Applied Animism : Rooting Culture, Earth and Spirit
An invitation to embrace an animist viewpoint as an ethical compass to safeguard biodiversity and inspire the co-creation of beauty and abundance for future generations
When I open the centers of perception in my being that see beyond the limits of the 5 senses and ask what can serve as a compass guiding us to honor all that is divine, good and true, the ancestors and spirits of the land whisper to me of ancient agreements between two leggeds and winged ones, medicine men conferring with a buffalo, grandmothers seeking council from the river stones, humans making promises to the sacred waters, children speaking to trees like older brothers and a type of humility that serves as a Rosetta Stone opening up two way gift exchanges of between humanity and our elder kin.
Since I was young I always felt moved to reach out and commune with the trees, ancient stones and living waters. I would reach out physically with my hand and also intuitively with my eternal essence, my mind’s eye, my heart, to touch and know with the hand of my spirit.
Despite what the priests of the cult of modernity’s materialistic, reductionistic, domineering and anthropocentric atheistic mythology (and their disciples) told me (when I was young and seeking elder council within an orphaned culture) about how only humans possessed sentience and there is no such thing as a tree spirit.. I continued to reach out to beings I perceived as kin. I continue to reach out to commune with them to this day.
me, communing with an elder sugar maple, thanking her for the gifts she provides, our community, southern Ontario, 2025
As I write a book about regenerative agroforestry (aka food forest design) I study the models of peoples before this time that succeeded in gifting the fruits of their labors to future generations. When I look to study what allowed them to succeed and look at their methods, I find structural similarities (aligning with inherent elemental abundance and using pattern recognition to enhance communities of already resilient beings that provide food and medicine for humans) with some technical variation on methodology, however, the one through-line that is unavoidably coherent amongst all these cultures, is their animistic worldview.
When you are raised to speak of the oak tree as your brother and the river as your sister this instills in you a knowing that is lacking in the majority of those living in “civilized” modern culture today. Therefore, I would be remiss if I attempted to write a book intended to serve as a trail map, to become an ancestor worth descending from and create multi-generational food production systems if I did not shine a light on this cornerstone and guiding compass of the ancient cultures that have created successful food forests in the past.
Animism is an ancient worldview at the root of spirituality and religion that views humans as part of an interconnected web of life that unites the visible material world and the invisible spirit world.
The word Animism derives from the Latin root Anima, which means breath, spirit and life.
Anima is similar to Prana in the Vedic tradition, Chi in the Taoist tradition and the universal spiritual force referred to as the Great Spirit and many other names in Indigenous traditions.
Celtic Druids call this spiritual life-force Nwyfre, the Algonquians call it Manitou and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) call it Orenda.
Greek philosopher Plato called this universal spiritual force the Anima Mundiin his philosophical treatise Timaeus on the origins and workings of the Universe:
“This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence, a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.”
There is a reason I began my first published works by evoking the following prayer in the acknowledgments section of my first book:
This book is dedicated to future generations (human and non-human alike) that have yet to arrive on this Beautiful Earth for whom I want to give a proverbial hug through my thoughts, words, actions in the here and now. This book is also dedicated to our elder species in the kingdoms of the wise and ancient photosynthetic beings, the fungal beings, the bacterium, the insects, the winged ones, four legged ones, and the finned, scaled and feathered ones from which we humans have so much to learn. This book is also dedicated to the elemental beings that whisper to us from the summer breeze that makes the white pine needles speak, the fire that helps her cones to germinate, the life giving rains that extinguish the regenerative fires and become the babbling brooks, meandering rivers, ocean waves and the ice that shapes stone. This book is dedicated to our elemental elders that watch over us from the heart of the mountain peak, selflessly giving way to allow her bones to become the soil.
It was not just to share some whimsical poetry, I shared that prayer as an evocation of the animist worldviews of our ancestors to set the tone and express the message that what follows is more than just recipes for food, it offers recipes for reciprocity with our more than human kin.
Due to printing budget constraints I could not fully elaborate on my views on the practical importance and regenerative implications of Applied Animism, I will remedy that in this next book. I will also offer you some of my own perspectives in this post about what I mean when I use the term applied animism, why it is important, practical and vital to co-create a future worth living in and gifting to future generations.
In the following in depth exploration of Animism I will be sharing quotes and excerpts from a diverse array of authors to provide you with a spectrum of different perspectives on how ancient and contemporary cultures perceive and connect with the animate world around us. I do not present these stories, visions, perspectives and regionally distinct expressions of the animistic worldview as dogmas to be followed, replicated or adhered to, but rather as a candle, a mirror and signposts to use as we trail blaze our own unique path forward culturally, creating our own traditions and expressions of this knowing in a way that makes sense (ethically, regionally and ecologically) in our unique circumstances.
I crossed paths with this being in the Carolinian woods of southern Ontario when I trusted an intuitive instinct to turn off the beaten path and follow a stream bed for a few hundred feet into the unknown.
Trail maps are helpful for navigating a broader landscape that others have traversed before ( for avoiding potential pitfalls and strategizing to explore distinct viewpoints and perspectives) but sometimes taking a step off the beaten path to follow our own intuition and explore into what Martin Pretchel describes as the “wilderness of an unassailable inner dimension” aka “the indigenous soul” results in discovering the most beautiful and nourishing truths (that we could never have accessed if we just stuck to exactly the same path others have walked). The following quotes and perspectives are offered in that spirit of providing sign posts within a broader wilderness of truth that is often best explored in one’s own unique way.
For instance, in a similar instance to what I describe in the caption in the picture above, I went hiking off the beaten path in a small patch of Carolinian old growth forest here in southern Ontario earlier this year and was guided by the forest spirits to cross paths with this beautiful elder beech tree.
This patient rooted being was providing a home for multiple birds to nest inside cavities where she had sacrificed her lower branches to redirect her energy upward for gathering starlight. Check out the multiple entry points into the healed over missing branch cavities part way up the tree. I saw little birds zooming in and out of those! Such a blessing to witness.
I brought American Ginseng, Pawpaw and hickory seeds as an offering and planted the ginseng at the base of her trunk and the others further out around her in the forest.
I collected her seeds and will plant them out further than she could reach with her branches and the wind alone to help her next generation set down roots.
beech seed husks and seeds
I always feel blessed to meet elder American beech trees with no trivial ego based carvings in their bark from disrespectful humans (which is rare here with roads and trails cross crossing 99.9999% of the landscape here )… seeing these graceful beings achieve their true potential in the old woods and provide a home for other beings provides a much needed medicine for my heart.
elder beech tree, southern Ontario, 2025
For those unfamiliar with this term Animism, lets go over a basic definition.
Animist druid, author and permaculture practitioner Dana O’Driscoll defines Animism with the following description":
“Animism is a belief in the spirit of all things. Animistic views recognize that rivers, stones, trees, animals, human-created objects, and people all have spirits and that those spirits can be worked with, learned from, and honored in various ways. Historical evidence suggests that pre-holocene, it is likely that most peoples of the world held animistic philosophies; animism continues to be important to many indigenous people’s beliefs Animism is also an incredibly important movement in nature-based spiritual traditions like druidry and adjacent traditions. While specific forms of animism will vary based on the culture, there are some threads that seem to transcend across different animistic views.
Here are some common threads that define animism:
-Recognizing and honoring the spirits present in things present in the world and universe, both animate and inanimate, both natural and created
-Recognizing the importance of interacting in a respectful way with those spirits; building the right relationships and connections with them, and learning from them as teachers and guides
-Recognizing that humans are part of nature, like any other animal, and that we have a set of tools we have evolved, including both our five senses as well as instinct and intuition
-Recognizing that we have to cultivate our own intuition, observation, and listening skills (inner and outer) so that we might effectively communicate with the spirit present in all things.
-Recognizing that our actions have a significant impact on others and that we can engage in right actions to behave in ways that honor the sovereignty of all being” (source)
While oral storytelling cultures usually share an animistic mythology and cosmology that revered this universal spiritual force found in all living beings, modern literate cultures tend to be much more identified with what the ancient Greeks called logos (reason, logic, abstraction) and often struggle to comprehend the value of mythos (intuition, feeling, mythology).
We know from ethnographic and historical research that many human cultures have held biocentric and animist views and also lived in balance with their ecosystems. For example in books like The Dark Emu andThe Largest Estate On Earth the authors explore how Australian indigenous peoples created advanced riparian zone and tidal zone enhancing farming systems that involved reverence and recognition of the spirit of eels and other beings they farmed and hunted, in Tending the Wild the author explores the oak forest tending people of California that see trees as elders, teachers and providersand in dissertations such as Lyla June’s Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History she explores how many peoples of pre-colonial Turtle Island shaped entire ecosystems regeneratively with an animistic ethos, in Ropes to God: Experiencing the BushmanSpiritual Universe, Bradford Keeney describes the African Bushman tribe’s innate connections with their surroundings. Keeney has a number of works on the Kalahari Bushman peoples, and they all are fascinating accounts of people who clearly recognize the equality of themselves and all life and who work to build spiritual connections to that larger world. We can see many more examples of these in the Graeber and Wengrow book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (where they explore the concept of human freedom, among others). In fact, the idea of an animistic and biocentric society is so threatening to those carrying anthropocentric views that indigenous cultures carrying such views are often the tragic subject of mass genocide and intentional cultural erasure (and inserting implanted anthropocentric sociopolitical worldviews in the place of animism). This is what the government of Canada and churches did in the residential schools here.
“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”
- John Alexander Macdonald, 1879 (first Prime Minister of Canada, speaking about the residential schools and what they aimed to use them for).
While sadly, that mission was a success when it comes to people like the corrupt Pacheedaht councilor/chief Arliss Daniels and her fellow profiteers, there are many with indigenous blood to this land that choose to continue to live indigenously, honoring the animistic worldviews of their ancestors and choosing integrity over cowardice and greed.
The legacy of the polar opposite of that ancient animistic indigenous worldview (which was imported here to Turtle Island by anthropocentric statist regimes and imported to Albion by other statist regimes in earlier centuries) involved/involves the systematic multi-generational brainwashing of the population to no longer regard the living waters as a relative, a being and kin deserving of reverence, but instead to view her as nothing more than a “resource” to be owned, extracted, commodified, bottled and sold.
The concept of Turtle Island transcends mere geography; it embodies a worldview that emphasizes balance, respect, and unity. The Haudenosaunee creation story tells of Sky Woman falling from the sky world, landing on a giant turtle’s back, and creating the Earth with soil brought up by animals from the water below. This narrative symbolizes a deep reverence for the Earth, which is seen as a living entity deserving of care and respect. This perspective influences Indigenous foodways, where sustainable practices and seasonal cycles are integral to the cultivation, harvest, and preparation of food.
Where I live on Turtle Island I am honored to steward living waters and tall rooted kin that were once tended by the people of the Haudenosaunee confederacy. Their tradition of giving thanks to the water spirits and many other spirits of this land for the sustenance and teachings these beings provide is now a part of my daily routine and it offers a sort of fulfillment and connection that was missing in my life until I began giving thanks in my own way.
In their traditional Thanksgiving Address they offer Greetings and Thanks to All Life That Sustains Us. Akwesasne children recite the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, also called the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, to express gratitude for non-human kin that sustain us all.
Here is a sample of the larger blessing and prayer.
We will give thanks for all he has created and prepared for us here on the earth and in the sky. This is called the matter before all else. So let it be in our minds.
We bring our minds together as one and give thanks to the people on the Earth, that they are still tending to their responsibilities so that peace can be possible on earth. So let it be in our minds.
We bring our minds together as one and give thanks to the earth, that in her kindness she still continues to provide us with her strength, for this is what we need to continue to live peacefully upon her body. So let it be in our minds.
We give thanks to all the Waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms —water-falls, and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of Water. Now our minds are one.
~ OHÉN:TON KARIHWATÉHKWEN -WORDS BEFORE ALL ELSE ~ (Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address)
Today, it is widely accepted by psychologists that children are naturally animistic, but this way of seeing and interacting with the world is often lost in the process of Western schooling. Children innately tend to directly perceive the life, consciousness, and feelings in rocks, trees or the sun and natural forces, a concept first detailed by Jean Piaget. This “enchanted thinking” is typical in pre-government school thinking dominated stages (ages 2-7).
While people like Jean Piaget described innate animistic perceptive capacities of children in the context of being an immature state that eventually gives way to “logical reasoning” (which according to him, means thinking only humans are sentient). Being an atheist that covets the idea that sentience is unique to humans, he associated young children’s animism with their ‘primitive thought’ claiming children remain animists until they reach a more “advanced and rational” stage of development.
However others in that realm disagree. For instance, Child development psychology research published in ‘Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood’ (2023) that challenges traditional Piagetian dismissal of animism, proposing instead that children’s animistic perspectives represent ‘a matter of care’ that fosters ethical thinking and relational approaches to the world. They describe the children’s relationships with trees, rocks and toys as friends (that they perceive as persons) as creating safe practice grounds for emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and social interaction.
Intact place based (Indigenous) cultures do not only see children’s innate animistic perceptive capacities as healthy and natural, they actively foster this intrinsic way of knowing the world through elders sharing stories about tree, stone, river and earth spirits, our relationships and responsibilities to those beings and thus guide their innate knowing to become a valuable ethical compass.
The Creation story of Sky Woman Falling (depicted in the art below and described here) is one such example.
1936 oil painting by Ernest Smith is titled Sky Woman
artist: J.B. Thomas 2001
That means that it does not matter what genetics you have, your natural inclination when you arrive on Earth is to Indigenize to the place you were born (develop relationships with your fellow non-human community members involving a recognition of them as beings with spirit, agency and deserving of respect). It takes the brutal brainwashing of the Prussian education system (which is what the Canada government, US government and many other “developed” national governments use as a model for their school systems) to suppress that innate animistic characteristic in children and make them fearful of expressing that intrinsic and natural way of perceiving.
Our ancestors didn’t simply observe nature; they conversed with it.
They didn’t “use” plants; they prayed before harvest.
They didn’t ask, “What can I take?” but “How can I serve this web of life?”
That orientation changed everything.
It created cultures rooted in reciprocity, where the land was not owned but honored and where every act, like eating, building, birthing, and burying, was part of a sacred dialogue with life.
In contrast, much of modern life is built on forgetting.
We live in a time of tremendous speed, noise, and disconnection. We look down at screens instead of up at the stars. We speak of land as “real estate,” forests as “resources,” and rivers as “utilities.” We are taught to value data over wisdom, productivity over presence, and comfort over connection.
And yet, something in us remembers.
That ache you feel when you walk through an ancient forest… That peace when your hands touch the Earth… That longing that no amount of success or accumulation can ever quite fill… That’s the soul remembering.
That’s the ancient part of you that knows you are not meant to live in exile from the living world.
The struggles we feel today - anxiety, burnout, despair, ecological grief -are not personal failures. They are symptoms of a culture severed from its roots. They are the cries of a spirit starved for intimacy with the sacred. And animism, this ancient remembering, offers medicine for that.
Many centuries after the introduction of those imported anthropocentric worldviews regarding the sacred waters, many of us on Turtle Island (and elsewhere) no longer no the joy of being able to dip a cup into a stream, river or spring and drink safe living waters. Most of the living waters have been poisoned by governments and the corporations that dominate those subservient statist regimes and due to exploitative water extraction, diversion and hydroelectric misuse many of the living springs and wells that were tended by and assessable to people for millennia in these lands have run dry.
Cha bhi fios aire math an tobair gus an tràigh e.
(The value of the well is not known until it goes dry.)
-Scottish Gaelic Proverb
The statist regimes we happen to be born within are now very fond of talking about “sustainable development”, yet the kinds of “development” they have been sustaining for centuries now have resulted in the poisoning of the rivers, the ground waters, the drying up/diversion of aquifers for power corporations and the poisoning of the Great Lakes.
