there's more to life than books, you know

Sex is energy. What gives the physical exchange its excitement, its intensity, is the movement of vital energy, an energy not limited to human beings, but present in earth, air, water, fire, in plants and animals, in all living things. Understanding that the erotic is energy open up the potential for an erotic relationship with the earth. We can love nature, not just aesthetically, but carnally, with our meat, our bones. That sort of love threatens all the proprieties of estranged culture. Love that mirrors the wildness of nature can move us into the struggle to protect her, and can give us the deep strength we need. That love is connection. When we feel it deeply, perhaps with an oak, when we feel the tree's aura move into our bodies, feel our energy flow through the ground into its roots, let ourselves merge and feel at one with its tree-ness, we are sustained in the fight to keep the ax from its trunk, the radiation from its leaves.
(-----starhawk, dreaming the dark)

There is also this implicit arrogance, this idea that because our culture and connected over-cultures act in alienation from and instrumentation of (other) forms of life that this is somehow The Human Way of Being In The World, our particular evolutionary function. There's this idea that maybe there's no implicit violence or dulled ignorance at work because it is, after all, the way of this Earth for species to emerge teeming and eventually disappear. There's this complete ahistoricity that refuses to analyze 'our' ways of life as a specific approach to the land, to production, to other humans and other animals-- one dominant form among many other approaches, many other ways of being in the world which present, in fact, whole other possible worlds.

There is violence in our estrangement from the world. Why do I write world, what do I mean? There is violence in our estrangment from the land, the sky, the waters. There is violence in our estrangement from the sacred (I'm thinking here of darkhaligh's recent writing on how the dominance of monotheism has severed us from intimate knowledge of magic, of the divine, of multiplicitous powers). Violence stems from the confluence of these two things, the splitting of intimacy and kinship and power from the world itself, draining the earth into some kind of background.