Praise What is Truly Alive

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of love nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher lovemaking
Sweeps you forward.

Distance does not make you falter
Now, arriving in magic, flying
And finally insane for the light,
You are the butterfly, and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced this:
To die, and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

Organic Resonance: The Language of the Magical Landscape

 David W. Kidner's Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

The metaphor of resonance is a fundamentally integrative notion, since resonances occur between things, expressing relation rather than independence, interaction rather than autonomy, and dynamism rather than stagnation, as in Michael Taussig’s (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 167-168) depiction of Aymara culture:

The enchantment of nature and the alliance of its spirits with mankind form an organic resonance of orchestrated social representation. The organization of kith and kin, political organization, use of ecosphere, healing, the rhythm of production and reproduction—all echo each other within one living structure that is the language of the magical landscape. (305)

Practical Magic: Medicine with a Capital "M"

Andrew Weil's "On Integrative Medicine and the Nature of Reality"
excerpt from Voices of Integrative Medicine: Conversations and Encounters ed. Bonnie Horrigan

When Dr. Andrew Weil was investigating Native American Shamanism in the 1970’s, he found their word for medicine had a much larger meaning than our word for medicine:

When they talked about medicine men, medicine women, medicine place, medicine people, it was a much bigger concept that embraced magic and religion, as well as what we mean by medicine.  I call it Medicine with a capital “M,” and I think that our culture desperately needs it. (252)

Dr. Weil's opinion is that our medicine and culture have disowned magic, which is regarded as antiscientific and antirational. Magic, for Weil,  is about “the relationship between internal and external reality and how [anyone] can change or modify external reality with internal operations [...] Being able to instill or awaken in patients a sense that they can get better is an example of "practical magic": change on the level of consciousness that can translate into physiological reality (252)