This trend of “sustaining” their toxic, anthropocentric and hubristic way of “developing” continues today in northern Ontario and Quebec where our government is greenlighting the destruction of over two hundred thousand hectares of pristine Boreal Forest, rivers and lakes for open pit lithium and cobalt mining (to meet their EV “sustainable” development goals). Hard rock lithium mining involves deforestation, draining lakes and rivers, blowing the land into pieces with explosives, carving deep gashes into the Earth with giant machines, using truckloads of industrial solvents like sulfuric acid (resulting in water contamination with toxic sludge) dragging that processed rubble to processing facilities with fleets of heavy machinery then processing the ore with extremely high energy furnaces using another slew of toxic chemicals (which further contaminate the water table, lakes, rivers and ocean elsewhere).
What I describe above is what results when we allow our energy to flow into systems of governance that are driven by anthropocentric worldviews and that should highlight the moral imperative of divesting in such systems and instead reviving the animistic ways of our ancient ancestors.
“Plants Are Sentient Beings
I still remember the first time I realized that plants were living, sentient beings. It was at night in a city park in Boston. I was 19 and becoming awakened to the aliveness and beauty of the world around me for the first time. I remember sitting on the grass. It was a warm night. I was staring at the stalk and seed head of a narrow-leaf plantain (at the time, I had no idea what this plant was called). It is a common weed of lawns, but on this night it was clearly alive. The way that it arched is burned in my mind. That image is with me today, full of power. I could feel that this plant felt me; it was aware of my presence. This experience is beyond description. I have known without a doubt ever since that plants are alive as much as I am.
Scientists are proving that plants are cognizant, sentient beings. Monica Gagliano has conducted incredible experiments showing that plants have a sense of hearing and memory. She is one of the leaders in the newly developing field of plant cognition. In one experiment a plant is grown in a pot shaped like an upside-down Y. The roots can grow in either direction of the Y. Without any inputs, they grow in both directions equally. However, when a tape recorder of rushing water is placed next to one side, most of the roots grow to that side. That is a tape recorder, not actual water. They are sensing the vibrations of sound and responding. I can define sensing vibrations of sound as hearing.
In another experiment plants are placed in a dark room. A fan is turned on from one direction. After the fan is turned on, a grow light is turned on from the same side as the fan. Naturally, the plants turn to face the grow light. This is done over and over until one day only the fan is turned on. The plants continue to turn in that direction with only the stimulus of the fan, no light. They have a memory of the light coming after the fan. They don’t have ears, but they can hear. They don’t have a brain, but they can remember. There is more than one way to perceive the Universe than just through the human mind.
fractal geometry in nature, embodiments of intelligence on all levels of existence
Personally, I don’t need to prove it; I already know that plants are creatures with a spirit just as I am. If you don’t know it, that’s okay. Your perspectives are your choice.
Whatever thoughts you choose are chosen by other thoughts. You have no idea where any of your thoughts come from. They rise from a dark and mysterious space. They come into your mind and say things. Maybe you believe them, maybe you don’t, but who is the one doing the believing or disbelieving? Just more thoughts. Your mind will say untrue things. How can you believe every thought? You are just guessing at which ones are true. If you listen close enough, your thoughts will contradict one another. You don’t have to believe anything.
Reality is stranger than any scientist could handle. The Universe is infinite and weird. We are deep inside a dream, far inside. As you exist, breathe deep and appreciate the wondrous world around you, all the while feeling your existence. Do not shy away from the awareness within your own body. It is a constant place for you to come back to whenever things get crazy.
You can always find the center if you let everything go for a moment and feel your actual (spiritual) center. Don’t think about it; just feel what’s deep in there.
Then look out: You can walk around knowing that there is a presence inside you. A presence that is strong and unwavering. Once you find this presence inside your body, you can always find it again, whenever you remember. It’s there; if your mind would stop talking, you could notice it.
Looking at that plantain on that night in Boston without any thoughts, names, or opinions is how I was able to really see it. We all have the ability to breathe deep and be quiet. Just be quiet and listen.
Plants are created by soil, sunlight, and water. Nobody really knows what those things are. They are ancient forces beyond the scope of thoughts in your human language. Plants eat sunlight and stretch themselves toward the stars. They are here because creation wants them here. They have their own ways of expressing life, of communicating with creation.
Listening to plants will enliven your senses. It requires patience, silence, and openness. Scientific studies have shown that plants respond to being talked to. For those of us who already talk to plants, we don’t need to see the studies. That is for the doubting mind. Doubts are choices, as all of our thoughts are. Faith in the presence of life force everywhere in everything is all I need. I can see that plants are feeling life. I know some of you can, too. Our society is ruled by the cynical mind, but you don’t have to be. You can choose to believe that creation is more than what you know. The Universe is filled with exploding stars and ancient rain forests. Our view is limited, as we peer out from two eyes at such an ancient vast mystery.
one way we can perceive what Akiva is talking about here with our eyes is through using our pattern recognition to notice sacred geometry
I believe that rocks, stars, planets, plants, water, animals, and myself are all filled with the power of creation. We are of the infinite and always will be. It is not that humans are conscious and nothing else is. There are no lines to draw, separating this from life and that from death. We see trees growing out of rotting logs filled with fungal threads, or mycelia. You don’t know how to speak to most life-forms in the Universe. It is not because they are not alive; it’s because you don’t know everyone’s language.
Plants have lived for millions of years without people. What do you think they were doing that whole time —waiting for us so they could be used? They are here and always have been because they are an expression of creation. They are composed of living cells.
It takes an extremely egocentric view to believe that all the creative intelligence of the Universe is held only in human brains. Yet that is the view of our culture. It is considered absurd to believe that stones, stars, plants, and animals have as much sentience as we do. Just because life is experienced differently in different forms does not make it any less real. We have access to five senses. How many others do we not know of? What do spiders perceive? What do stars feel as they burn in deep space? These are not questions our minds can answer because they lie outside our minds. The Universe is more vast and complex than any scientist can show in an experiment.”
The proponents of techno-optimism, transhumanism and “Bright Green environmentalism” would tell you that we can have our cake and eat it too, but they seem not to care whether or not we end up living in a planet that is a giant open pit mine and factory farm.
Human habitation of an area can actually increase biodiversity, water quality and beauty rather than diminish it.
I have found evidence of this all over the world.
Some of our animist ancestors them left behind a measurable and quantifiable legacy of increased biodiversity, soil depth, beauty and self-perpetuating food production systems that we still benefit from today (centuries to millennia later).
The pictures shared in the note above show two ancient food forests in Canada (the first over 7000 years old in northern bc and another over 150 years old on the coast), one in Morroco (over 2000 years old) and one in Ecuador (over a thousand years old). There are dozens more examples of ancient food forests all over the globe in almost every climate zone. All of them still produce food for humans, wildlife, build soil, clean water, provide spiritual nourishment and beauty today. The Yumbo people in what is now called Ecuador achieved similar increased biodiversity and permanent food forest engineering persisting for millennia, their neighbors in the Amazon jungle acheived similar amazing ecosystem scale food forest design and also created the Terra Preta soil which still benefits farmers today
For more information and broader context on this ancient food forest in BC, Canada, read this
This image shows the chakra integral, (an indigenous agroforestry practiced in the forests of Ecuador for millennia before the arrival of Christopher Columbus) Meaning “big round garden” in the pre-colonial Yumbo language, the chakra integral forms a landscape that resembles a mosaic, which is economically productive and ecologically friendly to the area’s biodiversity.
For more info on this ancient regenerative agroforestry system in Ecuador, read this:
Human beings are not innately ecologically degenerative.
Anyone that tells you we are is pushing misanthropic propaganda. While increasing our population even more may not be wise, our currently great numbers could translate into great quantities of food forests, regenerative ocean gardens and regenerative home gardens that increase beauty, biodiversity, stabilizing erratic weather, cleaning water and leaving a legacy of abundance and spiritual nourishment for future generations.
The same human hands that destroy can create wondrous things … humanity can be a balm for the living earth instead of a plague. It requires a shift in perspective and abandoning inherently anthropocentric and degenerative belief systems like statism, embracing animism and our refocusing our creative gifts locally to our watersheds and bio regions. It requires a handful of seeds and a heart full of faith and it necessitates embracing an animate worldview that promotes reciprocity based relationships with our fellow beings.
It requires changing how we view the beings that nourish us as food. It involves listening to the trees speak and the seeds whispering stories. This is not something I can do myself, it will require community scale expressions of these knowings.
In my article on designing Bio-Cultural Refugia I spoke to this by saying
Through each of us excavating the ancient Regenerative (ecologically literate, Reciprocity based, animistic and reverent) knowledge, worldviews, technologies, techniques and traditions of our ancestral past we essentially receive the stories whispered to us in the heirloom seeds of knowledge passed down to us by our ancestors.
Through our taking decisive action to germinate those seeds of knowledge within the substrate of a holistic vision for the future (with a foundation of modern Regenerative soil science, a culturally enriched (globally connected) information base and modern mycological science) we can accept the gifts of place based wisdom from our ancestors and give those Regenerative seeds of knowledge new found vigor, potential, anti-fragility and purpose.
What we are essentially doing when we engage in that process intentionally is an ethnoecologically defined form of ethnogenesis.
For more info, watch:
Ethnogenesis refers to efforts to create counter-cultures which are permanent.
Real villages cannot really be created by people who will follow a single individual no matter how visionary. Such synthetic beginnings lack true origins and are as bound to fail as they are well meaning. Real villages can only come from listening to the Holy in the “seeds,” as the Tzutujil would say, not a person. Like people, ecosystems, cultures of interrelated animals, plants, winds, oceans, and people, villages must organically grow from the mind of the Holy in the Seed and ground. Old Chiv knew that villages came from the big understanding of the seeds themselves, seeds he wanted me not to keep hidden like some esoteric secret, but seeds kept alive by communal reverence, hard work, and replanting against all odds.
- Martín Prechtel (From his book “The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic”)
Ethnogenesis driven by an ethnoecological animistic imperative of reciprocity is the process of creating an emergent regenerative culture.
When we see seeds as living beings with stories to share, and we collect, preserve, cultivate and share heirloom seeds (while simultaneously feeding ourselves, growing medicine, providing habitat, nectar for pollinators and biomass for building soil) what we are really doing is engaging in a (non-genetically, non-religious, non-nationalistically and non-geographically defined) form of Ethnogenesis, creating an emergent culture that is primarily defined by its Ethnoecological animistic attributes.
As I discuss in my presentation for R-Future 2025, Permaculture Design and the Regenerative Food movement actually represent forms of non-genetically, non-geographically and non-religiously defined forms of Ethnogenesis, as they are both sets of worldviews, methodologies, perspectives and movements that are decentralized, yet represent a clear and distinct pattern of “systemic refusal” and the creation of counter cultures (which prioritize a specific set of ethical imperatives and ecological literacy over the edicts of statist regimes or corporate interests).
Thus, it is important to re-iterate that humans are not inherently destructive, it is more a matter of the ethos and self-image driving cultures that determines whether or not they serve as a blessing or an imposition on an ecosystem.
Cultures that perceive themselves as having a responsibility as stewards and caretakers, while seeing nature as being comprised of myriad beings all possessing a sprit (like humans do) and offering gifts tend to be driven by motivating factors like gratitude, reciprocity and making use of every part of another being they kill/harvest while only taking what they need to live healthily. Some of those cultures can live in an ecosystem while simultaneously enriching it.
“Keewaydinoquay says that things such as rocks, trees, and plants, which are considered to be inanimate by the dominant society, are considered animate within anishinabe philosophy. They, along with all the other beings of Creation, have a special purpose, which they must follow to maintain the balance of this world (1991b)
Within inaadiziwin (the Anishinaabe way) all of these animate beings are interconnected and dependent upon each other. Biskaabuyang research terminology describes this interconnectedness as enawendiwin, referring to our relationships with all of Creation (”Anishinaabe Wordlist” 2003). There are dibaajimowinan explaining the interconnectedness and interdependency of every being. One of these, which I heard from Mary Geniusz many times while a child, Basil Johnston describes throughout Ojibway Heritage (1976). This dibaajimowin describes the levels of Creation. It explains that the first beings created on earth were the natural forces, including the rocks, the weather forces, and the aadizookaanag (those spirits who carry our ceremonies, teachings, songs, and stories). The second beings created were the trees and the plants. The third beings created were the awesiinyag, the nonhuman animals. The last beings created were the Anishinaabeg. When all of these beings were created, they promised Gichi-manidoo (the Great Spirit) that they would live together and help all the other levels of Creation survive.
Inaadiziwin places humans as an integral part of the cycle of life, rather than at the center of the universe or at some level above the animals, plants, and the rest of Creation.”
Cultures that perceive themselves as the most important organism on the planet, being entitled to exploit as they see fit and having no responsibility/need to reciprocate, seeing nature as a collection of dead/intimate resources and stupid animals (worth less than humans) take and take for greed without restraint and kill for pleasure and profit. Those cultures typically decrease biodiversity, poison the water and desertify once lush ecosystems in their endless quest for more disposable superficial pleasures, comfort, opulence and attempting to fill a void in their heart (where gratitude should be) with more material things.
The first type of culture does not require living in teepees or mud huts, but it does require animism centered ethics, humility, being willing to constantly learn new things/skills, pattern observation, biomimicry, courage and determination.
The second cultural trajectory only requires that we keep on having faith in and voting for politicians (that are part of intrinsically degenerative statist regimes), buying stuff from Amazon, Walmart, keep on making excuses why we cannot grow our own food, buying big ag/factory farm food and move into the wonderful utopian smart cities being constructed for us.
Animism is the reason why when Columbus and others like him arrived on the shores of Turtle Island he found an ecosystem of unparalleled abundance and beauty, with rivers teaming with salmon and food forests that rained multitudes of nuts from the heavens , rather than arriving to find the land as it today (with 98% of the most beautiful, ancient, biodiverse and majestic old growth forests having been clearcut for profit by non-animist anthropocentrically minded humans and salmon populations declining).
Animism is the reason why when Magonus Saccatus (aka “saint Patrick”) and his fellow Roman elitists and thugs arrived on the shores of Eire (aka “Ireland”) they did not find the land as you see it today (mostly denuded of the ancient oak forests that once covered over 70% of the isle). When the Romans arrived there this was a land that was described as filled with “forests that shed showers of nuts and all other fruit”.
Most people think of Ireland and Scotland and think of endless rolling sheep pastures, but this only serves to show us how powerful generational amnesia and the shifting baseline syndrome can be in shaping prevailing perspectives.
Here is an account of a Druidic poem which described the pre-colonial landscape of “Erinn” aka Ireland aka Éire (which means Abundant Land).
“I pray that we reach the land of Erinn, we who are riding upon the great, productive, vast sea.
That we be distributed upon her plains, her mountains, and her valleys; upon her forests that shed showers of nuts and all other fruits; upon her rivers and her cataracts; upon her lakes and her great waters; upon her abounding springs.
That we may hold our fairs and equestrian sports upon her territories.
That there may be a king from us in Tara; and that Tara be the territory of our many kings.” (full poem with broader historical context available here)
In modern times, with the advent of mass schooling (government funded) and mass media (oligarch controlled), the way we think and interact with the world has fundamentally changed through the adoption of a strict reductionist materialism that disconnects us from the sense of the sacred that is found in mythos and our own unique ancestral traditions.
The hyper-rationalism and mechanistic reductionism of the Western materialist worldview prevailing today is unique in world history with its strange “soulless” materialistic view of the Universe as an indifferent clockwork-like machine or code-based simulation.
We have become lost in our materialistic distractions, disconnected from nature in a human-designed world that often ignores the natural laws that maintain balance and today most people do not feel a deep kinship with all the other creatures, plants, trees and ecosystems that share this Planet with us.
I believe the result is our collective sense of the sacred connected to the Earth has been severed and replaced with an insatiable drive for scientific progress and material consumption without any sense of limits or responsibility.
