They took steps every day. Steps along the creek side. Steps through the valleys, hills, mountains, deserts, and swamps. They walked through the fading leaves, freezing streams, and falling rock. They moved carefully across the land, somehow never fully aware of what they passed. Success in their eyes was conquering the “natural” world before them. They overcame the density of the forest, the discomfort of the elements, and the scarcity of food for all their people.
But what they didn’t see was the truth under the ground or beyond the horizon. They didn’t lift the rocks or peer behind the far side of the trees. They didn’t dig beneath the ground that their boots so quickly covered. Self-interest limited their perspective. They were oblivious to the sensuous presence of the world, to the “lives of other animals, the minute gestures of insects and plants, the speech of birds, the tastes in the wind, the flux of sounds and smells…” (Abram, 201). Measurable progress in establishing their communities and quality of life seemed to be the only concern.
Curiously, ignorance did not hinder their survival. Despite oblivion of the sensuous world, they carried on. A Western Apache woman, Annie Peaches, of Arizona explained it that “The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right. The land looks after us. The land looks after people.” (Abram, 156). Even after ignoring the moral efficacy of the land, they were able to establish themselves across the North American continent. The western world became something different.
Their boots were always on, always working. They lived in the present, mindful of the past but concerned with the future. Learning, conquering, expanding. Taking everything they can, and making it their own. They never stopped moving. But neither did the rivers and streams. The water kept flowing. The wind never stopped blowing and the leaves never stopped falling. The land persisted to be despite the ruckus of western expansion. They perceived something different than the earth itself. They lived conscious of their time, but “things are different in this world without ‘the past’ and ‘the future’,” (Abram, 203). Sensuality was overlooked.
They passed by the world for what it truly is. They knew a creation story that ceased just after it began. This is much different than the creation notion of the aboriginal Australians. Their creation story is a continuous process. “the perpetual emerging of the world from an incipient, indeterminate state into full waking reality, from invisibility to visibility, from the secret depths of silence into articulate song and speech.” (Abram, 169). The modern westerners face a blindness to the depth of silence, the world without definitive time.
They are “raised in a culture that asks us to distrust our immediate sensory experience and to orient ourselves instead on the basis of an abstract, ‘objective’ reality known only through quantitative measurement, technological instrumentation, and other exclusively human involvements” (Abram, 217). Existing on this earth must have more purpose than to develop the human experience. The mystery of what is under the ground and beyond the horizon begs to be known. John Fire Lame Deer tells us: “A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives,” and in doing just that they can uncover the mysteries beyond the human perspective. (Abram, 225).