For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind and body, not a curse on your soul, as the Christian West has too often seen it.
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For Amazonian people, there are spirits or essences within reality, and this essence takes different forms—human, bird or animal—but since the essence is the same, the spirit in one form can transform into another form in a kind of Ovidian metamorphosis known throughout the forests. The same life force is in everything, animating you and the eagle, the glossy leaf and the kingfisher, the jaguar and me.
There is a tender familiarity in this, a gentle ontology. The difference between creatures is just a trick of the light, a superficial thing, for underneath we are made of the same stuff. On the surface there is an obvious difference between you and the daffodil, the catfish and the monkey puzzle tree, but what animates each is the same vibrancy and immanent energy, the one life force expressing itself in differing guises. This understanding is learned through the language of metaphor or through the intense experiences of the soul. For Amazonian people, knowledge comes from communicating with the wild world, through its plant teachers or through shape-shifting—that strange, beautiful and entirely wild way of knowing.
(Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, pp. 68 and 69)
"On the surface there is an obvious difference between you and the daffodil, the catfish and the monkey puzzle tree, but what animates each is the same vibrancy and immanent energy, the one life force expressing itself in differing guises."
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