Only by being deeply here, in and of this place, am I palpably connected to every other place. However much I may be concerned by events unfurling on the far side of the globe, and however insistently those happenings shove themselves through my various screens and headsets, my primary responsibility must be to the realm that I ceaselessly inhabit with the whole of my creaturely flesh, and to the palpable relationships that I sustain in this realm.
Only by giving primary value to the full-bodied world of our face-to-face-and face-to-place-encounters, do we have a chance of maneuvering wisely, and well, among the many other worlds that now claim our attention. Only by really opening and offering ourselves to the local earth - unplugging ourselves from the digital thrall and stepping out to wander and bask in the scents drifting up from the night river, allowing the intersecting tones of this land (of its denizens and its solitudes) to recalibrate our organism - only thus do we begin to come to our senses and start to reckon the worthy use, and the misuse, of all our technologies. For we are human only in contact, and in conviviality, with what is not human.
~ David Abram
From his book The Spell of the Sensuous