Customer Reviews

Sight and Sensibility : The Ecopsychology of Perception

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...I've just started to read this book and am enthralled. Essentially, the author writes about the deep wound that we in Western culture have created with our objectification of life, rather than our full participation in it. We need to re-engage with our miraculous senses, and with Creation -- it is only through this awakening to our relatedness with our intrinsic, wild & innocent nature that we will love this world enough to cease our destruction of it...and of ourselves.

I'd put it up there with Thom Hartmann's "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" and Daniel Quinn's books. The writing is fluid, elegant, sensual, and full of love for the countless miracles of life that are evident in every form and season.

I'm reminded, too, of Rainer Maria Rilke's Eighth Elegy, as translated by Stephen Mitchell: "With all its eyes the natual world looks out / into the Open. Only *our* eyes are turned / backward, and surround plant, animal, child / like traps..."

This book invites us to dissolve the cages that we've constructed around our souls.

Of the many books I have read this long summer, only this one would I call truly beautiful. It is not just a read but an encounter with a deeply inspiring being who seems to become an actual presence herself--someone to guide us back toward awakening to the wondrous, sensuous world around us. Far beyond the information purveyed or even the stories told, Laura Sewall herself emerges from her luminous prose as though to point with a gentle smile to the doorway which will lead us from our self-made enclosures, from the prison of our own device. This prison seems to consist of our habit-routines which bind our perceptions. Her special field of expertise is sight. She shows how we have lost our "depth-perception" by seeing everything in terms of our own culturally constructed self and its illusory security. We have learned to see only objects in terms of their potential use or threat to us. We do not see into them or their unified relations or our relationship with them (and through them): "The canon that our Western worldview posits is that the healthy, well-adjusted adult is autonomous and independent, not interdependent" (247). Instead of seeing the living world and knowing we are part of it, we see a dead world reduced to "resources". But her tale is much more than a position or an argument. She shows the reader both through her own experience (including a powerfully transcendent moment of awakening on the East African veldt) and, more subtly, through her expressive prose and prose-poetry. Reading this book is itself an experience which approaches such transcendent moments. For Laura Sewall, "perception is the dynamic ground of our many relationships with the world" (17) which "may become the ground for a sensuous, even ecstatic relationship with the world" (18). And this is the kind of many faceted text which can remind us of that. Nearing the end, as the author called for the courage of new consciousness, I feared for a time that we were going to leave terra firma and go soaring into the airy-fairy realms of New Age spiritualism. But I was wrong, and relieved to be so. This fine author stayed firmly on our dusty planet: "My prayer is that we *get down*, that we get down and dirty" (274). When I was finished, I closed the book and whooped for sheer joy.

Ken Cohen in TAOISM, relates the body's meridians to Earth's energy fields through Feng Shui. In SIGHT AND SENSIBILTY, Laura Sewall relates Human Potential to Ecology through the neurophysiology of vision. She incorporates ideas not only from Eastern and Western philosophies, but also Native cultures in expressing her vision.

Justifiably critical of modern civilization, her message remains guardedly positive. For instance, early in her study of Vision, she recognized that visual processing in adults was more malleable than recognized by establisfed science. She also postulates that by employing the senses fully, we can learn to love the Earth. In other words,to improve things for the next generation is in Pema Chodron's: START WHERE YOU ARE.

Laura Sewall stresses, as the teacher who inspired me many years ago did, "bridging gaps", integrative methods, and sharing. The ideas in this book like D'Arcy Thompson's: ON GROWTH AND FORM will inspire people for many years. Her book is also a good example of what is meant in Buddhassa Bhikkhu's: MINDFULNESS WITH BREATHING: "We can use any bodily activity as a basis for (mindfulness). The more necessary and central to life that activity is, the better."

Not only has this book connected to ideas that interest me, it has provided many interesing new ideas to explore. One measure of how well she writes is, how easy it is to check the page notes and bibliograpy during the course of reading.

I believe anyone who reads this book will have a comparable experience, although in perphaps quite different areas of endeavor.

This book by Laura Sewall remains the single best one-dip immersion into the field and thought of ecopsychology. Over the years I have returned to it time and time again, quoting it in many of my own writings and teachings, and continuing to marvel at its artistic mixing of deep theory with light personal stories. Overall, much more readable than Abrams' text by a long shot. For all these reasons, I was very happy that my publisher Green Frigate Books was able to successfuly ask Ms. Sewall to write one of the front-piece blurbs to my recently published book "Profitably Soaked: Thoreau's Engagment with Water" as well as, especially, the Foreword to my recently published "Deep Immersion; THe Experience of Water."

Without an understanding of the human experience in the world, our perception is blurred, quite literally it often seems. Sewell explains how our visual and spiritual sight is dulled by modernities and uses this thesis to place human relations to all things. I found her view to be thorough but her exploration limited. What about the other senses? Further, Sewell's mandate for how we treat our environment is appropriate, and she often refers to tribal people, but not once does she refer to the tribal experience. In fact, her lessons are often about the individual experience in nature, as a way to achieve a visionary experience, and I wonder how it is tribal people related to nature: as individuals or as a tribe? Yes, we are fragmented with our surroundings, but with each other as well.

This book by Laura Sewall remains the single best one-dip immersion into the field and thought of ecopsychology. Over the years I have returned to it time and time again, quoting it in many of my own writings and teachings, and continuing to marvel at its artistic mixing of deep theory with light personal stories. Overall, much more readable than Abrams' text by a long shot. For all these reasons, I was very happy that my publisher Green Frigate Books was able to successfuly ask Ms. Sewall to write one of the front-end blurbs to my recently published book "Profitably Soaked: Thoreau's Engagment with Water" as well as, especially, the Foreword to my recently published "Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water."