phenomenology

“Phenomenology is the Western philosophical tradition that has most forcefully called into question the modern assumption of a single, wholly determinable, objective reality.”

“Despite all the mechanical artefacts that now surround us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to calculate and measure is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses.”

“Thus, the living world - this ambiguous realm that we experience in anger and joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.”

David Abrams - The Spell of the Sensuous

The philosophy of phenomenology runs through this journey as water runs through the Forest and Cave. It is both ever present and agent: shaping this work, these perspectives, this web of relationships. As such this issue should be thought of not as an isolated subject but as just one glimpse of many, into this rich practice of philosophical inquiry; the careful study of direct sensory, emotional and intuitive perception and the understanding that try as we might to separate our minds from the world, our reality can only be experienced through embodiment within it. Phenomenology, like many indigenous philosophies, acknowledges that we are a part of ‘the flesh of the world’, that perception is a matter of dialogue with the non-human, that always we are in relationship and conversation with the trees, animals, birds, mountains, rivers and caves around us.

What do we say in these conversations with the world? Have we been listening? Have we been silent too long?

It is time to resurrect a dialogue, to make an offering, to ask permission, to imagine reality from another perspective.

KALEIDOSCOPE MINDS

More than the sum of our parts: the rich alchemy of embodied experience

ASKING PERMISSION

Ritual and respect in an animate landscape

EPHEMERAL ECHOES OF THE ETERNAL

DAWN CHORUS

Awakening to the sounds of a multifarious world

Share your own explorations and reflections #liminalcompass