a holiness that dwells and dreams

... Informed by the logic of our creaturely senses, the story gestures toward a great secret: that there’s a blazing luminosity that resides at the heart of the earth. The tale suggests that the salutary goodness of light makes its primary home within the density and darkness of matter. That the transcendent, life-giving radiance that daily reaches down to us from the celestial heights also reaches up to us from far below the ground. That there’s a Holiness that dwells and dreams at the very center of the earth. ~ David Abram, Becoming Animal-An Earthly Cosmology

Nonetheless, the older, more primordial style of prayer sustains a very different stance toward the local terrain than that which resolutely directs itself toward a divinity beyond the world. While the latter feels the sensuous landscape as a finite and restricted realm relative to its transcendent source, the first experiences the sensible world as the source of itself--as a kind of ongoing transcendence wherein each sensible thing is steadily bodying forth its own active creativity and sentience. ~ David Abram, Becoming Animal-An Earthly Cosmology