Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.
David AbramNo event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.
David AbramThe world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of position and of mood.
David AbramSensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.
David AbramEach place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.
David Abram