#david abrams

When you look at these words, you instantly see what they say. As soon as we focus our eyes upon these ostensibly inert bits of ink, we hear a flood of words, and feel ourselves addressed, spoken to. Such is the power of the alphabet, the grip that these human-made signs have upon our senses! In a culture without formal writing, however, it is not the visible letters but rather the whole of the visible landscape that retains the ability to speak. Every bird, every rock face, every bend in the gushing stream carries the capacity for meaningful expression, the power of speech.

It's 1:30 Am and I just discovered that baby Stephen plays the sax on the music video of Del Shannon's Runaway (the opening credits song of Crime Story!) How cool is that!?

The earth of our direct experience is not that blue marble, flecked with white, mapped and mointored by innumerable satellites. Rather, it is the particular place where I find myself, the tangible terrain that I engage with my muscles, whose horizons beckon my eyes and whose tangled rhythms nourish my listening ears. It is this high windswept valley of dreaming of rains that seldom come; or that rolling woodland overrun with suburban subdivisions and marauding deer; or that coastal estuary cradling your metropolis, where peregrines nest atop the tall bridges and mussel beds seeded by schoolchildren seive industrial pollutants from the tides. Only by being deeply here, in and of this place, am I palpably connected to every other place. However much I may be concerned by events unfurling on the far side of the globe, and however insistently those happenings shove themselves through my various screens and headsets, my primary responsibility must be to the realm that I ceaselessly inhabit with the whole of my creaturely flesh, and to the palpable relationships that I sustain in this realm.