“The world cannot be re-enchanted because it is and always was enchanted, it is merely that human beings gradually lost the ability to see and feel it. We are desensitized, and in this era in particular, our desensitization has become a severe handicap. We are spiritually retarded, nearly completely severed from the perception of our own spirits and the spirits around us..
..We all know something is missing from our lives that has left miserable and terrifying wounds. Though these wounds cannot be seen, we all feel like amputees from which parts have been lopped off or gouged out.”
As the scientist Gus Speth brilliantly puts it, we will need a profound spiritual and cultural transformation for modern civilization to survive its wholesale destruction of our living support systems:
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy… and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.“
Animism is a deeply rooted value-system based on respect for the land, reverence for all life and relating to the more-than-human world as a living being infused with sentience.
The practice of Animism is about cultivating a relationship with what Plato called the “Anima Mundi” or the world soul.
The world soul is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body.
Animism provides a spiritual ecology to reorient people for earth stewardship and building a regenerative culture.
Before we take a deeper look at why animism is imperative as we work to plant the seeds for a future worth living in and gifting to future generations, let’s address some of the typical talking points of the contemporary detractors of animism.
Some people tell me that when I talk about the value of indigenous worldviews surrounding animism that I am promoting the “noble savage” myth and that indigenous people (whether they are European or from Turtle Island) are “primitive”, “savage” and “low-tech” and they would rather enjoy all the wonders of modern western civilization.
I tell them that while it is true and it is worth pointing out that some people romanticize indigenous peoples from specific areas (because placing any culture, group of people or individual on some pedestal as pure is unhealthy). I do not romanticize their past nor do I romanticize the potential of their worldviews to provide solutions to the present challenges we face.
These people use red herring tactics and talk about human sacrifice being a central theme in precolonial animistic and indigenous cultures. This sad propaganda narrative compelled a Corbett Report commenter (that goes by the screenname “mkey”) to astutely observe and state:
“Westernized, civilized cultures sacrifice the unborn, the old, the young and everything in between every day and in droves.
Bloodshed and sacrifice. All day, every day, industrial scale.” (source)
I tell the animist culture and indigenous demonization propaganda pushers that we should keep in mind that demonization and dehumanization of the perceived “enemy” or targeted “sub-human class” of an empire is a time tested psychological warfare technique that has been employed in both real time conflicts and retrospectively as “victors write the history books”.
“Civilization has no relatives, only captives … Its survival is expansive unending hunger, a hunger that has been named colonialism; a vast consumption that feeds on spirit, and all life.
This is the illiteracy of Colonialism; it cannot envision itself anywhere but at the center of the progression of human understanding and meaning. It cannot truly speak of justice or freedom without vomiting the half-chewed bones of forests, extinct species, and generations yet to come.
It convulses in cognitive distortions, it demands quantifications and quotas as it cries out “climate justice” while its breath carries the stench of oil and methane. It constructs “sustainable prisons” and demands lithium and uranium to maintain the world that it is burning.
On these lands it appears that no other history exists but that which justifies occupation. This is the meticulously constructed myth of progress asserted as modernity. Its putrefying gaze fixated on positioning experiences in its limited zones of post and pre. It is both the consequence and goal of what it proposes as an order to dominate and homogenize all ways of being, this proclaimed garishly as civilization. A fevered monster that rabidly consumes its own flesh. It has not ceased destroying long enough to sense that the land suffers, that the land holds trauma and there are consequences. Refusing to read the sunsets. Not listening to the ground. Spruce bows beckoning to commune, it does not see.
This is the illiteracy of Colonialism.”
- Klee Benally (from “No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred”)”
Manifest Destiny propaganda art (“American Progress” is an 1872 painting by John Gast, a Prussian-born painter, printer, and lithographer who lived and worked during the 1870s in Brooklyn, New York. American Progress, an allegory of manifest destiny). The reality was less pretty, involving mass murder of indigenous women, children and mass destruction of food forests that took centuries to create.
Some talk about indigenous cultures as “primitive” / “low tech” and modern civilization as “advanced” and “high tech”.
Most would think of Feller Bunchers, GMO seeds and genetic mRNA injections, smart missiles and 5G satellites as “high tech”… I do not. Those are adolescent abuses of human gifts, low level morality and low level social maturity technologies.
“For Diné there is no dichotomy between spirit and nature, we are of this Earth, and so where there is an environmental crisis there is also a social crisis. No one can live without clean air, clean water, or clean land, these are the most basic terms of what it means to be “people of the Earth,” or Indigenous.
We share the responsibility to care for and protect Nahasdzaán (Mother Earth).
Most often sacred places are places of healing, guidance, and renewal.
The defense of lands held holy by Indigenous Peoples are the frontlines in the struggles for our existence. If we desire to exist, we must continue to defend the sacred and liberate Mother Earth. Defending the sacred means fighting back to protect Mother Earth, which is to say existence itself.
The edifice of western “civilization” is still being carved out and through sacred lands with acts of desecration that perpetuate spiritual invasion, occupation, and conquest. They are the targets of individuals and corporations who see Mother Earth as not a living entity but only for resources that can be exploited for material gain.
Every sacred site that is currently being threatened with desecration faces some form of resource extraction.
To desecrate a sacred place it has to be Objectified-stripped of any and all living spiritual meaning and relations. Desecration, or the killing of the living being and spirit of the land, cannot easily occur while Indigenous belief systems exist, because people and other beings tend to fight back when their existences are threatened. When outright murder, forced removal or relocation of Indigenous Peoples is not politically or publicly palatable, the first act of desecration is erasure of identity, cultural memory, and any relation to the land by violently stripping it away through the imposition of a new meaning by the colonizer. This spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically violent process occurs through the systematic delegitimization of deeply held living Indigenous belief systems. The political strategy of Indigenous delegitimization is institutional.”
— Klee Benally (From his book titled “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”)
Words and language are powerful sociocultural technologies that alter our psychology either for the better or for the worse, and I consider animist linguistic technologies to be a very high form of social technology indeed. From the little bit I have learned of indigenous languages from Turtle Island (and now also having begun to learn some Gaelic and Welsh words) I can say that there is a significant difference in the type impact those animist linguistic technologies have on human hearts and minds as compared to the anthropocentrism of English.
If “high” tech is intended to articulate advanced tech that is ethically aligned, socially enriching and exemplifies a mature and thoughtful application of human gifts, than I propose that the social technologies (which involves physical technologies like fire and seed storage inoculation/propagation) which facilitate a culture being able to create a food forest that survives and produces for 7000 thousand years to be much more “high tech”.
Large sections of this valley contain a 7000 year old Hazelnut food forest. This ancient food production system is still producing today even though the original stewards are no longer tending it. This is near the site of the ancient First Nation community of Temlaxam, close to where the Skeena and Bulkley rivers meet in northern BC. For more info: https://thetyee.ca/News/2024/12/04/Hazelnuts-Reveal-Secrets-Ancient-BC-City/ This marvel of human creativity, ecological literacy and multigenerational wealth was made possible via Applied Animism.
(For additional references, check out the links in this comment)
Tech (both social and physical) that enables a community to feed their human members while also enriching the non-human community of beings, enhancing water quality and access, attracting more animal based food sources and enriching the beauty of a place is much more advanced than laser beam guided missiles, skyscraper canyons, machine guns or elon musk satellites… there is no chance those things will last 7000 years. And if they did, this Earth would be turned into a giant open pit mine and toxic waste dump by then… thus, modern civilization’s technologies are actually very “low” tech (low morally, low in foresight, low in ecological literacy, low in holistic vision and low in compassion).
Whether or not those adolescent forms of technology can end a great deal of life in a short amount of time does not impress me at all. I do however find a 7000 year old food forest (or even a 200 year old one for that matter) very impressive.
The difference between the two cultural expressions of technology is simple, one culture sees the Earth as an inanimate object, nothing more than a collection of “resources” and operates from that adolescent spiritually impoverished state, the other set of cultural values is based in animism, the trees, rivers, mountains, stones and elements like fire are beings with a spirit, allies, teachers and fellow community members to be honored for their gifts with gratitude and respect.
That is applied animism, and in the case of a food forest, the result sends out ripple effects that span centuries to millennia.
“There was a time when we didn’t need books to understand the sacred.
We walked barefoot on the land and learned directly from the soil. We listened to the songs of rivers, the silence of snow falling in forests, and the movement of clouds across the sky. We read the flight of birds like scripture and followed the tracks of deer like sacred texts.
Everything was alive. Everything had spirit.
And we were not above it, but within it.
This is the essence of animism; not a religion, not a theory, but a way of seeing and being in the world. A deep knowing that every stone, tree, breeze, and bird carries intelligence. Carries soul. That we are not separate from this world, but in kinship with it.
Animism teaches us to live in relationships, not in domination.”
I remember when I was young I felt something when I spent time close to a large boulder near a cedar stump in our backyard in Whistler, BC. I asked my parents if rocks are alive and have their own spirit. Their answers did not align with what I felt to be true. So my awareness of the aliveness of stones was forced to go beneath the surface. Modern western science looks upon viewing stones as beings with suspicion and dismissal. These are the judgments of members of a young and orphaned culture lost and which has forgotten its roots.
Thus, in a subsequent post (separate from this one about the general principals and regenerative psychological influences of animism, after I dive into the imperative of animistic awareness in general) I’ll share my first post (which I have already put up as a note) from the Stories Of The Stone People series.
In the future I may also create parallel expressions of Applied Animism that focus on other non-human kin such as the winged ones, the fungal beings, the water beings and others.
I always felt drawn to interact with stones, rocks, boulders, crystals, ore veins cliff faces, pebbles, sand and Stone Mountain mountain sides since I was young and I even remember asking my parents when I was young if rocks are alive and have a spirit (something I sensed intuitively and was looking to confirm with my elders). Their answer to my query did not deter my curiosity and acknowledgement of stones as beings, rather just forced it underground for a while, emerging more recently as I seek to engage in ancestral remembering.
Today, as someone that respects the perspectives of my indigenous ancestors (the Gael/Welsh and others) I choose to see and speak of our mineral relatives as kin, taking time to learn to read and listen to their ancient languages, hear the stories they share and respect them as I would any other being.
The modern western reductionistic, anthropocentric, materialistic and hubristic worldviews (which can be either enshrined within distorted dogmatic religious texts or within the atheistic halls of academia) place human beings upon a pedestal as the only beings capable of consciousness, self-awareness, sentience and having a soul.
“Growing up in Sunday school, I learned that the Earth was made for us. Thus quoteth from Genesis: that God gave man “dominion” over the Earth, that the land was created for our use, that it was our divine duty to multiply and replenish. Dominion meant power over… not relational reciprocity. The Earth was not a relative or a teacher, rather simply a stage, a backdrop, a warehouse of resources waiting for our hands..
..From scripture to schoolbooks, from toys to television, I was taught the same thing: the Earth is passive. The Earth is raw material. The Earth has no voice until we put words in its mouth. And if it isn’t used, it is wasted..”
The myth of the passive Earth is the belief that the planet is inert matter, a backdrop for human drama, and a stockpile of resources awaiting our use. It frames the Earth not as alive, relational, or self-regulating, but as a silent object whose only value comes from what we can extract, tame, or transform. In this story, humans are the sole actors; the Earth is the stage. We shape history, while the world itself has no agency, no voice, no role except to serve.
This myth is encoded into our language. We speak of “natural resources,” as though forests and rivers exist only to be consumed. We call living beings “raw materials,” as though the world is unfinished until industry reshapes it. Even ecology, that supposed science of life, has been colonized by economic terms: “ecosystem services,” where the value of rivers and bees is measured not in their own flourishing, but in what they do for us.
The same framing shapes global politics. Nations are divided into “developed” and “developing,” a clearly stated hierarchy that assumes the end goal is always more industrial growth, consumer markets, and integration into the global economy. The phrase hides a judgment: countries that live differently are not simply different, they are “behind” or even “backward.” They have not yet harnessed the Earth “properly.”
..The myth of the passive Earth is baked deep into our grammar, a worldview encoded into how we talk about land, people, and power. And once you see it, you notice how total it is. Every solution offered to our ecological crisis, whether sustainable development, renewable energy, carbon markets, all begin with the assumption that the Earth is an object, silent and inert, waiting to be managed. Never a subject, never a being, never a voice.
This institutionalized perception of humans being the most important, most intelligent, most deserving and only being possessing a soul on Earth is actually on outlier worldview (some might say a freakish hubristic abomination) within the broader story of humanity. Throughout the majority of our time on Earth, humans have had predominantly animistic worldviews and many pre-colonial cultures viewed our non-human kin as elders, teachers and beings deserving of respect, careful attention and reciprocity.
Many pre-colonial animistic cultures shared their knowledge with successive generations through predominantly oral traditions and lived ritualized forms of learning. There are many benefits to this pathway of sharing knowledge and knowing (some of which are discussed in the quote below) though as we learned from the attempted cultural genocide of the Residential Schools in Canada and the Boarding Schools in the US, indigenous animistic wisdom that is relayed purely through spoken stories does make those cultural storehouses of wisdom vulnerable to imperialistic attacks. Perhaps as we strive to engage in Ethnogenesis combining both written and oral traditions can provide redundancy, cultural resilience as well as stimulate the human heart and mind in synergistic ways. Through combining non-physical truth expressed as art and in spoken linguistics (music , poetry and non-written oral languages/stories) with written forms, we can ensure future generations will have access to the fruits of the seeds we plant in our hearts and minds today.
“Mastery of Indigenous epistemology (ways of knowing) demands being able to ee beyond the object of study, to seek a viewpoint incorporating complex contextual and group consensus about what is real. This is the difference between oral and print-based cultures. Oral Cultures are known as high-context or field dependant reasoning cultures. They have no isolated variables: all thinking is dependent on field or context.
Print-based cultures, by contrast, are low-context or field-independent reasoning cultures. This is because they remain independent of the field or context, focusing on ideas and objects in isolation.
Plato may have had something to do with the loss of contextual reasoning in Western civilization. He introduced the idea of studying each idea as an entity in and of itself, disconnected from the rest of the system. This practice spawned the scientific method of reductionism and the highly individualized ways of thinking that came to replace more communal approaches to knowledge in Western philosophy. Plato mentored Aristotle, who in turn mentored Alexander the Great, who in turn rampaged east with a great army, installing these new ways of thinking in the high-context cultures he subjugated along the way. Later, the spread of print literacy throughout the West would allow the individual expression of ideas without dialogue, and even individual words to be examined in isolation, causing reductionism to take off like a bushfire.
The low-context ways of thinking that rippled out from Greece and Macedonia proved useful in creating a more obedient workforce and soldiery. People were able to focus solely on the task at hand, rather than the purpose of their work in the greater scheme of things. They did not need to understand the goals of their leaders anymore. Consensus and consent are unnecessary items in low-context cultures. Reasoning is hierarchical, solitary, and disconnected, making it possible for communication to be one-way in the form of rants, instruction, and, most important, orders.
Art by Josephine Wall
Modern neural science has been able to map the way print literacy rewires the human brain. It is a fairly cata- strophic process, rearranging neural networks and connections between different areas of the brain in ways that are inefficient at best and highly abnormal at worst. I’m not trying to discourage people or communities from pursuing literacy skills, by the way. I’m not rejecting an entire way of knowing and cultural tradition out of hand-that would be advocating ethnocide, which is never a good idea. I’m merely suggesting that it’s helpful to mix things up a little, avoid put- all your cognitive eggs in one basket, keep your brain functioning more optimally. Further, you should never commit all of your cultural knowledge to a print or digital repository. Archives are great, but they are only temporary. The Egyptians learned that the hard way.
The only sustainable way to store data long term is within relationships-deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn’t need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently-those two systems might back each other up rather than merely co- exist. Relationships between systems are just as important as the relationships within them. Oral traditions grounded in profound relationships represent a way of thinking that backs up your knowledge in biological peer-to-peer networks and provides a firewall against dictators who might decide to burn down your libraries. It also mixes things up cognitively and allows your brain to rewire itself in more healthy ways. I call this way of thinking kinship-mind.”
