animal

I'm sharing the words of writer, David Abram from his book "Becoming Animal An Earthly Cosmology" not only for your sake, but also for mine, so I will not forget them as they are a way of thinking and realizing our place in the world. Each day as I draw from life, outside surrounded by nature, birds, wild things and hot skies, and then later on when I paint abstractly, at home with ambiguity and passion's many flavours, I struggle to find a way to be in a world quite un-accepting of the artist's way. So it's writers like Abram who guide and encourage me with their ponderings.

The computerized mind when left to its own devices, all too easily overlooks the solid things of the earth. Skilled in the rapid manipulation of symbols, it neglects the stones and the grasses that symbolize nothing other than themselves. Dazzled by its own virtual creations, the digital self forgets its dependence upon a world that it did not create, overlooking its carnal emplacement in the very world that created it.

Bodily perception provides our most intimate entry into a primary order of reality that can be disparaged or dismissed only at our peril.

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.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology