contemplativeinquiry

“Wander over to that oak, or a maple, or a sycamore, reach out your hand to feel the surface of a single many-pointed leaf between your thumb and fingers. Note the coolness of that leaf against your skin, the veined texture your fingertips discover as they roam across it. But notice, too, another slightly different sensation: that you are also being touched by the tree. That the leaf itself is gently exploring your fingers, its pores sampling the chemistry of your skin, feeling the smooth and bulging texture of your thumb even as the thumb moves upon it.

“As soon as we notice than our hands are being included within the tactile world, we are forced to notice this reciprocity: whenever we touch any entity, we are also being touched by that entity.

…..

“Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”

David Abram Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology New York: Vintage Books, 2010