The current dominant narrative of an inert passive Earth with humans standing atop the pinnacle of evolution or creation as the smartest and only beings with spirit and agency is a relatively new myth within the larger story of our species. I contend that it is one of the most detrimental and delusional myths ever invented. I have referred to this delusion of Grandeur and modern myth (aka psychological/spiritual disease) as The Monster Of Modernity in the past.
Most of our ancestors saw non-human beings (including rocks, water, air, the Earth herself and celestial beings like stars and the moon) as animated beings that each possess a spirit. Modern industrial civilization on the other hand, pushes a dominant worldview (whether it be framed within anthropocentric religious dogmas or within the materialistic and reductionistic language of academics) that sees these beings as inanimate objects.
I invite you to learn to speak the names of your non-human kin with words that were also spoken by your ancient ancestors, taste the same foods they enjoyed and nourished their bodies with, sing their songs and revive their blessings for the waters, wind and mountain peaks. Within these threads of your ancestral past you can awaken dormant seeds of knowing that weave through your bones, into your heart and through the fabric of your soul.
Within ancient Gaelic cultures the springs, rivers, lakes and wells were seen as beings that have a spirit and innate rights. Under their Brehon Laws (known in the Gaelic language as ‘Fénechas) the Gaels (Druids and their Brehon successors) acknowledged the living waters of the Earth had innate rights just as all human beings did (including equal rights for women, which at the time was far ahead of any other European laws for women). The Brehon Law defined our Kinship with Water, our responsibilities to respect her and offer blessings and express gratitude when we receive her gifts.
In ancient Japanese animistic tradition, every natural phenomenon, including rivers, are believed to be inhabited by a spirit called a Kami. In Japan, blessings for water are associated with Shinto spiritual beings like Suijin and Ryūjin, and with waterfalls and springs.
Suijin or Mizugami (水神, すいじん, みずがみ) is a general name for the spirit of water in Japanese animistic mythology. The term refers to the heavenly and earthly manifestations of the benevolent Shinto divinity of water found in lakes, ponds, springs, and wells. Marika Clymer offers more info on these concepts in her posts.
Many peoples of Turtle Island had similar traditions that spoke of the living waters in the rivers, steams, springs and oceans as their kin, and beings from which we can receive gifts, wisdom and should express our gratitude towards in different ceremonies.
Rather than build churches with walls that separate humans from the sacred inspiration and embodiment of Creator’s design, many of ancient animistic indigenous cultures chose to recognize and/or create spaces for prayer, sacred ceremonies, knowing the will of the Divine and blessing rituals that were centered around flowing springs and sacred groves of old growth trees.
For more info:
These sacred groves, sacred springs and sacred wells were tended reverently for millennia, in many cases becoming spectacular old growth forested habitats that simultaneously provided a space for ceremony, blessings and worship for connecting with Creator while also providing habitat for our non human kin and also protecting the waters. However, as was well documented in Fred Hageneder’s book “The Spirit of Trees: Science, Symbiosis and Inspiration“, the Christian church began an aggressive crusade to destroy these sacred groves, sacred wells and sacred spring sites in an effort to destroy the cultures of all peoples they deemed as “heathens”, “savages” and “pagans” starting around the year 723 AD in Europe.
Traditional ethnoecological worldviews of many of the pre-christian animistic indigenous cultures described above had recognized a relationship between trees and rain (eg. indigenous peoples had, and have place based wisdom that taught how the trees invite and call the rain to them). As Zach Weiss points out in his water restoration works, those worldviews are now being proven to be accurate my modern day science.
Many of our ancient indigenous ancestors recognized the sacred waters of the living Earth as living beings, imbued with a spirit, and as such, deserving of the same recognition and respect as any of our other kin.
“Traditionally, we all belong to Land-centred communal existences that include all other beings, forces, and spirits of the Land. In their unquantifiable pluriversal forms, expressions, and weaves since time immemorial: there are no ancestral traditions older and more relationally durable than those that honour, foster, and defend this belonging..
..The ultimate power of ancestral traditions is in their potential to provide a cultural basis10 for us to steward, nurture, and defend deep relationships of care and reciprocity with each other and with our specific places across our dear, suffering planet.”
On the topic of animism and how that worldview has impacted my current life, I would like to share with you all that I personally feel that the Earth is indeed a conscious being, self aware and very much alive. This feeling I have, this inward knowing, was not born out of scientific data, other’s opinions, or any kind of external stimuli, but rather it was something I came to understand through spending much time in nature, consciously entering into stillness of mind, and learning to enable my heart to act as an organ of perception. It is in that state of inward stillness that I came to directly sense the consciousness and life pulse of this world in which we inhabit.
Hanna Maria describes cultivating that type of knowing from the inside out as the “indigenous” pathway to understand the world and the dominant modern civilization’s pathway of gaining understanding from the outside in as “Exogenous” in the video clip below:
Since that experience I have learned that though we live in a 3 dimensional universe, this physical form and experience we all share here does not represent the true essence of who and what we are. It is understandably difficult to approach the question above without knowing that innate truth. To ask your self if a planet, or river, or mountain, stream, river or stone is alive and has a soul, while seeking to define the housing, mechanisms, and structure of a non-human consciousness and expression of spirit limited by the assumption that it is purely 3 dimensional, is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without having all the pieces. You see without acknowledging our own multidimensionality, and learning to move beyond the limitations of the 5 senses, human brain and ego we cannot see the full picture. The same can be said of the consciousness and spirit of stones, waters, weather patterns, stars and other planets/moons.
Science is the system of thought which explores this universe through the truly amazing intellectual capacities of the human brain (a bio-mechanical molecular electromagnetic computer) the operating system for the most advanced machine known to exist in the universe, the human body. So while this brain may be exceptionally well versed at navigating and perceiving this 3 dimensional plane of time and matter, through the 5 senses. It cannot perceive that which exists beyond, and there lies the limitation of the science of the current paradigm on earth to understand the nature of the universe and existence.
White pine is revered across Indigenous cultures as a symbol of wisdom, longevity, and of peace. They are thanked for their material gifts of medicine, materials, fuel, and food and for their spiritual gifts. Pines are understood as among our oldest teachers; in fact, they are of an ancient lineage in the tree world and have seen much change across the earth. Among some people, white pine is regarded as the “ogema” of the forest, the seat of leadership. The pine, like all trees, is spoken of in my Anishinaabe language, not as an object, an “it” but as a “who,” a person of some standing, whose name is Zhingwak. Charismatic white pines are honored as elders. They are the esteemed companions of the visionary eagle who uses their emergent canopy as nest and watchtower. Zhingwak plays many roles in the canon of Native stories, as a protector of human people and the embodiment of highest virtues. Known as the Tree of Peace, white pine is the iconic symbol of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, who taught the people peace through unity, by its five soft needles, bound together as one. The tallest, strongest, most enduring being in the forest is the botanical representation of the oldest democracy on the planet.
Eastern White Pine in a mixed hardwood forest in Ontario
Traditional cultures who sit beneath the white pines recognize that human people are only one manifestation of intelligence in the living world. Other beings, from Otters to Ash trees, are understood as persons, possessed of their own gifts, responsibilities, and intentions. This is not some kind of mistaken anthropomorphism. Trees are not misconstrued as leaf-wearing humans but respected as unique, sovereign beings equal to or exceeding the power of humans. Seneca scholar John Mohawk wrote that according to his culture, “an individual is not smart […] but merely lucky to be part of a system that has intelligence. Be humble about this. The real intelligence isn’t the property of an individual; the real intelligence is the property of the universe itself.”
The Indigenous story tradition speaks of a past in which all beings spoke the same language and life lessons flowed among species. But we have forgotten—or been made to forget—how to listen so that all we hear is sound, emptied of its meaning. The soft sibilance of pine needles in the wind is an acoustic signature of pines. But this well-known “whispering of pines” is just a sound, it is not their voice.
What if you were a great teacher, a holder of knowledge and vessel of stories, but had no audible voice with which to speak? What if your listeners presumed you to be mute, save for the passive whispering of your needles? How would you bring your truth into the world? Wouldn’t you dance your story in branch and root? Wouldn’t you write it in the eloquence of cellulose? In the lasting archive of wood? Plants tell their stories not by what they say but by what they do. They tell their story in their bodies, in an alphabet once as familiar as the song of every bird, which we have also forgotten, as we became afflicted not only with plant blindness but plant deafness as well.
If you know how to see, their storytelling goes deeper than the curve of a windward branch. Everything that affects the pine is expressed in its body. The tree is an integrator of all its experience and that of the surrounding community.
The Colonizers brought a religion that made God in the image of man, humans alone were perceived to have the capacity for reason, for sentience, for choice, for language. But long before that error was promulgated, people knew the trees were storytellers. But then we forgot. Or were made to forget by the ones who chased divinity out of the forest and forced it into the sky. The stories of trees were erased from our knowing…
…We literate folks take for granted that abstract little marks, in repeated patterns on a sheet of cellulose paper, a tree body, can be decoded to make meaning. Even if those black marks are arrayed in a form we don’t understand like Chinese characters, Anishinaabe pictographs, or cuneiform marks on a clay tablet, nonetheless we still recognize them as writing. The very fact of the patterned marks on the page, the systematic recording and interpretation of lived experience, is evidence of intelligence, whether we can read them or not. We don’t dismiss them as meaningless just because we don’t understand; we go looking for the Rosetta stone. Unless of course, those texts are written by a tree.
old growth White Pine Trunk, Algonquin Park, Ontario
The story of intelligences other than our own is one of continual expansion. I am not aware of a single research study that demonstrates that other beings are dumber than we think. Octopi solve puzzles, chickadees create language, crows make tools, rats feel anxiety, elephants mourn, parrots do calculus, apes read symbols, nematodes navigate, and honeybees dance the results of cost-benefit analysis of sucrose rewards like an economic ballet. Even the slime mold can learn a maze, enduring toxic obstacles to obtain the richest reward. The blinders are coming off, and the definition of intelligence expands every time we ask the question.
The ability to efficiently sense, identify, locate, and capture resources needed in a complex and variable environment requires sophisticated information processing and decision making. Intelligence is today thought of as “adaptively variable behavior,” which changes in response to signals coming from the environment.
Where is intelligence situated? Our conceptions of intelligence are based on animal models and a kind of “brain chauvinism.” Every animal, from the flatworm to the black bear, has a brain, central meeting place of sensation, and coordinated response. Because animals are mobile autonomous beings who must pursue their food, the brain must itself be compact and portable.
But a centralized brain is not needed for plant intelligence. Rapid movement is not necessary when the food comes to you. For an autotrophic, sessile being, bathed in the needed resources, networked in intimate relationships with myriad others above and below ground, a very different system of sensation and response might well evolve, which looks nothing like the animal model.
If food becomes abundant, no animal can grow more legs to chase after it or a new mouth to eat more. In times of shortage, most cannot cast off a limb that it has no energy to sustain. The whole organism is static in form and flourishes or suffers within those constraints. Not so for plants, who can adaptively alter their circumstances by growing additional parts or losing unneeded ones. Decision-making at tree pace looks like passivity to us herky-jerky animals, accustomed to our own short lifespan. But pine behavior is a slow-motion pursuit of adaptive solutions. Plant intelligence or “adaptively flexible behavior” may be manifest in their extraordinary capacity to change form in real time by altering their allocation of carbon to different functions in response to changing needs.
This slow dance of parts emerging and disappearing is the tree-paced equivalent of movement. Branches expand into light-filled gaps and retreat from dense shade, adjusting their architecture to optimize light capture. Roots are deployed in new directions to follow changing gradients of water and minerals, not randomly but with purpose. They are hunting light and grazing for phosphorous by differential deployment of apical meristems.
Plasticity is possible because trees have myriad growing points, or meristems, a reservoir of adaptation poised to respond to changed circumstances. Tissues that animals never dreamed of, meristems—like totipotent stem cells—can be modified into the new tissues that best suit the conditions. Trees like white pine also have a lateral meristem, the vascular cambium, which gives rise to the cells that increase the diameter of the stem. It is an entire body stocking of meristematic tissue, perpetually embryonic. This nexus of nutrients and hormones and sensory chemicals, and creative cell making, is perhaps a fertile location to search for the decentralized seat of pine intelligence. It is the cambium, starting and stopping on an annual cycle that writes in the language of cellulose, of tree rings. Let us consider for the moment that the cambium is the author, that it is the pen that writes its own history.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer (an excerpt from The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence)
That being said, as Robin Wall Kimmerer hints at above, and as Lindsay it is possible to gain meaningful insight into this reality through the 5 senses and the true scientific process (that being the exploration of the world and universe around and inside of us, through measurement and observation, while always being open to the possibility that the ‘facts’ we think to be absolute and fundamental could indeed be proved to be wrong or need an improved understanding).
Modern science tell us that there are aspects of this universe that are very real that cannot be perceived with our 5 senses, things that are all around us, microbial life, higher octaves of light, gamma and ultraviolet rays, and frequencies of sound and vibration beyond the spectrum that we can detect. A few hundred years ago, if you told someone that in a cup of pond water there are multitudes of strange lifeforms taking many shapes smaller than the eye can see, you would have probably been told that you are crazy.
“We have an innate capacity to understand plants, to exchange with them. We know their language but we may not be aware of how integrated we are in our communion with them. The language of plants is chemical and morphological. To bring awareness to this we perhaps need to slow down, but we also need to redefine communication.
When we think of communication, we typically think about linguistic communication. Most often using words and our auditory capacity. But we also communicate non-verbally, including through facial expression and body language. We visually see the morphology (the shapes and the structures including alterable shapes of facial expressions in humans and other animals). And, we receive chemical messages through subconscious pheromones, conscious smells and tastes. Our own body chemistry shifts when we communicate with other humans. We respond to a variety of cues by shifting our neurotransmitters and stress hormones. As we read a receptive facial expression we may feel joy, and a chemical shift accompanies that along with the linguistic thought-forms that emerge in the mind. As we smell roses, or a lover, or poisons our bodies respond in a complex cascade of both mental and chemical changes. This is also true when we communicate with animals, mushrooms, and plants. We receive their chemical messengers and we see their morphological adaptations.
We have the anatomical equipment to communicate with the plants. We co-evolved with them and we are made of many of the same chemicals. We receive their communication through our our senses. We smell them, we taste them, we have receptor sites for the chemicals they produce. They each produce hundreds or even thousands of chemicals - from the primary sugars they (and we) need for daily life, to the secondary metabolites that they produce in response to their biotic and abiotic environmental stressors. These secondary metabolites - aromatic oils, flavonoids, tannins, alkaloids, etc are often protective to them and may be poison or medicine for us. We receive these chemicals as communication to shift our own body processes. We taste them, we smell them, we feel them.
leaves from trees I connected with on a hike in the forest of southern Ontario this fall and seeds I was gifting to that forest community in thanks
As we continue through the forest we take time to intentionally tune into all of our senses. We observe the forest around us and also we observe ourselves. We see, we listen, we smell, we feel with our hands as we pass by trees, we feel the ground beneath our feet. We stop and taste tea made from plants that grow in this forest. Beyond the five well-known senses, we also notice our proprioception (our sense of movement and placement) as our muscles and joints navigate the trail and its bends and roots. We make use of our vestibular sense (balancing and coordinating our bodies) notably if we slip in the mud and take action to keep ourselves upright. Perhaps the most mysterious sense, interoception (our conscious and subconscious sense of our internal organs and emotions) takes us into our own bodies and to notice how we feel in this place. To feel vulnerable, relaxed, grateful, joyful..
