Opening to porosity means opening to the possibility that the earth is animate and communicative (Abram, 1996, 2006; Smith, 2004; Buhner, 2004). It also acknowledges that words are not the only kind of human language, and human languages "are only a small subset of language as a whole" (Bringhurst, 2002, p. 13). To learn these multiple languages and hear the many voices of animate Earth requires vast listening spaces – spaces to disengage the thinking mind and dwell, for moments at least, "in the wordless and thoughtless space of sensuous awareness" (Bai, 2001, p. 92).

Although I recognize the irony of using technology to encourage communication with animate Earth since technology is often claimed to distance one from connection with place (Payne, 2003), the form of this dissertation is like the many other intentional contradictions contained herein. It is designed to provide both listening spaces and multiple invitations for readers to open to a re-animated perception.

If that knowing happens to lead you to turn off the computer and go outdoors, scratch your head in wonder, or hang out with your favourite plant or companion species (Haraway, 2003), then do it! It is in those spaces-in-between texts, those intentional contradictions, and often in that movement away from the desk, that communication might occur.

"The planet shivers ever more rapidly into a fever, while increasing numbers of our fellow species – each of them an utterly unique style of sensitivity and earthly sentience – tumble helter-skelter into the oblivion of extinction. It will not likely be long before our own clever species follows them.

 

Unless, that is, we wake ourselves from the long delusion of our detachment from bodily earth, to find ourselves included, once again, in the breathing body of this world. Unless we begin to engage the land around us as attentive participants within its vast life, letting our actions draw guidance from the other participants – the other beings– whose sentience is so richly entangled with ours. Unless we emerge from our technological cocoon, shaking our senses free from their stunned immobility, stretching open our eyes to receive the sun's glint off the wings of a peregrine soaring above the city buildings, opening our ears past the ceaseless churning of words toward the voices of silence...." (Abram, 2006, p. 13).