Do you have a small shelf of books that are truly special? Not just personal favorites but books that actually reshaped your thinking? David Abram’s “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology” was that kind of book for me. Abram is an environmental philosopher who makes the most compelling case I’ve ever come across for animism - the idea that everything around us is alive and sentient. That might include not just birds and trees, but also rocks and clouds. I confess, I struggle with this idea, but every so often I have an experience that makes it all feel real - and it’s magical.
Abram says we’ve often forgotten how to experience the world through our senses. Too often, our experiences are mediated through words and concepts rather than direct encounters with the things they’re describing and categorizing. Language, for all its wonders, has a way of distancing us from direct, sensory experience.
Abram himself has a fascinating backstory. He was once a sleight-of-hand magician who traveled around Asia looking to meet shamans and jhankris - or “traditional magicians,” as he prefers to call them. In the Himalayas he met an especially powerful sorcerer named Sonam and became his apprentice. Abram’s daily practice was to watch a raven for hours at a time - the bird’s every twitch and croak, as if he were inhabiting the body of the raven. Then one day, miraculously, he seemed to turn into that bird. He tells this remarkable story in our show “Shapeshifting.” I hope you’ll get a chance to listen.
—Steve