Embodied Experience

Reflect on the following prior to our departure:
From Landscapes of the Sacred
Lane, in writing of “giving voice to place,” outlines the phenomenological perspective, noting the interaction between landscape and those who perceive it. He writes, “Our embodied presence demands that we cannot know the world without also being actively engaged in it” (53). We are first and foremost embodied beings. We interact with the landscape as bodies encountering an environment that is also embodied. We are not Cartesian minds separated from extended bodies, able to know the world independent of an embodied experience. This affects our knowing so that objective distance is an imaginative exercise, but can never give us a complete understanding. Lane continues, “To relate most fully to any given terrain, according to David Abram, is to respect its role as ‘sentient subject’ as well as our own role as ‘sensible object’” (53). Here the empirical object has been identified as a “sentient subject,” a being who is aware of its own being. How can this be? This is not was so much of our schooling has taught us to believe. It will be helpful to have read some of Martin Buber here. He notes two basic relations, I and It as well as I and You. The first relation is between the sentient subject I, and the object it. The second is between the sentient subject I and the sentient subject You. I recognize You as being aware of yourself as I am aware of myself. I also recognize myself as a sensible object for you. Lane is pointing to an experience of the particularities of landscape where it is transformed into a You and I am its sensible object. How has this happened in your own experience of some significant place? Lane continues, “One’s actual embodied experience in encountering a place perceived as sacred is crucial, then, to the sense of magic or awe that one finally attributes to it. The place is ‘known’ only to the extent that we participate in the various affordances it offers, responding to the striking geographical features it projects, adjusting to its changing visual, auditory, olfactory, and kinesthetic qualities” (53).