Contents
A book I’m reading by David Abram. From the book:
This is a book about becoming a two-legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us. It seeks a new way of speaking, one that enacts our interbeing with the earth rather than blinding us to it. A language that stirs a new humility in relation to other earthborn beings, whether spiders or obsidian outcrops or spruce limbs bent low by the clumped snow. A style of speech that opens our senses to the sensuous in all its multiform strangeness.
The chapters that follow strive to discern and perhaps to practice a curious kind of thought, a way of careful reflection that no longer tears us out of the world of direct experience in order to represent it, but that binds us ever more deeply into the thick of that world. A way of thinking enacted as much by the body as by the mind, informed by the humid air and the soil and the quality of our breathing, by the intensity of our contact with the other bodies that surround.
The author’s emphasis on speech and language surprised me at first—I thought this would be a book about being or behaving, not speaking—but then again speech and thought (which is internal speech) often are how we humans engage with the world in our peculiar human way, so perhaps that’s the place to start. In the second paragraph, Abram seems to make a nod toward the idea of embodied cognition, that thought is not solely a product of the mind but of the whole body and its senses.
Internal vs. external orientation
My friend [@joelmeador])(https://note.garden/joelmeador) recently noted Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and as I explored it I learned of the difference between internal and external orientation. The distinction gets at whether we experience life primarily through our internal state (thoughts, emotions, memories) or external sensory data (sights, smells, awareness of those around us), with the idea being that both are important and should remain in balance. I tend to be more internally oriented, and what piqued my interest in Becoming Animal was its promise to help me be more externally oriented.