What we prize and what we have built in Western civilization: edifices and expanses of stone, steel, concrete, intricate and globe-spanning machines (this here internet).  Our high arts - painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, video - all involve the manipulation of non-living materials to mimic or evoke life.  The mental arts that we value -  mathematics, logic, logos, the Word of God, books, poems - all depend upon a distancing of the mind, a translation of the world into symbols.  All of our paths lead us away from actual living life and into a place of clean, pure abstractions.

It is no little thing to turn that ship around.  I'm going to stop hating on Descartes and blame it on Plato instead, for a while.

Green grass and flitting birds, forests and wild pigs, gardens and pastures, fleas and earthworms  - those do not turn up in The Republic.  Why?  Big-time epistemological error, Plato. Socrates' verbal bullying skills are not really all that interesting.

Why do we have to  fall down in awe in front of Michelangelo and Da Vinci? Or Prada, for that matter.   The mountain that it is my privilege to see every day is a thousand times more beautiful and fascinating than even a Velasquez.   My horse has things to impart that are more profound than King Lear.  Seriously, but it's not in words.  A horse speaks in movements and in relationships that exist in the present.  As in Right Now.  A Right Now that is so big and so fast that I am barely able to comprehend it, but if I am really, really alert I catch a little bit.  A little bit about the relationship between the faint breeze and the distant mountain, maybe, before it changes and is gone and we are in another Right Now where I'm struggling to keep up with what is going on.