"I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive;
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I'm a part of it. Even my breathing
enters into an elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
winter, summer, storm, still –- this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance."

- William Stafford, "Time for Serenity, Anyone?"
from the book *Even in Quiet Places*


Barbara Ehrenreich just wrote a book about ecstatic dance called, Dancing In the Streets, A History of Collective Joy, where she calls for people to:
“reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and dance . . . There is no 'point' to it -- no religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made -- just the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."

David Abram reminds us in The Spell of the Sensuous: “The senses are what is most wild in us — capacities that we share, in some manner, not only with other primates but with most other entities in the living landscape, from earthworms to eagles.”