…the intermediaries between the human community and the more-than-human community – the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests are considered to be living, intelligent forces. Even the winds and the weather patterns are seen as living beings. Everything is animate. Everything moves. It’s just that some things move slower than other things, like the mountains or the ground itself. But everything has its movement, has its life. And the magicians [shamans/healers] were precisely those individuals who were most susceptible to the solicitations of these other-than-human shapes. It was the magicians who could most easily enter into some kind of rapport with another being, like an oak tree, or with a frog.

~ An excerpt from ‘The Ecology of Magic’, a Scott London Interview with David Abram, anthropologist, philosopher, magician and author of The Spell of the Sensuous.

Merced River, Yosemite – photo from bigstockphoto.com