Description:
A stunning gathering of creative nonfiction, research, and poetry, Sensoria will broaden the moral imaginations of its readers and challenge conventional worldviews about human relations to the nonhuman world.
Humans, along with all other creatures, are an entanglement of sensual relations, shaping and shaped by our somatic engagement with the world.
The essays and poetry of Sensoria transport readers into compelling stories and ethical reflections that stretch the limits of the moral imagination, calling attention to the wondrous ways in which humans and other-than-human beings experience and perceive the world, not just through the senses but within them.
By exploring the sensorium among all forms of life endowed with different kinds of consciousness and communicative abilities, this volume highlights ecologically and socially diverse ways of touching the world with mind, and touching mind with the world.
The sensory faculties are inherently about the capability of paying attention to other beings and forces that share our planet and whose lives are interwoven with our own.
For each of the five senses, the contributors to Sensoria--including music composer David Rothenberg, historian of color Carolyn Purnell, bio-philosopher Andreas Weber, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, neuroethologist Bill Hansson, travel writer and novelist Nick Hunt, and religious scholar Graham Harvey--explore and illuminate the biology and neurology of sensation as well as the imaginative possibilities for understanding the senses.
This timely volume offers readers new ways of understanding relations in everyday encounters that link our inner and outer awareness--embodied experiences that shape what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, and the way these perceptions can help us to attend more closely and respectfully to the lifeworlds of other-than-human creatures.
Brief description: Dr. Gavin Van Horn is the executive editor of Humans & Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the co-editor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Wildness: Relations of People and Place, the award-winning five-volume series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, and the five-volume series Elementals. He currently resides in the ancestral lands of the Northern Chumash people in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, senses awakened by sage, hummingbirds, and ocean air. More about Gavin and his work can be found at www.storyforager.com
Review Quotes: "If the words in an enchanted book, perhaps with pages made of hazelwood, could seduce you out of that chestnut leather armchair and out of your sensible but inflamed mind to wander out the open door in your bare feet, like a salmon returning to her recently-undammed home for the first time in a hundred years, and immerse yourself, hungrily, in the nonverbal but eloquent animate world of falling gold leaves and huffed bear breath, the world of your unremembered animal birthright, a world in which you find yourself, now, being tugged toward the distant call of possible loons landing on the moonlit pond next to the aromatic orchard of ripe apples (floral, tangy, earthy) within easy reach for both you and the salivating bear to pluck, then, after the wandering and after the dreaming, when you return home, if you do, Sensoria might be the book you find waiting on the leather arm of your favorite chair. In this one dazzling volume, Bruce, Gavin, and Heather have gathered together a wild chorus of silver-tongued naturalists, Earth wanderers, storytellers, poets, and imagineers, all of them charming us to fall even deeper in love with our endangered yet endlessly spellbinding world. Go ahead, what the hell, take a bite." --Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft, Nature and the Human Soul, Wild Mind, and The Journey of Soul Initiation