David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at all — it was keeping things square with the land, the birds, the weather. His beef in this book is that we’ve turned nature into an idea instead of our home, our refuge, and our sustenance. So he goes at it sideways, with chapters on shadow, on stone, on wind, on the plain fact of breathing. There’s a bit where he crawls into a cave in the dark that’ll stick with you for years. It’s slow on purpose, so plan for it.
Becoming Animal