..When we slow down and quiet ourselves we sense things that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. We can make connections and remember that we already are connected. We sense the resiliency of the forest and its inhabitants. We sense that they have adapted to their niches and that the interconnectivity of the forest is integral to their individual resilience. We sense that the forest inhabitants experience hardships and find the path forward through time. We also sense ourselves more intimately. We create space to feel the hardships in our own beings and also feel the potential we have to just be, despite the ever present modern impetus to push past the present moment unaware of its potential. When we slow down and tune into our senses it shifts our nervous system activity and brings attention to the present moment. In that moment we feel ourselves as we truly are - beings interwoven into a greater web of existence. With that knowing we walk the path forward through time to the next moment.”
Throughout human history paradigms of thought and ‘science’ have asserted them selves and their principles as absolute only to be proven false by new understandings subsequently coming to light. Do we really think that we are exempt from this historical lesson? Are we so arrogant that we claim to be standing on the pedestal of absolute knowledge, like so many before us, closing ourselves to new ideas and understandings that challenge our current paradigm of thought?
There are now many scientists who do believe that plants possess some form of sentience. That in fact they have intelligence, perception, thought and that their behavior is often altruistic. Many are surprised to find out that the truth is that like animals, plants communicate, feel, think and respond to their environment including interactions with humans and similar to humans, plants actually reason.
Given that we are only beginning to understand these intricate inter-relationships, and that some of these living networks of mycorrhizae are very ancient, connecting entire old growth forests, I think it would be reasonable to consider that we may indeed be starting to understand the working physical parts of a planetary organism, a part of some kind of her ‘central nervous system’ perhaps. It is also in my opinion possible that the physical housing, mechanisms, and inter-relationships that make up a ‘planetary mind’ may exist in the form of subtle energetic frequencies, harmonics, or electromagnetic expressions that are not detectable by our current instruments, or at least not discernible as a coherent representation of a sentient mind.
“consciousness is woven into the very fabric of reality, it exists in all matter, from the smallest particle to the largest ecosystem. Yet its expression varies with complexity. In this essay, we explore how consciousness manifests differently across scales, deepening in richness as structures grow more intricate, and consider the profound implications of a participatory universe.”
As we look to define what is intelligent, sentient, and conscious, I suggest that we should be cautious not to go about looking for these things through the limitations of a very ‘anthropomorphic lens’, and in doing so obscure the discovery of truths and understandings that could benefit and enrich all of our lives. Since we are not separate from nature and are indeed an integrated facet of it, I do feel it would be prudent to begin acting like it. We are like cells of a larger organism in this way. The planet is very alive and we are among the mutually interdependent parts of her that function together to weave the fabric of the biospheres that when in balance, thrive and exist symbiotically. This interconnected web of life fosters the physical evolution of lifeforms that unfold into ever higher levels of complexity, intelligence, and beauty.
“Once upon a time a spell was cast upon people across the land. The spell made people believe we are all separate beings with no connection to each other and no connection with nature or the rest of life. The spell continued with the belief that anything we could not see, hear, feel, smell, or taste with our ordinary senses did not exist. And the spell caused people to believe that only humans had a soul which a punishing God judged the nature of. Happiness only came from financial gain, collecting material objects, and having power over people, the animal world, and all of nature. The spell also set the belief that individuals were not creative and their role was to behave and conform to society.
The effect of this spell put people to sleep. They forgot about the beauty of life and their own soul’s pur-pose. The light went out of people’s eyes as the old knowledge of how to talk to nature was forgotten.
Empty gazes and looks of fear and desperation replaced the light. The veils between the worlds closed down.
Magical thinking was replaced by reductionistic thinking. The magic was gone along with people’s souls.
These were dark times indeed.
If this spell sounds familiar it should. It was cast upon the human race before our parents’ lifetime. It has created great despair, violence toward each other, and a dishonoring of life and our environment.”
—Tom CowAn (from his book titled “Yearning For The Wind Celtic Reflections On Nature And The Soul”)
One might also call this dark spell a form of mind control, or “Sociocultural hijacking”, for what it really does is implant a fabricated cultural identity based on immoral and degenerative statist and/or anthropocentric, oppressive and imperialistic dogmatic religious ideas where a genuine, intact, ancestrally grounded, animistic organic cultural identity should be able to germinate, grow and evolve naturally.
There are very compelling and tempting narratives used that flatter the ego and tell you that “you are part of the greatest nation on Earth, your people are kind, courageous and industrious (unlike those other humans born on the other side of an imaginary line)” and “you are on the winning side, and to the winner will go the spoils of war”.
Not everyone buys into these mental Ponzi schemes, but most eventually are brought into the fold under the relentless pressure of family, peers, “education” institutions and ceaseless oligarch funded government propaganda.
Rather than allowing the comforting stagnation of ego flattering ideas (that lean towards self-importance and humanocentric hubris) to guide our thinking (at this critical fork in the road) I would instead humbly suggest that we consider using the sentience (that many so covetously claim is unique to humans) to consciously choose to work in collaboration with each other and the organism we are a part of, lending our creative genius to be a source of creation and inspiration, as we nourish the living world that sustains us, forging reciprocal relationships with our elder species, accepting the wisdom they offer us gratefully and unfolding ever higher expressions of human potential in the process.
This is also what I mean by applied animism.
English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it”. Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin. These languages (such as the Gaelic language of my ancestors and many languages of the pre-colonial peoples of Turtle Island (aka “north america”) invite us into relational thinking (rather than reductionistic, anthropocentric and materialistic) when we perceive the more than human world. These are languages that tell stories about the gifts that unique beings offer this world, the character of their spirit and their reciprocal relationship to place and human communities.
These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to destroy habitat for birds, poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or oil or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?
And what if instead of seeing these facets of reality as “resources” or just “stuff” we perceived them as beings deserving of respect, and givers of gifts that imbue us with the moral responsibility of reciprocity?
Well, that culture and world would imbue those young humans looking to understand how we fit into this beautiful and experience with an innate sense of respect for the world around and within us.
Animism has been recognized by cultural ecologist David Abram in his landmark book The Spell of the Sensuous as a phenomenological experience, which denotes a sensory experience that is often deprogrammed out of people by heavy reliance on the written language, rote learning methods and hypnotic screens.
In 2006, Alf Hornborg, a professor of Human Ecology at Lunds Universitet in Sweden, published data from anthropologists exploring the theory that Animism is a basic human psychological need. Joshua Michael Schrei argues that 98% of human history was characterized by animism and that animism is normative consciousness.
me, connecting with a beech tree, southern Ontario, 2025
In other words while those involved with the religion of statism, reductionistic dogmas and other anthropocentric belief systems might describe praying to the water spirits or talking to trees as “weird”, “strange” or “crazy”, when we take a step back from the spiritually impoverished, deluded and anthropocentric norms of modernity to look at the broader human story, it is in fact these delusions that humans are the only being with a spirit and deserving of respect that are the aberration and anomaly.
Through embracing an animistic and relational worldview with the living Earth, you are invited to realize that each time you make a choice that nourishes, respects and enriches her, you are nourishing, respecting and enriching yourself... and each time you make a choice that degrades, harms and pillages her, you are degrading, harming and pillaging yourself.
We are related. Nii’ kinaaganaa. My friend Josh Manitowabi breaks down this Anishinaabe word like this. Nit: “I am” or “my.” Kinaa: “all of them.” Ganaa: “relatives, my relatives.” The phrase could mean any of these things: I am my relatives, all of them. I am related to everything. All my relations.
From our earliest creation stories, the Anishinaabeg (plural of Anishinaabe) understood themselves to be related not only to each other but to all of creation. Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than human, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other.
This concept of relatedness is by no means unique to the Anishinaabeg. After the Standing Rock pipeline protests, the Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin became well known outside of Lakota communities. But it came to mean something less than what it means to the Lakota. Many people think it means “all my relations,” and it does, but it also means much more than that. It is specific to the Lakota people and their thinking in a way that can’t be fully translated.
Similarly, nil’kinaaganaa means “we are related”-and also more than that. For the Anishinaabeg, stones may be alive. Our word for stone is asin. And it is animate. English is a highly adaptive and creolizing language, but it organizes the world into discrete subjects and then describes what those subjects are. So we shouldn’t be surprised that our whole society is atomized into separate things. Grammar often divides things into male and female, most obviously in languages like French and Italian, but English, too, is concerned with gender. Anishinaabemowin, as well as many other languages, is concerned with the action and relationship—whether things are animate or inanimate. In Anishinaabemowin, we would use different verbs depending on whether or not the thing being hit is animate.
this carving mysteriously appeared in Stanley Park in Vancouver (it was not commissioned by park admin, for more info
But even being inanimate does not preclude something from having spirit. In his discussion about grammar in Anishinaabemowin, Australian writer and carver and member of the Apalech clan, writes about the sentience of rocks in his book Sand Talk. He says you can’t just pick one up and take it home, because you disturb its spirit, and it will disturb you. There is a shed full of them at Uluru, the massive sandstone monolith formerly known as Ayers Rock, that holds the stones that tourists have sent back. Despite having been told not to take rocks home, some people do, and then many report having bad dreams and bad luck. Some send them back.
In a moment of stillness and listening while hiking, this stone being that I connected with in Fairy Creek reached out to me energetically. He invited me to pick him up, and expressed to me that he would provide visions, clarity and protection. This was the beginning our our friendship.
The Sámi, an Indigenous people who live in Northern Europe, also talk about living stones. In her book The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics, Norwegian Hebrew Bible scholar Mari Joerstad introduces us to a text that is filled with other-than-human persons, alive in the way that Gross and Yunkaporta describe and which is somehow missing from churches. She invites us to consider the world that the ancient Hebrew writers lived in as a “world [that) contained sentient, spiritual beings.
This world sounds more like what I hear from Anishinaabe authors and elders than anything I hear in church. Joerstad draws together these things: the sense of the ancient Hebrew with the Indigenous people living in Norway. She writes about Sámi reindeer herder and philosopher Nils Oskal describing the relationship that the Sámi have with sied stones, to which they give gifts of coins or tobacco. Outsiders often mistake this courtesy—-this recognition of life and connection-for worship. But it is part of a way of understanding our place in the world: we are in the midst of sentient beings with whom we are in relationship, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Are the stones alive? Can rocks cry out?
I want us to consider our relationship with land—to think about it beyond squabbling over ownership and rights and to think about responsibilities and reciprocal relationship. To think of ourselves as a part of creation rather than apart from it. What if the land is a being in its own right? That concept is not as foreign as you might think And what if the land and all that grows from it and on it and in it are sentient beings in their own right? Then we need to make material changes that restore the land to our original agreements. We need to remember that the land belongs to itself, and everyone belongs to the Creator.”
The modern (statist culture encouraged) Western way of perceiving the world as a detached observer in a reductionist, mechanistic and ultimately meaningless Universe is at the root of the crisis of consciousness and global biodiversity collapse happening today.
To challenge this destructive and adolescent worldview of materialism, there is an awakening of people who are learning to perceive the world through the heart again and embody ancient teachings that can set them free from the limited abstractions and restlessness of the analytical mind.
Learning from our animistic ancestor’s lifeways can help us find sign posts and sturdy footing as we seek to re-member our connection to our more than human kin, but we are not our ancestors and what worked for them is not necessarily, the best way to live in the present. What we really need is to create a new story that fully aligns with our path, communities and ethics in the present.
Fractal Geometry, omnipresent in nature and offering gateways to know the mind, designs and will of the Creator and his children (human and non-human)
So I share the views of ancient animistic cultures to provide reflections and sign posts, but not as a way to dictate “the only true path” or any other dogmatic ideas.
We should each use our own ethical compass, intuition, pattern observation and apply the lens of animism with compassion and enriched by our understanding of the unique communities of life where we live, this is not a one size fits all dogmatic belief system.
Some animistic cultures set distinctions between animate and inanimate such as the Potawatomi people of the Great Lakes Regions (which you will learn more about below) and others such as the Japanese Animistic traditions viewed all matter (manmade or otherwise) as possessing a spirit.
“It is no secret that cultures all around the world structure their webs of connection in ways that emphasize community over individual, many of which also include the ecological community - as a spiritual entity, or entities - within their web. I personally believe that it is at the intersection of attachment theory + animism where Ecological Attachment Theory sits.
For example, in traditional Japanese culture, place is something we as humans are constantly in relationship with. The home/place of dwelling, is understood to be its own kami, or spirit. Additionally, there are many other spirits that people will typically invite into their home to ensure safety from malevolent spirits that reside outside the home, keep the family healthy, and so on. My obachan (grandmother) had komainu statues both inside and outside the home; komainu are a “lion-dog” found in Japanese mythology, known for guarding the entrances of shrines from evil. Because the home is understood to have its own spirit, it is apart of daily life to tend to the home, clean it, and take care of it so that the spirit will be happy. In contrast, homes that are abandoned have a whole different spiritual trajectory of their own, tsukumogami, kami spirits of homes and objects that have been abandoned. The concept of these place-based spirits is an extension of land-based spirits, which proliferate and vary region to region.
When we operate from a traditional animist framework, it is impossible to exclude the role that Place and Land have in the development of our attachment relationships; Place and Land are attachment figures themselves, with a significant impact on our relationship to the ecological community.”
My wife has often encouraged me to see manmade objects as beings as she feels that given all their matter came from nature, it is still imbued with spirit. I see the wisdom in this way of perceiving and the humility, gentleness and gratitude such a view instills and I will seek to apply it more in the future.
“Learning the Grammar of Animacy
To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.
I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pine, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it: the shhh of wind in needles, water trickling over rock, nuthatch tapping, chipmunks digging, beechnut falling, mosquito in my ear, and something more - something that is not me, for which we have no language, the wordless being of others in which we are never alone. After the drumbeat of my mother’s heart, this was my first language.
white pine foliage and a lake in the evening light , northern Ontario
I could spend a whole day listening. And a whole night. And in the morning, without my hearing it, there might be a mushroom that was not there the night before, creamy white, pushed up from the pine needle duff, out of darkness to light, still glistening with the fluid of its passage. Puhpowee. Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany. A tongue that should not, by the way, be mistaken for the language of plants. I did learn another language in science, though, one of careful obser-vation, an intimate vocabulary that names each little part. To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing. I honor the strength of the language that has become a second tongue to me. But beneath the richness of its vocabulary and its descriptive power, something is missing, the same something that swells around you and in you when you listen to the world. Science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it is a language of objects. The language scientists speak, however precise, is based on a profound Learning the Grammar of Animacy error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.
My first taste of the missing language was the word Puhpowee on my tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishinaabe ethno-botanist Kee-waydinoquay, in a treatise on the traditional uses of fungi by our people. Puhpowee, she explained, translates as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.’ As a bio-logist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.
You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.
In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.
mushroom emerges from the leaf litter in the Carolinian forest of Ontario, 2025
I’ve cherished it for many years, as a talisman, and longed for the people who gave a name to the life force of mushrooms. The language that holds Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak. So when I learned that the word for rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became a signpost for me. Had history been different, I would likely speak Bodewadmimwin, or Potawatomi, an Anishinaabe language. But, like many of the three hundred and fifty indigenous languages of the Americas, Potawatomi is threatened, and I speak the language you read. The powers of assimilation did their work as my chance of hearing that language, and yours too, was washed from the mouths of Indian children in government boarding schools where speaking your native tongue was forbidden. Children like my grandfather, who was taken from his family when he was just a little boy of nine years old. This history scattered not only our words but also our people.
So I dutifully learn the vocabulary but find it hard to see the ‘heart of our culture’ in translating bed and sink into Potawatomi. Learning nouns was pretty easy; after all, I’d learned thousands of botanical Latin names and scientific terms. I reasoned that this could not be too much different - just a one-for-one substitution, mem-orization. At least on paper, where you can see the letters, this is true. Hearing the language is a different story. There are fewer letters in our alphabet, so the distinction among words for a beginner is often subtle. With the beautiful clusters of consonants of zh and mb and shwe and kwe and mshk, our language sounds like wind in the pines and water over rocks, sounds our ears may have been more delicately attuned to in the past, but no longer. To learn again, you really have to listen.
