Awakening What's Wild Within Us

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Think of a honeybee drawn by vision and a kind of olfaction into the heart of a wildflower—sensory perception thus effecting the intimate coupling between this organism and its local world. Our own senses, too, have coevolved with the sensuous earth that enfolds us. Human eyes evolved in subtle interaction with the oceans and the air, steadily formed and informed by the shifting patterns of the visible world. Our ears are now tuned, by their very structure, to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. Sensory experience, we might say, is the way our body binds its life to the other lives that surround it, the way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams. Sensory perception is the glue that binds our separate nervous systems into the larger, encompassing ecosystem. As the bee’s compound eye draws it in to the wildflower, as a salmon dreams its way through gradients of scent toward its home stream, so our own senses have long tuned our awareness to particular aspects and shifts in the land, inducing particular moods, insights, and even actions that we mistakenly attribute solely to ourselves. If we ignore or devalue sensory experience, we lose our primary source of alignment with the larger ecology, imperiling both ourselves and the earth in the process.

I’m not saying that we should renounce abstract reason and simply abandon ourselves to our senses, or that we should halt our scientific questioning and the patient, careful analysis of evidence. Not at all: I’m saying that as thinkers and as scientists we should strive to let our insights be informed by our direct, sensory experience of the world around us. Further, we should strive to express our experimental conclusions in a language accessible to direct experience, and thus to gradually bring our science into accord with the animal intelligence of our breathing bodies. (Science can no longer afford to deny the scientist’s own embeddedness in the very world she studies; we can no longer pretend that the human mind is able to break wholly free from its co-evolved, carnal embedment in a more-than-human web of influences.) Sensory experience, when honored, renews the bond between our bodies and the breathing earth. Only a culture that disdains and dismisses the senses could neglect the living land as thoroughly as our culture does.

Many factors have precipitated our current estrangement from our sensuous surroundings. One of the most potent is also one of the least recognized: our everyday language, our ways of speaking. What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world! To be sure, there are styles of speaking that keep us close to our senses and enhance the sensory reciprocity between our bodies and the flesh of the earth. But we often wield words in ways that simply deaden our senses, rendering us oblivious to our sensuous surroundings and to the voice of the land.

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