"By affirming that the other animals have their own languages, and that even the rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove is itself a kind of voice, oral peoples bind their senses to the shifting sounds and gestures of the local earth, and thus ensure that their own ways of speaking remain informed by the life of the land."

--David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

This moment is unlike any other...

In “The Surrealist Manifesto,” Breton writes,

If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others . . . ? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable . . . It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge . . . Forbidden is any kind of search for truth that is not in conformance with accepted practices . . .

Instruction from the clouds #2

Grow wings!

Instruction from the clouds #1

Head in this direction.

Who can plead innocence?

Thank you, Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle, for the best words I have come across regarding the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/04/notes060410.DTL

Thank you, alpacas!

The Los Angeles Times reports "a nationwide effort by alpaca breeders to help absorb some of the millions of gallons of oil that's spilled into the gulf. It will be packed into buoys and then sent out into the oil slick.

Breeders say the fabric is uniquely suited for the job and does it better than other materials.

"The alpaca fiber is a hollow fiber rather than wool or human hair that's solid fiber, so it has more space to absorb the oil."

I didn't know that yesterday when I met this recently sheared beauty on a tour of fiber producing farms east of Albuquerque.

A chorus of saltbush, chamisa, and cottonwood

Words from Thomas Berry: "The Cenozoic period is being terminated by a massive extinction of living forms that is taking place on a scale equalled only by the extinctions that took place at the end of the Paleozoic around 220 million years ago and at the end of the Mesozoic some 65 million years ago. The only viable choice before us is to enter into an Ecozoic period, the period of an integral community that will include all the human and non-human components that constitute the planet Earth.

The first principle of the Ecozoic era is recognizing that the Universe is primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. This is especially true of the planet Earth. Every being has its own place and its own proper role in the functioning of the planet, its own presentation of itself that might be identified as its voice.

Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us.