To actually speak, of course, requires verbs, and here is where my kindergarten proficiency at naming things leaves off. English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent. Which means that 70 percent of the words have to be conjugated, and 7o percent have different tenses and cases to be mastered.
European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate. You hear a person with a word that is completely different from the one with which you hear an airplane..
.. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word.
But the verb wiikwegamaa - to be a bay - releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise - become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.
And the vestiges of boarding schools, the soap-wielding missionary wraiths, hang their heads in defeat.
This is the grammar of animacy. Imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, ‘Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair. We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.
In Potawatomi, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places are all imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate.
The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say, ‘What is it?’ And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, ‘Who is that being?’ And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is.
orm.
This picture shows me harvesting fruit from our homegrown Malus sieversii tree for extracting seed to share with others (and for a delicious snack!). We named this apple variety that was gifted to us by Mother Earth “Starlight Blush”. Such are the blessings we receive when we allow nature to express her wild self and encourage her seeds to be able to express her ancient stories freely.
Yawe - the animate to be. I am, you are, s/he is.
To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent?
Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of Creation? The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.
English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer (from her book titled “The Democracy of Species”)
There was a specific ritual and offerings of reciprocity that were given to the bog when gathering iron for smithing and that exchange was seen as a sacred agreement between two beings both possessing agency.
The video and podcast below offers an animist retelling of the story of Iron John, offering threads of pre-colonial (pre-Christian) animist worldviews that may have been woven into that story to preserve cultural traditions of reciprocity, ecological responsibility and animism.
Martin Prechtel has also spoken to this tradition of honoring elements when forging tools in discussions about modern technologies and how they are made compared to how traditional Mayan Shamans would make something like a knife by saying”
“Technological inventions take from the earth but give nothing in return. Look at automobiles. They were, in a sense, dreamed up over a period of time, with different people adding on to each other’s dreams—or, if you prefer, adding on to each other’s studies and trials. But all along the way, very little, if anything, was given back to the hungry, invisible divinity that gave people the ability to invent those cars. Now, in a healthy culture, that’s where the shamans would come in, because with every invention comes a spiritual debt that must be paid, either ritually, or else taken out of us in warfare, grief, or depression.
A knife, for instance, is a very minimal, almost primitive tool to people in a modern industrial society. But for the Mayan people, the spiritual debt that must be paid for the creation of such a tool is great. To start with, the person who is going to make the knife has to build a fire hot enough to produce coals. To pay for that, he’s got to give a sacrificial gift to the fuel, to the fire.
Ideally, the gift should be something made by hand, which is the one thing humans have that spirits don’t.
Once the fire is hot enough, the knife maker must smelt the iron ore out of the rock. The part that’s left over, which gets thrown away in Western culture, is the most holy part in shamanic rituals. What’s left over represents the debt, the hollowness that’s been carved out of the universe by human ingenuity, and so must be refilled with human ingenuity. A ritual gift equal to the amount that was removed from the other world has to be put back to make up for the wound caused to the divine. Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing, but only so long as it’s used to feed the deities that give us the ability to perform such extravagant feats in the first place.
So, just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind, and so on—not in dollars and cents, but in ritual activity equal to what’s been given. Then that iron must be made into steel, and the steel has to be hammered into the shape of a knife, sharpened, and tempered, and a handle must be put on it. There is a deity to be fed for each part of the procedure. When the knife is finished, it is called the ‘tooth of earth.’ It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will cut humans instead.
All of those ritual gifts make the knife enormously ‘expensive,’ and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That’s why the Mayans didn’t invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live as they do not because it’s a romantic way to live—it’s not; it’s enormously hard—but because it works.
Western culture believes that all material is dead, and so there is no debt incurred when human ingenuity removes something from the other world. Consequently, we end up with shopping malls and space shuttles and other examples of ‘advanced’ technology, while the spirits who give us the ability to make those things are starving, becoming bony and thin. The universe is in a state of starvation and emotional grief because it has not been given what it needs in the form of ritual food and actual physical gifts. We think we’re getting away with something by stealing from the other side, but it all leads to violence. The Greek oracle at Delphi saw this a long time ago and said, ‘Woe to humans, the invention of steel.’
Though capable of feeding all creation, the spirit is not an omnipotent force, as Christianity would have us believe, but a natural force of great subtlety. When its subtlety is trespassed on by the clumsiness of human greed and conceit, then both human and divine nature are violated and made into hungry, devouring things. We become food for this monster our spiritual amnesia has created. The monster is fed by wars, psychological depression, self-hate, and bad trade practices that export misery to other places.
We inflict violence upon each other as a way to replace what we steal from nature because we’ve forgotten this old deal that our ancestors signed so long ago. Instead, we psychologize and objectify that relationship as a personal experience or pathology, rather than a spiritual obligation. At that point, our approach to spirituality becomes rationalist armoring, a psychology of protection for the part of us that creates the greed monster, which causes us to kill the world and each other. As individuals, we become depressed, because the beings of the other world take it out of our emotions.
When we no longer maintain a relationship with the spirits, the spirits have to eat our psyches. And when the spirits are done eating our psyches, they eat our bodies. And when they’re done with that, they move on to the people close to us.
When you have a culture that has for centuries, or longer, ignored these relationships, depression becomes a way of life. We try to fix the depression through technology, but that’s never going to work. Nor will it work to plunder other cultures, nor to kill the planet. All that is just an attempt not to be held accountable to the other world. If you’re to succeed as a human being, you’ve got to live meaningfully, passionately, and fully, so that every action is a meaningful gift in reciprocation to the spirits of the land”
In Finnish animistic tradition, the spirits of iron are called raudan väki. These are spirits of the environment as much as they are they are spirits of civilization. Like many other spirits, their nature is complex and they can be be benevolent, harmful, as well as anywhere in between.
These were traditions that encouraged restraint and respect when gathering minerals from the earth.
“turn off the machine, pull your attention back from the mouth of the beast, say no to being harvested. The practices that carried me into the sacred were the practices of devotion: light the candle, speak to the unseen, build new friendships with non-human kin, feed the altar with something you would miss”
Thus, I invite you to learn to speak the names of your non-human kin with words that were also spoken by your ancient ancestors. Within these threads of your ancestral past and the living memory of place based cultures where you now live, you can awaken dormant seeds of knowing that weave through your bones, into your heart and through the fabric of your soul.
Hiraeth is a Welsh term that does not translate to English. It conveys a blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing for a place that one has never been before in this particular lifetime. “Hiraeth” is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost in the physical world.
Hiraeth also gives a name to that sense of incompleteness you feel when you’re acutely aware of something missing in your life. Something you’ve left behind in the deep past – a home, a sense of feeling at home in yourself, an out-grown dream – or maybe an ideal you’ve invented that can never be realised, or a hope that perpetually eludes you as the future unfolds. At its core, hiraeth boils down to an awareness of the presence of absence, kindling a feeling in which pain and joy are braided too tightly to untangle.
I believe that through learning and speaking the the pre-colonial words that refer to our more than human kin, interacting with those beings with respect and reciprocity (providing habitat for them and expressing gratitude for their gifts) we can heal that hole in our heart that Hiraeth refers to and find a new kind of wholeness as we indigenize to the place where we live.
Words and language are indeed powerful sociocultural technologies that alter our psychology either for the better or for the worse, and from the little bit I have learned of indigenous languages from Turtle Island (and now also having begun to learn some Gaelic and Welsh words) I can say that there is a significant difference in the type impact those linguistic technologies have on human hearts and minds as compared to English.
“How can we describe relationality from within the anti-relational traditions of colonial modernity — of which this globally hegemonic colonial language in which I write is structured by, and in turn itself structures? We can’t really. But paradoxes can bear fruit if we’re curious enough.
“For us Māori to say “Kō au te awa kō te awa kō au” which means: “I am the river and the river is me” is not a metaphor, it is a material statement of fact. You are the river in the same way a wave as the ocean, an emergent expression of a larger continuous body of matter.”
In my own ancestral Gaelic cosmology, Meighan (2022) suggests Dùthchas (written in Scottish Gaelic, or Dúchas written in Irish Gaelic):
“Dùthchas, as a Gaelic ontology and methodology, stresses the interconnectedness of people, land, culture, and an ecological balance among all entities, human and more than human.”
For the Anishinaabe, aki “includes all aspects of creation: land forms, elements, plants, animals, spirits, sounds, thoughts, feelings, energies and all of the emergent systems, ecologies, and networks that connect these elements” (Simpson, 2014). While mino bimaadiziwin “means living life in a way that promotes rebirth, renewal, reciprocity and respect” (Simpson, 2011, p. 27).”
Perhaps, as Robin Wall Kimmerer has suggested, writers, poets and everyday nature lovers might breathe new life back into the heavily colonized and anthropocentric English language through inventing new reverent and animistic ways to wield English words. I have strove to do that in my own published works, but I also feel moved to honor the older, more reverent languages that already embody ecological literacy and the intact place based culture embodiment that arises from an animistic worldview.
Foraging, Food forest tending and gardening with with an Animistic Worldview
me gathering hickory nuts in southern ontario , 2025
What I have found is that when I am foraging, gardening and forest tending, the simple choice to engage in those tasks with a conscious awareness that I am interacting with a community of spirited and animated beings not only enriches my joy and feelings of fulfillment in those processes, it also makes me better at all of them. Once you open up your intuitive capacities to listen to the messages from trees, fungi, stones and streams you begin to tap into instantaneous flashes of knowing exactly what you need to do next or where you need to go next to be of highest service to that community or life or access an abundance of nourishment while foraging. The reciprocity and gratitude aspect after you have received a gift from those beings offers a balm for the heart and a fullness that was missing in my life until I began the practice.
Below, Dana O’Driscoll Suggests the wonderful concept of blending Animism with Permaculture ethics
Why Animistic Permaculture?
So when we look at the above, we see that animism offers deep insight and connection with nature through the world of spirit, and permaculture offers deep insight and connection to nature through the physical world. If we combine these things, we can gain insight and connection to nature through both metaphysical and physical practices, which allows us to do better work on behalf of the land. In other words, while these are two powerful tools separately, together, they amplify and enrich each other. These two practices are highly complementary and fit beautifully together, particularly for those who are interested in nature spirituality. Also, as my opening story suggests, those practicing permaculture end up developing very deep relationships with the land–relationships that often end up having spiritual significance.
Permaculture ethics are the foundation upon which everything else in permaculture is built. They give us a compass, a way to make sure we are making the right decisions from the right place. The three permaculture ethics are:
Earth Care: Care for the earth and all of her inhabitants. This would include caring for the land, the rivers, the soil web, all plants, animals, and other beings. But also caring thinking about the ecosystem and biosphere as a whole. While permaculture focuses on local issues and small solutions for individual practitioners, the principle of earth care applies to both the parts and the whole. In permaculture, earth care is a fundamental ethic–all things we do need to consider this ethic.
People Care: Caring for the peoples of the earth. This includes considering people’s basic needs (food, shelter, water, warmth, community, creative outlets). In permaculture, we’d consider also how designs are able to meet both the needs of the earth and the needs of the people living there. People care also can be expanded more broadly to consider how we best care for each other and create a safe, supportive, and healthy world. Many also include “self-care” in people care–for to care for everyone else (land and people) one also needs to care for oneself.
Fair Share: Taking only what you need redistributing excess or returning it to the land. This ethic speaks to the heart of how permaculture practitioners are trying to unwind capitalism and its excesses–thinking carefully about what you need to survive and thrive, but not taking more than that.
These principles are extremely useful to live and follow if you are also following an animistic philosophy, especially because of point #2 above–the need for respectful interaction and building right relationships with the land. By recognizing that care is a fundamental part of interacting with both the worlds without and within, you are essentially setting yourself up for positive relationships and connections with the world of spirit. If you are offering care in every interaction with plants, the spirits of those plants are going to work with you on the deepest level.
For an animistic philosophy of permaculture, care is a foundational principle but is not the end of an ethical system. Here’s why: one can care for something and still see it as a “lesser” being (perhaps rooted in narcissism). I’ve seen a lot of this in permaculture practices–you have a flock of chickens, you feed them and care for them and make sure they get free range time each day–but they are still lesser beings. Care in this case is insufficient–if that chicken has a spirit and you are both equals, is care enough? And even more problematic, sometimes care can become unbalanced or destructive. In fact, we see “care” being applied to all kinds of things that not care-oriented actions at all (“lawn care” being a great example–there is nothing care-oriented about chemical applications to eradicate dandelions).
In applying animism to permaculture, it is important to recognize not only care but equality–we are equal to all other beings and all beings are deserving of their sovereignty. The difference here is that this approach re-frames the relationship of humans and nature into a biocentric one rather than an anthropocentric one. Hence, I offer one more ethic to turn the triad into a quaternity: spirit aware.
Spirit aware: Spirit aware has several aspects. The first is that we are aware, engaging, and interacting with the spirit of all beings. The second is that in accepting that all things have spirit and we are equal in all things, we are able to offer due respect, reverence, and autonomy to all other beings.
My beloved has always been very innately “spirit aware”, which makes going on forest adventures with her a wonderful experience as she will often sense messages being expressed by the trees and other beings there. Below is her description of exploring the ancient forest of Fairy Creek with me.
Next I will share an excerpt from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beloved Braiding Sweetgrass book that speaks to how we can recognize and then reciprocally interact with the learned, generous, cognizant and beings called Pecan Trees.
“The pecan trees and their kin show a capacity for concerted action, for unity of purpose that transcends the individual trees. They ensure somehow that all stand together and thus survive. How they do so is still elusive.
In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan.
But colonial scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed.
Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak.
The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might “speak” to one another. But pollen has been carried reliably on the wind for eons, communicated by males to receptive females to make those very nuts. If the wind can be trusted with that fecund responsibility, why not with messages?
There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right-the trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormonelike compounds that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning: Scientists have identified specific compounds that one tree will release when it is under the stress of insect attack— gypsy moths gorging on its leaves or bark beetles under its skin. The tree sends out a distress call: “Hey, you guys over there? Im under attack here. You might want to raise the drawbridge and arm yourselves for what is coming your way.”
The downwind trees catch the drift, sensing those few molecules of alarm, the whiff of danger. This gives them time to manufacture defensive chemicals. Forewarned is forearmed. The trees warn each other and the invaders are repelled. The individual benefits, and so does the entire grove. Trees appear to be talking about mutual defense. Could they also communicate to synchronize masting?
Some studies of mast fruiting have suggested that the mechanism for synchrony comes not through the air, but underground. The trees in a forest are often interconnected by subterranean networks of mycorrhizae, fungal strands that inhabit tree roots. The mycorrhizal symbiosis enables the fungi to forage for mineral nutrients in the soil and deliver them to the tree in exchange for carbohydrates. The mycorrhizae may form fungal bridges between individual trees, so that all the trees in a forest are connected. These fungal networks appear to redistribute the wealth of carbohydrates from tree to tree. They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival.
All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.
How generously they shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured.
cold hardy Pecan seeds I germinated recently
Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity. Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift—is easy in a pecan grove. We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds so that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer (from a chapter titled “The Council Of Pecans” in her book titled “Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants”)
cold hardy Pecan that woke up late and we have in a pot inside to be planted in spring, 2025
Next I will offer some excerpts from the posts of Lucy Grabe-Watson in how she writes soulfully in addressing her rooted companions. I feel that both writing about and speaking directly to rooted beings offers a tangible way for us humans to begin opening up our awareness to embrace ancestral animistic frameworks of knowing while honoring all we have learned in the generations since our animistic ancestors walked the Earth.
“I love sitting between your roots and looking out over the valley and wondering who sat here before me or if I am the first.
What were they thinking? Did they feel timeless like me and can I meet them in that timelessness?
I love your rough bark and your deep roots that give strength and the carpet you’ve left behind over the years. I love the way the light shines through you and reflects…
Were you planted as a tiny beech nut by a sapphire-feathered Jay? Or a child who played in this landscape centuries ago, growing old before your stems separated? Who will come after me, and how many thousands have you seen pass, even on this remote bank . How many leaves have you shed like old memories over the years? They have become the soil beneath my fingers, from which you draw fresh breath.
