"I am trying to investigate the communicational regularities in the biosphere, assuming that in doing so, I shall also be investigating interwoven regularities in a system so pervasive and determinant that we may even apply the word "god" to it.  The regularities we discover - including regularities and necessities of communication and logic - form a unity in which we make our home."  Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred.

I keep coming back to Bateson's work.  The shift in perspective, in the underlying habits of thought of perception, that his work articulates is, well, I don't have a word for it, but it's a big deal for me; this idea that one is inside of an environment which is thinking by means of on-going interactions/communications - between rain, grass, grazing animals, for instance, and, again, this is not something you learn about so much as something you inhabit.
It's a humbling shift in perspective because we humans raised in Western industrial nations really like to think of ourselves as gods, as divine beings somehow above all of the stuff that goes on in the non-human world.  We've been told all of our lives that we are so important that we're not supposed to die and flow back into the cycle of content.  We have technology and therefore we are above all of those nasty and demeaning biological cycles.  We're always talking, talking, talking, to shut the world out - praising or fighting or ordering or planning or persuading...just like I am now.