October 14, 2026

Every Blade Has Its Moment

Magic, in this original sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.

David Abram spent years living among traditional healers and sleight-of-hand magicians in Indonesia and Nepal, studying how people without writing stayed attuned to a world alive with feeling. When he wrote The Spell of the Sensuous in 1996, he wanted to recover what literate cultures had traded away for the written page: direct, sensory contact with a world that never holds still. This passage opens the book by redefining magic—not tricks, but the plain fact that a swallow, a fly, a blade of grass each live through their own brief, unrepeatable experience, gone the instant it passes. It matters now because we tend to treat the world as fixed scenery, when every creature and plant we pass today is moving through its own short, passing moment.