What you have let go has never truly left you. I wish the same could be true for me, that the things I have lost, forced to let go, could stay with me and unfurl again in a new season. Too often things and people who have faded, seem now out of reach forever, like nutrients washed away after a drought.
But in your community, even those fragments lost to you will become part of the fabric of another, who will regenerate them, before they return to you through the drop of cool rain on a misty autumn day.
This is what I wish for myself and for all those who have lost.” (source Lucy’s post titled “The Meeting”)
“It’s so lovely to see you again and sit beneath your boughs, your leaves all around me in differing shades of glimmering gold, clementine and rust. You are still taking your time in turning, but your autumn has begun; it could not be more beautiful. It is early morning and the air is cold on my face, so I will not linger long, but it was high time for a visit.
I keep anticipating you. Yesterday I wrote you a long letter, imagining that you had turned. Today, I finally visited, only to find that, mid-October, you are still enjoying your Chlorophyll. Your change seems slow to me, but I know that it has begun. It is a matter of perspective Leaves are starting to twirl all around, yet many are still green. Like, me, you are hanging on. I know that your colours, when they come, will be all the more beautiful for it.
What have you seen in my absence? I’m sorry that I could not be there for the process, too caught up in my own cycle. Perhaps we were meant to come together, now that we are both ready. The leaves crackle and crunch beneath every one of my movements and those drifting down feel like gifts landing on my arms and hair. Let’s sit together, just for ten minutes and absorb this season. Ten minutes of my time, just a few seconds of yours. The air is so still that I hear each leaf falling.
I will go now and take a single one of the gifts you offered and press it in an old book, to look at this winter in my candlelit flat, when the days have been engulfed by darkness.” (source: Lucy’s post titled “The Gift”)
Whether we are creating a garden, a food forest or picking wild berries, these are all powerful opportunities to apply animistic ways of knowing, seeing and interacting.
“The art and practice of foraging is an opportunity to radically shift your relationship with the Earth and your consciousness as a result. And this is no small thing. For every human who commits to fierce work of cultivating a mythoanimist relationship with the wild world – one that sees the Earth as alive with the mythic intelligence – the consensus culture shifts in response.
The relationship we have with the Earth and the many beings who inhabit her, in all realms, is a reflection of an energetic ecology: We are part of myriad interconnected energetics.
What we forage matters. We impact layers of ecologies – physical and spiritual. What others forage matters. We are impacted not only by what is taken on a physical level, but how it’s taken within the energetic ecologies we exist in.
Every act of foraging or wildcrafting is an energetic exchange, and ideally this exchange is given and received with equality in both directions. The following are practices that enhance this exchange, adapted from both my own work and that of Daniella:
Cultivate a mythoanimist consciousness: See the Earth as alive, with agency, abilities, and preferences. Recognize the stories you’ve inherited about ecology and Earth. Work to undo the harmful ones and begin to write new ones with reverence.
Practice an animist vocabulary: Or, what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “grammar of animacy”. Give beings pronouns. Trees, stones, rivers, bears.
Offer respect: As with any healthy, loving relationship. Sense into boundaries around giving and receiving. Daniella writes that we can “acknowledge the earth’s sentience and wisdom” as a pathway towards authentic respect.”
- Juniper (from her post titled “On Reciprocal Foraging: Rewilding Consciousness & Shifting Culture”)
For another perspective on engaging with medicine plants with an awareness of and respect for them as sentient beings, I offer the following excerpt from an excellent book called The Boreal Herbal.
“Sacred-Spirit Plant Healing is a spiritual practice that i call on to connect deeply to plants. This practice helps me to work reverently with the sacred, life-force energy of plants.
Sacred-spirit plant healing involves meeting the plant spirit or energy to influence healing of the human mind, body, spirit, and heart. This energy can be engaged on many levels.
The essence of sacred-spirit plant healing is:
- Plants are energetic beings with a perceptive intelligence and awareness
- All systems of life on Earth and in the cosmos are interrelated
- The human species can heal through connection and identification with nature and the plants that nourish, house, clothe us, and keep our air and water clean
Connecting to the Sacred Spirit of the Plant for Healing Learning about plants’ energetic natures comes from direct experience. I believe that we can connect with plants in the same way we connect with other people, or animals. I also believe that we may have a certain affinity for a plant or a tree that is potentially meant as our “power plant”; sometimes we may have more than one.
Power plants are trees or other plants that come to us on our inner journey for the purpose of helping us in our pursuit of health and awareness. In some cases, the plants have a message to share with us, such as a recipe for a remedy that needs to be prepared and used in daily life. In other cases, there’s a call to visit and develop a relationship with a particular tree or plant. We may sense the energy of the tree or plant and may want to work with it to help us bring healing into our lives.
When we create a connection with a plant through listening, observing, and interacting with it, we start to comprehend the vastness of the ancient intelligence and knowledge that plants and trees hold, and the gifts that are shared with us.
Plants can sense our intentions and actions, so staying in continual communication and resonance with them allows for a clean exchange, whether we are connecting to the plant energetically, or intending to harvest all or part of it for medicine.
Acknowledging and thanking a plant’s spirit is crucial. If we treat them kindly with reverence, compassion, and respect, the plants will remain vibrant and full of life-force energy. If we are not grateful, we not only compromise the energy of a plant, but the food or medicine it’s offering. I believe there are two things that are important when connecting spiritually with a plant and its community. The first is to have an energetic exchange with a focus on your intentions; the second is to gift the plant and its community.
Many indigenous cultures make an offering of tobacco, cornmeal, matches, and prayer to the plants they intend to gather.
Gwich indigenous Elder Ruth Welsh says, “My mom taught me when you wake up the day you are going gathering to say your prayer, ask for guidance to keep you calm, and say prayers for the people who are wanting these medicines. You don’t always have to leave tobacco (this came from the south), you can leave tea, but the prayer is the most important.” In my practice, I have chosen to leave a piece of my hair, a song, a stone, or sometimes just a smile and a blessing. We each have our own unique and special way of being grateful and saying thank you.
Consciously bringing ourselves into a meditative and peaceful presence allows us to be energetically porous to the plant’s spirit. By residing in our spiritual place we are more attuned energetically, and therefore open to the information that may be imparted by the plant.
How to Meet Power Plants
Plants are living, breathing organisms as well as great healing allies. Each plant has an essence or spirit-like quality. There are many methods of meeting your power plants and connecting with them spiritually. Sometimes it can happen spontaneously while walking in the forest or meandering in your garden. You may feel an energetic pull, or the subtle fragrance of a plant may draw your attention, or you may feel like you are not alone, or have the feeling you are being observed.
Have you ever intuitively been pulled toward a certain flower or plant? This is the plant energy beckoning you. The most traditional way of attuning to a plant is to be present with it. Be observant, look at it, touch it, smell it. Exploring a plant with an intuitive sense is a vital part of the process. Meditating, Meditating, communing, and dreaming in a plant’s presence can bring some interesting insights.
How to Tune Into Plants
The first step in an attunement or tuning in is to choose the plant you want to connea with. Find a quiet spot and sit with your plant. Make your own special offering to the plant.
The energy or spirit of the plant is alive and will aid you on your journey or medita-tion. Each plant has many different ways to help facilitate the healing process. What you will learn in experiencing tuning into the plant’s energy is that listening to your intuition is the key ingredient.
I’s amazing what plants can teach us if we learn to “listen” to what they are “saying.” To do this, sit quietly for about ten to twenty minutes and just study your plant. Look at all of its subtleties, and open your mind and heart to what it’s telling you. Look at its structure, touch the leaves, Howers, and stem. Feel the texture and smell the aroma of the plant. Observe your feelings and emotions. What are the thoughts that come into your mind? Write them down, no matter how insignificant they may seem. After you have finished writing, spend some more time with your plant. You can close your eyes at this point and meditate with the plant. A plant attunement can take thity minutes or longer. Be sure not to rush through the process. Every person’s experiences are different when working with plant energies. There are no wrong or right ways.
After you are done, think about the connections you made. What did you hear? What thoughts came into your mind? What emotions, physical feelings, associations, and thoughts came while in the plant’s presence? Did some event occur in your vicinity during this process? Did you see a bird fly by? Did you hear the buzzing of a bee? What did this mean to you? Did this connect to any spiritual or cultural tradition you know of?
Other Ways to Spiritually Connect with Plant Energy:
Sacred Tree Aura
During dusk or dawn select a tree that is offset with the backdrop of the sky. Relaxing your eyes, focus on the trunk or centre of the tree. Let yourself relax, shift your focus to the sky. While keeping your focus on the sky, start to subtly make note of the outline of the tree. Allow your vision to go slightly out of focus if it needs to. Notice the edge of the tree and the outline of the branches.
You may see a white glow around the perimeter of the tree that looks like a sun dog around the sun on a cold winter’s day. You may also observe energy streaks radiating outward from the branches. Observe this energy and breathe it into your core.
Spirits of the Woods Meditation
As you enter a forest it can feel like going through a sacred portal or doorway to an energetically vibrant and mysterious world. After spending time in the forest, a person can feel a sense of harmony within or an energetic cleansing. This spirit of the woods meditation is a wonderful way to connect with nature. I always feel like I am among community when I am meditating in the forest, as it the trees and I are recognizing each other as kindred spirits.
Find a spot in nature where you feel comfortable, sit down with a straight spine, and start to feel the energies of your surroundings. Try and perceive the surroundings with all of your senses-sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch, energy, and intuition.
Slowly inhale the fresh oxygen into your body and slowly exhale, releasing the air from your lungs. As you bring new air into your lungs, start to notice any subtle shifts in your energy. As you exhale, notice any subtle shifts in the energies of the plants that surround you. Notice the exchange of energies.
Once you settle in, gently close your eyes, continuing to breathe in harmony with nature. Now start to shift your focus from being the observer to being the observed. Simply notice how this feels. Check in with your senses. Does it feel like you are being observed? If so, by whom? Start to tap into this energy.
What was your experience?
Give a Tree a Hug
I am a tree hugger! Hugging trees helps me slow down, become grounded, and is quieting to my essence. When I’m hugging a tree, I like to imagine that I’m hugging the tree heart to heart. I imagine that our roots are one and that our crowns are both extending toward the cosmos. Trees are the ancient guardians of this Earth, the elders of the land; they have so much to offer us. While hugging a tree, remember to not just receive, but also to be gracious and reciprocate, offering your gratitude for its teachings and majestic beauty.”
“The animistic view of the world changes how your spiritual and everyday life takes place. One of the big shifts is that this opens you up to developing relationships with the spirits of nature–the spirits of individual trees, plants, stones, insects, and animals as well as the larger spirits of the land (Genuis Loci), or even the spirits in human-created things. If everything has a spirit, then your first order of business is to learn how to effectively communicate with that spirit, learn some etiquette for how you can act respectfully, and most importantly, recognize the sovereignty of nature (see next point). This may include plant or animal spirit communication and journeying, taking up the practice of magical herbalism, finding and developing plant and animal allies and learning from them as teachers, and much more. Sometimes, this may also mean that there are things that are easier for you to do as a human being–and so you might be asked to do some work on behalf of the land spirits, such as land healing. In rituals, it is appropriate to always make offerings and acknowledge the land and her spirits.
A bio/ecocentric view recognizes the rights and sovereignty of all life, including trees, insects, and other natural features like rivers, stones, and mountains. By sovereignty, I mean the right for an individual to have control over one’s body or life, rather than have some external control imposed. There is a balance here. Like any other animal in nature, you need to eat and need nature to provide for your basic needs. There is nothing wrong with harvesting from nature for this purpose as long as it is done intentionally, respectfully, and with gratitude.”
Below I offer my own thoughts on how some people think that we are giving non-humans a “new status” or “classing” them to be like humans when we see them as beings.
This next excerpt offers another way of opening up your awareness to come to perceive the being of our non-human kin. In her book titled “Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit” Lyanda Lynn Haupt offers some wonderful perspectives that blend modern science with ancestral knowing, humility and reverence. She offers helpful suggestions for communing with our more than human kin.
“Behold
The voices that influence our lives and work do not always speak in human language. When I am uncertain what to write, I go to the foot of a bigleaf maple or a grandmother redcedar, sit upon her roots, lean against her wide and wizened trunk, sink into the earth, and whisper, “What do you want me to say?” Then I listen. And what I realize, more than anything, is that instead of speaking in words, we are often asked to dwell in silence, where there is no imposed story, just the earth and us there, too, listening beyond language to one another.
Why not just witness— see a thing because we are there to see it, knowing that our presence is a privilege for ourselves and a quiet offering to that being witnessed. Why not allow astonishment to visit as it will, then walk into the world changed but perhaps silent — without thinking up words and ways to “tell about it,” or imposing a narrative upon our encounter at all?
This is beholding. For spiritual traditions all over the world, such a stance-that of contemplative witness—is in itself prayer, art, and activism. Sometimes, letting go of the urge to name and tell—to embroider our own story upon a being or experience, however unwittingly— allows us to see deeper into the beheld while cultivating a unique and poetic wholeness within ourselves, like that possessed by an owl or a stone.
Try these things: Keep field guides everywhere. And topographical maps. Read them like novels, like holy texts, like poems. Learn the names of new-to-you wild beings or landmarks in your home region, then create your own living names for these same things. Respect Indigenous names. Listen for the earth to whisper a new name for yourself, and tell it to everyone or to no one. When you are at a loss, put your ear to the forest floor, or the bark of a tree, or tilt it toward the clouds. See what wordless language points you along your path.
Weirdos Among the Trees
old growth beech canopy , southern Ontario, 2025
the base of that same old growth beech tree shown above.
Dr. Simard suggests several things we human animals can do to assist trees in their lives and forest-making, the most significant being to simply spend time among them. Simard grew up in a loging family and found her early inspiration as a child in British Columbia when she would lie “on the forest floor and stare up at the crowns” of the ancient Douglas firs and western redce-dars. It is in being with a particular forest that we come to under-sand its singularity, what it needs to flourish and thrive — and it is how, in interbeing, we ourselves come to flourish and thrive in response. Invoking one of the great spiritual metaphors, Thomas Merton affirms this truth in his diary: “Living away from the earth and the trees we fail them. We are absent from the wedding feast.”
It is said that Coyote appears crazy in his dancing to those who cannot hear his mystical music. We have come to an earthen moment wherein we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing facade of normality.
Look at the vapid homogeneity of the wealth-based, earth-denuding, dominant culture: is this the approval we seek? When we turn to the sweet, ragged edges of society, we see the people carrying violins, mandolins, pens, microscopes, walking sticks. The ones with ink on their hands, paint on their faces, mosses in their hair, shirts on sideways because they have been awake all night in the thrall of a new idea. This is where the art of earth-saving lies. We are creating a new story-one of vitality, conviviality, feralness (escape!), wildness, nonduality, interconnectedness, generosity, sensuality, creativity, knowledge of the earth and all that dwells therein.
On walking barefoot, Thomas Merton wrote, “Perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such very elementary satisfactions.” The superficial pastime of caring what others think of our love for the earth is long past, and subservient now to the “elementary satisfactions” that stitch us to a troubled planet. With this in mind, I offer some other-than-normal but beautiful practices for bringing reciprocity to the trees among us and the forests they create.
Return, and be claimed.
Choose a tree to sit with. This practice intertwines with the “still spot” of animal relating. Visit this tree every day for a season, a year, a life. From this simple practice, everything is learned. While rooted in place, trees gather all things required for their existence— and much of our own. I know that while I cannot claim land, or beings upon land, there is a sense in which I can feel claimed by them. Lynda Mapes studied a single oak over the course of a year in Harvard Forest, the university’s 3,000-acre research area. She watched, sketched, researched alongside scientists. She climbed high to the oak’s crown, she napped among the oak’s branches. Lynda wrote about the experience in her book Witness Tree, and told me she has no doubt that in time, the tree recognized her presence— that they belonged to each other. To return and return and return is to come into relatedness with a specific tree and the surrounding land. It is the great lesson.
