“In North America this spontaneous and quietly growing movement goes by many names. In truth, it is less a movement than a common sensibility shared by persons who have, in Robinson Jeffer’s phrase, ‘fallen in love outward’ with the world around them. As their compassion for the land deepens, they choose to resist the contemporary tendency to move always elsewhere for a better job or more affluent lifestyle, and resolve instead to dedicate themselves to the terrain that has claimed them, to meet the generosity of the land with a kind of wild faithfulness. They rejuvenate their senses by entering into reciprocity with the sensuous surroundings. This does not prevent them from engaging in the political realities of counties and countries, from supporting statewide initiatives and voting in national elections. They are aware, however, that political and economic institutions not aligned with earthly realities are not likely to last, that such structures are like ephemeral phantoms to which we must attend without letting them distract us from what is really here. Such persons ally themselves not with the ever-expanding human monoculture, nor with the abstract vision of a global economy, but with the far more sustainable prospect of a regionally diverse and interdependent web of largely self-sufficient communities—a multiplicity of technologically sophisticated, vernacular cultures tuned to the structure and pulse of particular places. They know well that if humankind is to flourish without destroying the living world that sustains us, then we must grow out of our adolescent aspiration to encompass and control all that is. Sooner or later, they suspect, our technological ambition must begin to scale itself down, allowing itself to be oriented by the distinct needs of specific bioregions. Sooner or later, that is, technological civilization must accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land, its political and economic structures diversifying into the varied contours and rhythms of a more-than-human earth.”
— david abram, from the spell of the sensuous, which is a beautiful and thought-provoking book. my copy is dogeared and underlined all to heck.
