August 04, 2026

Make Contact Again

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abram wrote this line in the introduction to The Spell of the Sensuous, drawing on years he spent living among indigenous magicians and shamans in Indonesia and Nepal, watching how their rituals kept human communities in living relationship with animals, plants, and weather. He returned to the West troubled by what he saw as a collective sensory amnesia, a suffering caused not by any single crisis but by centuries of treating the living earth as inert backdrop rather than partner. His own transformation came through learning to notice again: the shift in light, the call of a bird, the texture of bark under his palm. The line still matters today as a reminder that healing our estrangement from the world starts with small, direct acts of attention.