The natural world is a gateway that leads us into greater affinity with ourselves and one another

The surrounding earth is a remarkable gateway that can lead us into greater affinity with ourselves, with each other, and with the many other beings with whom our lives are entangled.

Many people are feeling pretty disconnected these days. Disconnected from themselves, their fellow humans, and the animate earth around them. (Even – or perhaps especially – those of us who have spent our lives studying and advocating for the planet and its various ecosystems.)

In uncertain, divisive times, it’s more important than ever for us to remember how deeply interdependent we really are with other creatures, with the plants, with the winds and the waters that surge through us – with the elemental, living land that binds us all within a common fabric.

If you’re feeling at all disconnected – from the natural world, from the “here and now,” from your fellow humans, or from your own inner flame of purpose – cultural ecologist David Abram can help you rediscover a deep sense of affinity with this earthly cosmos woven of birdsong and thunderstorms.

His work helps us to rediscover ourselves as luminous animals in an animate world, able to ground ourselves and to draw nourishment from the breathing terrain wherever we dwell. David empowers us to show up ever more richly within our lives, enabling us to be of genuine service to the more-than-human world.

Through these kinds of activities, you will:

You will leave with tools and practices that help you stay grounded and deepen your perception of a world in which everything is alive – not just the animals, but the plants, the ground underfoot, the stars and weather patterns, even the words you use to describe it all.

Tools by which so you can experience greater integration in yourself, and greater fluidity in your relationships with other people and with the earthly cosmos that surrounds.

David Abram

Author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.

Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times and “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David Abram’s work explores the myriad ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth.

David’s essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. He has been the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo in Norway and was the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University in 2022-2023. His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination and is informed by his fieldwork with indigenous peoples in southeast Asia and the Americas, as well as by the philosophical tradition of phenomenology.

In the 1990s, David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – one which roots human cognition in the dynamic sentience of the body while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the uncanny intelligence of other animals, each of whom encounters the same world that we perceive yet from an outrageously different angle and perspective.

David is a fellow of Schumacher College in England and founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.