From Daily Log

Note created 5/24/17
I got an email that the Soul Spelunker blog has a new posting.
http://soulspelunker.com/2017/02/the-revelatory-power-of-the-world-soul.html#comment-26438

It starts out by quoting from an essay by James Hillman called “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World”.

It’s in print as one of 2 essays in book —. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Putnam: Spring, 1992.

I bought the Kindle edition.

Reading Hillman on Anima Mundi 5/25/17, I copied a passage, (emphasis added).
“Psychological dictionaries and schools of all orientations agree that reality is of two kinds. First, the word means the totality of existing material objects or the sum of conditions of the external world. Reality is public, objective, social, and usually physical. Second, there is a psychic reality, not extended in space, the realm of private experience that is interior, wishful, imaginational. Having divided psychic reality from hard or external reality, psychology elaborates various theories to connect the two orders together, since the division is worrisome indeed. It means that psychic reality is conceived to be neither public, objective, nor physical, while external reality, the sum of existing material objects and conditions, is conceived to be utterly devoid of soul. As the soul is without world, so the world is without soul.”
From “The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World”
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My paraphrase: Cartesian split leaves the world without a soul
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Then that night reading Tim Burkett’s “Nothing Holy about It”

“what about the language of the trees outside our windows or the language of grass? Across from the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center is beautiful Lake Calhoun. It constantly changes color, speaking in its own voice, as Dogen would say. We practice silence so we can experience language at the deeper, subtler level of nonconceptual language. Dogen calls this “wholehearted expression,” which is a key component of continuous practice.”

From “Nothing Holy about It: The Zen of Being Just Who You Are” by Tim Burkett, page 189
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My paraphrase: the natural world speaks. We meditate so we can hear that subtle nonconceptual language
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Abram’s related message:
From the short  bit on Abram in Cheetham.

“Like Bringhurst, David Abram understands human language as an extension of the biological world from which we evolved. He argues persuasively that the break with the world, the great disjunction that gave rise to the intensive self is in fact caused by a certain kind of reading, by the cognitive disruptions set in motion by the transition between orality and literacy. [21] His claim is that learning to read a text is such a powerful imaginative experience that it transfers the animation that normally and naturally inheres in our perception of the world around us to the images and feelings that the written text conjures in our mind. Literacy causes a profound rupture in our experience of the world. As the written word gains in its magic power to animate our minds and lives, this animation is drained from the world itself. The languages that the world speaks become foreign to us, and we come only to know our language. We become trapped in the exclusively human world, and at worst, inside our own heads. In the end we come to live in a world of images, ideas and abstractions rather than flesh and blood and earth and sea and sky. Abram draws on the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to show how our abstractions, our concepts, are all ultimately based in physical, sensuous reality. Our embodied lives are the matrix that grounds all of our ideas, all our thinking.”

from “Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman” by Tom Cheetham