David Abram's Articles on Lions Roar

Language is not a uniquely human possession. Every bird, every rock face, every bend in the gushing stream carries the power of meaningful speech. Ultimately, says David Abram, it is not we who speak—it’s the earth that speaks through us. I have a friend, a native man from one of the Pueblo villages that sprout from the high desert of northern New Mexico. On various occasions Jacob and I have wandered out across this red land, trekking among the sparse, knotted shadows of juniper and piñon, letting the ultramarine of the desert sky roll across us in waves. Usually we walk in silence, allowing ourselves to be led by the track of hare or coyote, or by the widening banks of a meandering arroyo. Now and then we fall into conversation. Yet I have noticed an odd contrast between us. If we are pondering some question as we saunter, and I happen to be visited by a new insight, I tend to announce that idea straightaway, with no interruption to our dialogue or the rhythm of our walking. When a fresh insight strikes my friend, however, he first halts his steps in order (so I’ve learned) to listen inwardly to the thought. But then he gazes around him, noting where he is on the land, silently questioning the nearby trees, or the sandstone cliffs, or the clouds drifting overhead, in order to discern which entity it was that gifted him with that insight. Only when he has settled his attention upon a particular clump of sagebrush or noticed the ghosting presence of a small whirlwind stirring the dust nearby, and has matched the character of that presence, somehow, to the quality of the thought that just found him, only then does Jacob relax back into our walk, and maybe tell me something of that insight. This happens often enough for me to realize that there’s nothing unusual about it. It’s perfectly normal for him, nothing special. When I’ve asked him about these pauses, these moments when our conversation suddenly seems to open, quietly, on to a field of intelligence vibrating all around us, Jacob has told me little more than I’ve told you just now. It’s just his way. Yet it lends to our reflective walks a quality of resonant attention to the world, an attunement to surrounding shapes, sounds, and textures usually absent from the mental reveries to which most of us are accustomed. There is something in this very simple and ordinary habit of my friend that astonishes me. Jacob’s outward listening, in response to the inward arrival of an idea, suggests an entirely different notion of mind, and intelligence, than that to which I’ve been educated. At first I surmised that Jacob felt he had no hand in these thoughts, that they came entirely from the other beings around him—from that many branched juniper, or that swooping magpie, or from the moon rising silent above the ridge. Soon, however, I learned that my friend’s understanding was subtler, that for Jacob the insights belonged no more to that juniper than they belonged to him. Rather, they were born of the encounter between them—between his mindful presence and the gnarled intelligence of that tree, between his sentient body and the earthly sentience of that place. Meaning, according to my friend, arises from meeting, from the felt contact between oneself and what is not oneself. From the encounter between oneself and another person, or a river, or the surging wind. From, ultimately, the ongoing interaction and intercourse between oneself and the rest of the earthly cosmos. This curious understanding—this view of meaning as something that exists only in meeting—is an understanding that has gradually come to inform much of my work as an ecologist and author. Jacob’s attentive response to the surrounding landscape, and the implicit assumption that lies behind it—that the material presences experienced by our senses are also sensitive and sentient in their own right—is an assumption common not just to the Pueblo culture of his ancestors, but to most indigenous, tribal cultures that still exist, whether in the desert southwest of North America or the archipelagoes of the Pacific, whether in the wooded plains of Africa, or the Australian outback, or the dank and dripping forests of Amazonia. Some form of this animistic assumption has likely been an instinctive aspect of every tribal, subsistence culture that has thrived on this planet since the emergence of human sociability. Yet over the course of the last three millennia, this ancestral supposition was successively overlaid, in various populations, by other ways of structuring experience. And during the last three hundred years, most of the remaining participatory lifeways were displaced, destroyed, or finally absorbed by the onrush of technological civilization, with its abundant blessings and its curses. By the start of the twenty-first century, those few groups still informed by the experience of an animate, wakeful landscape have had to submerge or stifle this aspect of their lives, accepting the basic assumptions of commercial civilization, with its highly objectified view of nature, simply in order to survive into the new millennium. Nonetheless there are many reasons to suspect that the older belief in a world all alive, awake, and aware simply cannot be eradicated. It can be submerged and paved over, but it cannot be destroyed. For a few people of European ancestry, the felt awareness of a living, expressive terrain may have been buried for some forty or fifty generations, yet it has never been vanquished: even at that depth it moves and stirs, exerting its influence upon our bodies and our dreams, waiting patiently for the moment when it will rise like a bubble from the depths, expanding rapidly toward the surface as the pressure upon it decreases, until it bursts into the open air of our experience, and we breathe of it once again. Writing about such deeply participatory forms of experience is always an odd and paradoxical endeavor, and I admit to some frustration at the apparent necessity of affixing these thoughts on the surface of the page. I’m never entirely happy about this—about having to take these visceral experiences, these carnal encounters and hunches and sensorial reflections, these intimacies, and pry them out of the loamy soil of my body in order to flatten them between the pages of a book or magazine. It feels like tearing off pieces of my skin and pasting them to the surface of the paper. I have no wish for these reflections to become stuck here, drying out between these pages like pressed flowers. I don’t want these notions to desiccate and die for lack of water. Many of my thoughts have been shaped by the forest and the tides; they have sprouted like lichen along the trunks of trees and on the mottled surface of certain stones. If they become isolated within a purely human language, enclosed within a disembodied field of signs and abstract cogitations, well, then those insights are not likely to forgive me. Originally invoked by the rhythmic thudding of a raven’s wings paddling the air overhead, or by the late afternoon sunlight spilling across the splintered stumps of a clear-cut mountainside, such reflections are already suspicious of me for offering them up as a set of symbols printed out in lines upon the page or the screen. They would much prefer that I offer them to you while we are sitting together among the ferns at the edge of a creek, or perhaps while walking in the rain along a city street late at night, with the radiance from the streetlamps gleaming upon the wet pavement, and every now and then the hissss of tires joining the rise and fall of our voices as we ponder and gesticulate and gaze silent into the electric dark. It is a risky process, this writing things down. There remain various cultures that still listen for the voices of rivers and stones, various peoples who know that language is not the exclusive property of humankind. But most such cultures still conversant with the animate earth are traditionally oral cultures, cultures that evolved and flourished without a strong reliance upon the written word. The tribal, subsistence cultures native to North America, like most of those indigenous to other continents, traditionally sustained themselves (often for millennia) in a fairly reciprocal relation with the living landscapes that they inhabited. They did so, commonly, without any dependence upon written-down words. To be more precise, they flourished without a formalized system of written signs that were tightly bound—like the printed letters you are now reading—to the spoken language. Oral cultures are cultures of story. In the absence of written records, linguistic knowledge is most effectively preserved in an easily remembered spoken form, in a style of speech that engages the imagination of the senses. For humans the world over, storytelling always was and remains the most engaging of such forms. Reliance upon spoken stories, moreover, seems to encourage a keen awareness of processes afoot in the surrounding terrain, including the habits of the local animals and the proclivities of the local plants. In part this may be due to the way the stories of a deeply oral culture inevitably root themselves in the specifics of the immediate landscape; local animals, like Raven or Coyote, often figure as central characters within the stories, while common trees and herbs, particular weather patterns, specific boulders, mountains, rivers, and even whole forests may play active, animate roles in the tales. Such stories provide abundant practical information regarding the elemental, earthly surroundings. They may function, at times, as maps for orienting within that expansive terrain, as well as compendiums of instruction about how to prepare particular plants as foods and as medicines, or how best to outwit certain animals when hunting. Within their layered meanings, the traditional stories commonly convey extensive instruction regarding interspecies etiquette—the proper gestures of...

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