There is a magical phenomenon of earthly experience you can discover anytime and anywhere, which grows out of the natural and intimate pairing of your perception with your immediate surroundings.
The scientific term for this phenomenon is ‘motion parallax.’ Yet there is a danger in relying upon purely technical accounts of this experience - you might fail to feel it.
Instead, if you leave aside disembodied descriptions about how your eyes “trick” you and enter more deeply into your phenomenological experience, what begins to open is the possibility of more deeply inhabiting your animal nature.
It’s a kind of moving meditation that you can access anytime you are walking - or even when you are driving. But perhaps the most ideal starting point, as I have done in the video posted here, is walking in a more natural and peaceful setting.
As a companion to the video, I’m also sharing below two excerpts from David Abram’s book, Becoming Animal, where I first learned the term ‘motion parallax.’
The excerpts come from a chapter titled Depth where Abram describes various experiences walking through wild landscapes, feeling the aliveness of the land dancing in front of his eyes.
In the second excerpt he describes a moment of losing touch with the animate character of the world as his perception contracts as a result of his thinking.
This is an experiment worth repeating again and again as you move through life, so you can develop a keener awareness of your susceptibility to being pulled out of the vastness of the world and the aliveness of your animal body into the dark and confined space of your thinking mind.
And you can reverse that pattern.
From David Abram:
Depth is the dimension of closeness and distance. It is the way the world spreads out from a few aspen leaves in front of your face, to the rocky ridge across the glen, and beyond that to the further hills piled one upon the other against the last mountain range silhouetted zigzag across the sky, and on past, opening out across the unseen desert to a horizon still faintly visible between a few peaks in that range. Depth is the visceral stretch between the near and far of things - the continuum, or glide, between the known and the unknown. It is the manner in which the distances beyond the horizon - realms that you can dream but cannot see - somehow open onto those vague and far-off shapes that you can see but cannot possibly touch, the way the perceptual world bounded by those edges swerves toward you out of that purely visible distance, growing more and more palpable until, yes, you can also reach it with your fingers, feeling the smooth texture of the branch with your hands as well as your eyes, a dimension that keeps on coming right up to your face and includes it.
Depth implicates the whole of our animal body (this carnal density of muscles and skin and breath), situating us physically within the animate landscape…
Listen:
But wait! What am I saying?! None of these trees is actually moving! I alone, among all these upright bodies, am actually locomoting along the ground. All their apparent movements, fast and slow, are merely a consequence of my own physical motion, the illusory effect of my own activity in the midst of what is, in fact, a fairly quiescent and passive topography. “Motion parallax” is the technical term for this dynamism that my own movement seems to induce in the landscape, this apparent roaming of things in relation to myself as I wander.
As soon as I reflect upon this, the land’s activity seems to subside. A certain vitality I had sensed in the forest has now dissolved. The dynamism has withdrawn from the surroundings and has concentrated itself within my skull, where all these thoughts are now churning…
Listen:
Embodied musicality #3