Into the Depths of a Breathing Planet
With David Abram
September 10-17, 2023
8 days, 45 miles of canoeing, daily writing,
delicious food, 19 participants max.
Guides: David Abram, Lauren Bond, Sarah West, Lauren Golten, and Cate Burnett
Pricing: $2995, payment plans upon request
The deposit and cost of The River’s Path Canoe Adventures are non-refundable. We strongly recommend purchasing travel insurance through our partner Outward Travel to protect your investment.
With each fresh meander of the river, the bustle of civilization fades into the many-voiced stillness of the canyon – into the sunlight glinting off a heron’s wing, and the limitless eloquence of a world that exceeds all our knowing. We’ll glide into elemental conversations between our bodies and the breathing earth, entering improvisational exchanges with other creatures and plants and clouds, with the silken skin of the water, with the invisible wind and the echoing cliffs.
In the course of this week we’ll explore the mysteries of perception and the magic of sensory experience: waking our creaturely senses, loosening our animal eyes and ears and muscles from the constraints imposed by societal assumptions and over-civilized ways of thinking. And we will engage the arts of word magic — of poetics, and praise, and the old, oral craft of face-to-place storytelling. Spontaneous, expressive movement may well play some part in whatever mischief we get up to. Listening, laughing, extending our bodily imagination into the hidden depths of the animate terrain, we’ll paddle our way into a more fluid and lasting rapport with the more-than-human earth dreaming all around us.
Meet David Abram
Cultural Ecologist & Geophilosopher
David Abram is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. He was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of indigenous “animism” as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – a broad reassessment which is now dramatically underway in many disciplines.
In the mid-1990s David coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity.
Currently the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair of Global Justice and Ecology in Norway. He has received numerous awards, including Rockefeller and Watson Fellowships, and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. David is co-founder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), and a distinguished teaching Fellow of Schumacher College in England. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.