make their skin wake up

I've posted a few of my rough notes from the Bioneers at the Easily Amazed Forum Schoolhouse, and it has been re-inspiring and re-stirring to read them over (except for the frustrating parts that I can't make out! I actually used to have very nice handwriting, before I spent a few too many years in school).

So far I've written up my notes from Paul Hawken's plenary address and James Hillman's, both of which are available as audio downloads from the Bioneers store. My latest addition, though, hasn't been available--I'm not sure if it didn't get taped, or it's just not listed yet in the store--but if it's "disappeared into thin air," or rather, resonating and reverberating still in the living air without its signal having been captured in electronic form, it might be appropriate...

So here are just a few para-phrases from that talk, which was a panel discussion between cultural ecologist and magician David Abram (author of the profoundly stirring The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World) and feminist thinker, poet and activist Susan Griffin on Changing the Language of Environmentalism (also, see Amy Lenzo's great notes, at The Beauty Dialogues):

Griffin: We need language that holds the grief of this moment--need to take back 'right to life/right to live'

Abram: We all have to be poets...to speak "as creatures luring people back into their bodies and making their skin wake up."
The Air is the Mystery for every oral culture--where the meaning is, where the voices of the ancestors still hang out.
Sometimes he spells it "E A I R T H" to remember that the air is part of the Earth, not separate from it.