Remembering Our Animist Roots: The World is Alive
Dartmoor stone circle, UK
Last week I shared some thoughts about our collective spiritual crisis. I shared that part of the work to healing this crisis is to heal the wounds of separation and disconnection within ourselves that keep us feeling unloveable, unworthy, and lost.
When we trust in ourselves and our innate goodness, we create our lives, and thus the world, from a place of love, hope, and generosity. We become a generative force in the world.
Today, I’m going to share the second part of this. We’re going to explore how when we remember that the world is alive, we remember our place, which nourishes, fills, and soothes the hollowness that has become so common in our disconnected culture.
Remembering that the world is alive.
As I said last week, we have separated ourselves from our true spiritual nature, and from the experience of belonging to the wider web of life, on both the Earthly and Cosmic planes.
We have painted over the conscious world with the story of materialism.
Living on a land that is dead, or devoid of a spiritual nature we are empty.
We live out our pain of separation in the form of greed, destruction, hatred, endless consumption, all to try to fill a deep spiritual hole within us.
So part of the healing is to re-animate the sterile world that Patriarchy and Capitalism has created, and re-enliven our spiritual relationship with the land.
"For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate." - Joshua Schrei
In our ancestral animistic spirituality, our ancestors knew deeply that the world is alive. They knew that we have relationship with the wind, a sunset, the stones, plants and trees, and the entire ecosystem.
When we turn back towards this ancient and embodied wisdom, we find a sense of belonging that has eluded our modern experience.The more we come into relationship with our bodies and our felt sense, the more we recognize the somatic wisdom that we’re always in communication with the living world.
We never stopped. We just forgot how to listen.
Animism says that everything in the world is made up of living consciousness, or a unique pulsating field of energy. It says that each being on Earth is having their own experience of life, including the wind, a boulder, an ant, a flower. It helps us understand that we’re not the only ones experiencing life, and that the life of all that’s around us isn’t here just FOR us, that they’re all on their own journey.
Animism is the guiding belief in much of my work and directly counters materialism, the overarching mode of perception of the “over-culture," which says: all the materials on Earth are for our use; their purpose is to be bought and sold for our profit; humans are the ones with ultimate say of what’s best for the land, trees, animals, and ecosystems; the land, trees, stones, and animals are a “resource” for human consumption; when we talk about our body we’re only referring to our physical nature; if something doesn’t have a quantifiable use for us, it is disposable.
Animism flips this story on its head, calling into question every single aspect of how we live our lives.
The more we practice thanking the water we drink, knowing that the water is a sentient being, the more we engage with the mystery of life.
The more we practice listening to different organs in our body we can gain incredible insight.
The more we ask the land, the stones, the trees permission when we want to adjust something in our yard, the more we find belonging in a co-created experience of life.
So let's remember that the land, the plants, the entire more-than-human world, is not only wise, but that we have a lot to learn from them.
Let's remember that our voice is but one hum within the great harmonic song of life. Humanity just one strand in the fabric of all-that-is.
When we work with the consciousness of Earth and Cosmos to help heal the wounds of separation I talked about last week, we extend the healing beyond ourselves to cultivate a wider communion with the Belonging that lives in the world around us.
The Belonging that is available to us when we approach the world with humility.
Because we are not separate from the world, we impact all of life by alchemizing, healing, and wholing our little sliver of experience.
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