Falling Awake: The Ecology of Wonder
With David Abram
July 31 - August 5, 2022
The garden colours, raven calls, salt water cleanse, sanctuary embrace and warmth of the human heart and spirit sit with me still, still, still. – Program Participant, 2019
How can we open a fresh and unshakeable solidarity between humankind and the other animals, plants, and elemental forces that compose this breathing biosphere? The uncanny effects of the current pandemic, and the broader contortions of climate change, ensure that our species is tumbling toward a sea change of immense proportions. Exploring practices useful for grounding and thriving in weird times, we’ll ponder how our lives might be of service to the more-than-human earth.
A dawning recognition of the power and primacy of place, an awareness of wildness unfolding wherever we turn our attention, a new humility in relation to other earthborn entities – whether salmon or cedars or storm clouds – and a radically transformed sense of the sacred: all these are struggling to be born at this teetering moment on our whirling dervish of a world. How can this altered awareness settle deep into our muscles and bones, and how can it come most powerfully to expression in our lives?
Join us for a program vivid with personal discovery and collective exploration – a gathering rich with storytelling, magic, and heartfelt conversation. Together, we’ll pool our findings toward a new experience of the enveloping earth as an exuberant, improvisational, and sentient reality – and of ourselves as full-bodied participants (along with the bears and the crickets) in the emergence of that reality.
(Please note that this program will entail some walking, and time spent outdoors).
This program supports you to:
- Deepen your sensory and perceptual skills
- Enter into richer relationship with the more-than-human natural world
- Awaken to the beauty and power of indigenous cosmologies
- Learn fresh ways of attuning to your home-place, enhancing your experience of the local earth wherever you live
- Wildly expand your philosophical toolkit
- Hone your poetic and storytelling skills
- Replenish your sense of wonder
- Become a more effective agent of cultural metamorphosis
David is an excellent presenter – knowledgeable, soulful, poetic and passionate. I am profoundly grateful for this experience. – Martha Sorensen, 2019
Schedule
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Listen
Watch
Narrated and informed by David Abram, Becoming Animal is a film about the interactive human/animal experience. Watch the trailer below:
Presenter
David Abram, PhD is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher who teaches widely on several continents. He is the multiple award-winning author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring”…
Learn more about David Abram