88 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
than human world. We have lost the understanding of ourselves as
integral participants in the world, and we have stopped believing that
plants and stones have something to teach us. Berry believes that this
silencing of our capacity to participate in the great conversion is what
allows us to poison rivers and oceans, to cut down rainforests and to
deplete the Earth’s resources.
Berry (2009) believes we must awaken to a consciousness of
the sacred dimension of the Earth during this transition out of the
Cenozoic Era. He calls us to abandon our mistaken ideas of human
superiority and dominion over the Earth and to see the universe as
a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. He calls
us to what he considers the “Great Work” of our time (1999), to
usher in an Ecozoic Era, a time when humans will live in a mutually
enhancing way with the community of Earth.An epistemology of the senses
Ecologist and philosopher David Abram (1996, 2010) shares how
his experiences in rural Indonesia and Nepal have shown him that
it is possible to experience the world of nature with much more
intensity than is common in the West. He says that our current
commodification of nature is related to how we think and especially
to our linguistic structures that privilege objectivity, rationality
and materialism. Abram reminds us that perception is actually a
reciprocal interaction of our living body and the animate world that
we inhabit. Our most immediate experience of the world is one of
reciprocal encounter.
Abram calls into question assumptions that the world is
mechanistic and determined and that only humans have intelligent
souls. He invites us instead into what French philosopher Merleau-
Ponty (2013) calls participation with the flesh of the world. This is the
experience that each of us, in relation to the other, is both subject and
object. When we enter a forest we both see and are seen by the trees
and plants and animals around us. This is our ancestral experience
of reciprocity with the animate Earth, our “age-old reciprocity with