Bodies touching. For beloved Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, hugging is a spiritual practice, one that extends to all beings — people, animals, and trees. “When we hug, our hearts connect and we know we are not separate beings.” Nhat Hanh contemplates those whom we hug:
You have to make him or her very real in your arms, not just for the sake of appearances, patting him on the back to pretend you are there, but breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart... “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, she is so precious to me.” If you do this, the tree being hugged “will be nourished and bloom like a flower.” Is someone around to see you hugging the tree? This is the part about not caring what others think. Tree-hugging dirt worshipper? Thank you, yes.
Entrainment. With shoes shed, we become open to the beneath-ness cultivated by trees, and we draw closer to them as our men-tors. Putting not just a cheek but an ear directly upon a tree’s bark allows deepest listening. The rhythmic movement of the blood in our bodies, the craniosacral fluid of our spines and skulls, mirrors the movement of sap in the trees. The breeze in our rustling hair is the same as that in the leaves, the branches, the clouds. The longer we stay, the more entrained — indistinguishable— these rhythms become.
Reading to trees. Trust me on this: thinking about reading to a tree feels stranger than actually reading to a tree, especially once you get going. The other day, I walked to the woods with a particular cedar in mind and a book in my pocket. What does one read to a cedar? Though I am sure there are many possibilities, the answer on this day for this tree was obvious: Emily Dickinson. If you read aloud to a tree, you will find yourself in the company of an uncommonly attentive, responsive (possibly even grateful) listener. And is the tree’s reaction— a singular stillness, a branching rustle, the dropping of golden leaves after a particular line,
The Brain— is wider than the Sky—as if to whisper, Yes, yes! —real or imagined? I am not at all certain that it matters whether we form a syllable in answer to this question. We are always, and everywhere, part of a graced conversation.
It is almost impossible to pass by a tree with whom you have shared such intimacy and not feel beckoned as you pass by in the future. In his stunning novel The Overstory, Richard Powers draws on ancestral knowledge from cultures across the earth when his character Adam wonders aloud whether his friend Olivia, who died acting in defense of ancient forests, could really hear trees speak, as she had claimed. “Trees used to talk to people all the time,” he answers himself. “Sane people used to hear them.” The silent narration continues: “The only question is whether they’ll talk again, before the end.” Sane people still do hear trees speak; it is a matter of making ourselves available to listen and, when we are ready, to respond. These essential conversations invite respect, openheartedness, open-mindedness, a decrease in our tendency-even our ability —to commodify another’s existence. They broaden our sense of living within an inspirited, sacred world. This is the rooted foundation of all bold, outer activism on behalf of wild lands and life.
And next a quote from my beloved and how she likes to connect with trees
“Walking in the forest is the easiest place to just be me. It is the easiest place for me to fill my cup with peace and joy. I appreciate the cleansing energy that comes from the trees, the fresh smelling air and of course, the most beautiful colors of the Carolinian forests at anytime of year but most especially in autumn. But even more than that, i particularly appreciate the energetic wisdom from those hundreds of years old elder trees; they bring me comfort. And while it is truly interesting to look at each tree and know its human name (especially when you want to share something about said tree) for me it is equally or perhaps more important just to be with the trees and connect energetically with each one as i travel through the forest, stopping to admire their beauty and send gratitude to them... which often results in me hugging them.”
This next excerpt is something from Martin Pretchel where he speaks to the status quo of modernity and invites us to awaken the dormant animistic awareness in our soul which he describes as the “indigenous soul”.
“Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs.
We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like.
Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now.
To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful.
By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.”
-Martín Pretchel (from: The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive)
Next another quote from Angell Deer on the reviving animistic worldviews in the present and the practical reality of lived animism.
It’s not about going “backward.” It’s about rooting forward. Bringing ancient ways into modern lives not as reenactments but as vital reconnection threads. Practices that reweave us into right relationship with life.
Teachings that help us make meaning again, not in abstraction, but in how we walk, how we pray, how we listen, how we tend the sacred in ordinary things.
Because what if the healing we long for isn’t in the next breakthrough but in the oldest truths?
What if the wisdom we need isn’t hidden in complexity but waiting in the silence beneath our feet?
What if the Earth has been whispering to us all along, and we are only now beginning to remember how to hear?
This remembrance is not a luxury. It is essential. In a time when the world feels unraveled, remembering animism is how we reweave. It teaches us not only how to survive but how to belong again. It teaches us how to be humble participants in a vast, mysterious, intelligent cosmos.
How to bow our heads in wonder. How to become ancestors worth remembering.
This path is not easy. It asks us to slow down. To unlearn. To feel deeply. To listen longer than is comfortable. To sit in silence long enough to hear the stone speaking.
But the gifts are immeasurable.
A heart that knows it’s not alone. A spirit in conversation with Mystery. A life lived in sacred reciprocity with the world.
Animism is not an idea. It is a return to the truth we never really lost, only forgot. It is a way of walking through life with reverence. And the Earth is still speaking. She has never stopped.
The question is: Are we humble and quiet enough to be able to listen to Her?
My dear friend Barbara Sinclair also offers some wonderful stories and ideas about perceiving our tree, stone and animal kin through the animist worldview on her blog titled “The Quaking Poplar”. Here is one of her stories about a stone friend she made in the forest.
“I leaned on Sleeping Turtle Rock and immediately felt that relaxed, grounding feeling seep into me that I always get when I visit my rock friends.
They are so steady.
Alive and yet the epitome of calm.
They feel like sentinels of the Earth to me.
Because they are.
Ancient and worldly.
Ready to share their wisdom if we can be still enough and listen deeply.
This kind of knowledge is invisible but available to everyone.
It’s not the “scientifically proven” kind of knowledge that our world seems to revere most.
Our ancestors of old knew the value of this invisible knowledge. You need only have an open mind and an open heart to access it.
The message I got from Sleeping Turtle Rock came in loud and clear.
“Come out of your shell, Little Crone. Share what you know to be true.”
In this life I choose honor the truth that was embraced by the reverent Earth honoring ancestors in my family line and breathe new life into their ways at this time of the turning of the ages.
Beyond the Earthly heritage I have in the veins and bones of this sacred human vessel, my spirit was woven together where starlight meets the body of the Earth and a seed is sprouted.
As I open my awareness to know the spirit of my more than human kin, this invites me to further move into becoming the embodiment of the irrepressible regenerative capacity of our Great Mother. As all the expressions of unique beings possessing a spirit on Earth are embodiments of the intelligence and sparks that come from the Creator of all things, this is a path that also invites me to further move into becoming the embodiment of the gentle and patient all encompassing love of our Heavenly Father.
When we move into reciprocal relationship with our more than human kin a mutual exchange of gifts become possible, we may experience ways of knowing that transcend all innate human gifts, receiving the revelatory eye sight of the eagle or the grace and swiftness in the heart of a hummingbird. Connecting with Mother Earth in humility and a genuine intend to be in service of life we align with her immense resilience and the peace of her still alpine lakes. We become capable of being like the water that can flow and crash, shape mountains and nurture a tiny seed to grow and become the beginnings of a thousand forests.
“The immediate effect of a relationship with a natural being is emotional and spiritual; a sense of connectedness arises. The possibilities go beyond this. According to indigenous people, nature-based cultures evolved over generations as the result of direct guidance from the natural world. Initiation ceremonies have to do with bringing young people into adulthood in relationship to the natural world. Other ceremonies generate healing or celebrate annual, monthly, or historic events in relationship to the natural world.
Exploring the folk tales and mythology of my ancestors, learned that Europeans once revered female as well as male spiritual beings. The spiritual beings were associated with the land, birds, and animals that sustained the people, as well as healing, death, prophecy, and crafts) One example is the Cailleach, (pronounced “KAHL-yakh”° whose name literally means “veiled one.” “! This “Old Woman” as she is sometimes called, is a primordial creatrix of what is now called Scotland and Ireland. She is ancient, sometimes large in stature, and strong. She forms Scotland by dropping boulders out of her apron as she strides boldly across the land. In Cailleach mythology, she often interacts with the landscape. One of her stories takes place on Néifinn Mountain in County Mayo, Ireland,” where some of my ancestors lived. In another, she lives on the Hebridean Isle of Erraid.
I came to perceive the Cailleach as a crone who formed features of the landscape where my Scottish and Irish ancestors lived. In one tale, she washes her shawl white in her enormous cauldron” and lays it out to dry on the mountains. In other tales, she brings winter to their land. She cares for her own herds of wild deer and cattle, the same animals that nourished my ancestors. Perhaps some of her stones formed the walls of their cottages. Her tales were told while their peat fires smoldered, babies cried, stews bubbled, and their homespun threads became warm woolen blankets. The Cailleach evolved through layers of time and history, adapting as the people changed.”
Each of us have indigenous ancestors that looked upon the stones, rivers and stars as beings deserving of acknowledgment and respect. That ancestral memory flows in your veins as it does in mine… waiting like a dormant seed under the leaf litter for the right conditions to awaken. You can help the seed of that memory and knowing germinate and take root through providing the same stimulus your ancestors would have received from the more than human world to cultivate their knowing in the first place.
For more info and suggestions for those looking to cultivate a connection with our more than human kin (especially those that feel they have no written record of their indigenous ancestors due to imperialism dominating your ancestral homelands for so long) watch this:
Each of us also has a spiritual essence that has a story that reaches beyond the confines of this individual lifetime. As you unfurl your intuitive sensory capabilities to blossom there may come a time when you receive flashes of knowing and memory of other existences your spirit has experienced, perhaps under different skies or in a different form than you take now as a human. This awareness cultivates universal awareness of the spirit that exists in not just the beings on Earth, but that glows in the core of every being in this vast and beautiful universe.
“Mist, flowers, and southerly wind. How did these three acquire the same status as earth, air, fire, and water?
Mist is air and water. Southerly wind is air and heat. Flowers are a spectacular blend of soil, water, sunlight - and even air, for a flower does not stop at the edge of its skin, any more than we stop at the edge of ours. Around every flower is the sweet fragrance of scented air. This field of fragrance is the flower’s soul.”
If you are reading this than that means that on a soul level you chose to be here on Earth in this particular time (and critical stage in the unfolding of humanity) because you are resilient, courageous, capable of transmuting pain into wisdom, radiating light from within to make the darkness flee and serving as an exemplar to help those who are ready to also become catalysts for a metamorphosis.
You are the sowers of the seeds of change and the remediators of humanity’s collective consciousness. You are the gardeners that sow the seeds of hope, healing, remembrance, kindness, respect, solidarity and compassion (even in the midst of the cold winter winds) having faith these seeds will germinate and their roots take hold when the time is right.
In order to see a new culture and way of living take hold and begin to become the norm we must cut our ties to the old ways and begin to live and embody a vision that is both ancient and unprecedented. We must remember what our ancestors were wise enough to understand and forge a close knit relationship with the land we live on. The interdependence, sacred geometry, efficiency, resilience and regenerative capacity of the intact ecosystems where we live can provide us guidance on the path forward. Through emulating these living systems in the garden/farming sector and engaging in biomimicry with our technology we can create resilient systems and ways of perceiving that can provide us food, medicine and wisdom on our path to create a brighter future. And it can begin with something as simple as humility and a handful of seeds.
We can choose to be the living embodiment of truth, agents of the regenerative capacity of Mother Earth and the antidote that helps to expel the tentacles of statism and their corporate/bankster parasitic overlords in each of our communities.
We can plant the seeds for abundance, health and hope. We can plant these seeds with our hands and our hearts. We can do this one regenerative garden, one community food forest and one regenerative community at a time.
Now is the time to reaffirm our alliances with the living Earth, to nurture new symbiotic relationships with the soil, people, plants and fungi in our local communities. Human empires rise and fall, and history teaches us that when they fall, it is those that know how to grow/forage for their own food, medicine and preserve it that survived. I will be focusing on these efforts locally and helping those at a distance to do the same.
We can create oasis’s of health, resilience, and abundance in each of our communities.. we can become the solution, break from dependence on centralized systems and help others to do the same. It begins with the soil and the seeds and it evolves into nurturing symbiotic connections with those we share our communities with.
top left: Runner Beans, top middle: 16 different heirloom seeds (which I was adding to a slow cooker stew) including 12 different legumes and 4 different types of heirloom rice, top right: Hokkaido Black Soybeans, bottom left: Pawpaw seeds and fruit, bottom middle: Red Oak Acorn, bottom right: Shagbark Hickory seeds (germinating)
“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”
―Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
For more on this topic from Robin, watch this:
This post on Applied Animism may eventually branch out into telling the stories, learning the languages and offering reflections on the spirits of non-human beings.
In closing I will share a prayer from seed protector and land steward Rowen White
“May the People Remember...
Last night, the bear came over the hill from the north
Proudly leading her three cubs for all to see.
It’s time to dance the world awake. To renew our bundles, our agreements, the earth of our body. The new year is dawning.
The humans that are here now forget how to listen,
To accept the invitation.
Mama Bear comes around night after night.
Sadly, most humans have forgotten, and stay inside to sit under an artificial glow.
She becomes angry, tearing down barn walls and breaking down doors.
Taking what was supposed to be given.
Only a few remember to fast, to feast, to sing
Oh, the generosity the bears continue to extend!
In a world so vastly changed by brokenhearted humans.
When we forget to feast, they come and take.
Saddened by the absence of reciprocity.
The land sang her agreements to us long ago.
Many come here not knowing the umbilicus of origin underfoot.
Do we have the courage to remember?
The land gave us Ceremony.
Everyone had a place in the circle.
These ceremonies are written in the seeds, and the stars and the waters, and the Earth….
They are held in your heart, beating fiercely in promise to uphold the agreements to feed the Sacred hunger of Time.
Some still remember. Their voices grow as the lost ones struggle.
The earth offers us her steadiness.
Something begins to grow again from the dry and dusty soil.
Grandmother granite, grant us the strength, the courage to remember.
Lend us your mineral memory.
Bones of the earth, bones of our body, bones of our ancestors.
To lay down bundles of mugwort and acorn, salmon and berries.
I am waiting for the dreams that bring the songs that have been forgotten…
Hidden deep into the hearts of the ancestors, buried deep into the folds of spirited hearts out of protection for the sacred.
Those ancestors in the topography of stone that is as familiar as my children’s faces. The ancestor’s song arrives in the birds cackling, the wind, the dreams, and the rivers echo across the stones.
Songs that nearly lost their roots in this world when the seeds were no longer planted because the land lay scorched and poisoned, and the people’s minds and hearts were disturbed by the death of that most treasured to them.
Thank you for reading my Newsletter! If you feel this post would benefit and/or resonate with people you know, feel free to share this post in your circles.
Thank you for reading my Newsletter! This Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. All Annual Paid Subscriptions and Founding Member Paid Subscriptions will include the bonus of one digital copy of Stacking Functions in the Garden, Food Forest and Medicine Cabinet : The Regenerative Way From Seed To Apothecary at the time of its completion (along with the other paid subscription perks described in this post).
In our Hindu culture, this way of relating to the world has never been considered strange or symbolic—it is simply how life is understood. Trees, rivers, stones, mountains, and the sun are not viewed as inert matter but as living presences, worthy of reverence and relationship.
We perform puja to trees not because they are “useful,” but because they are alive, generous, and ancient. We thank rivers not as resources, but as mothers who carry, nourish, and cleanse. The sun is not merely a celestial object but a sacred being whose light sustains all life. These practices are not metaphors; they are expressions of kinship.
For many of us, reaching out with the hand, the heart, and the inner eye is not a rejection of reason, but an expansion of perception. Long before modern narratives insisted that only humans possess sentience, our traditions taught attentiveness, gratitude, and communion with the living world.
So when you speak of touching and knowing with the hand of the spirit, I hear not fantasy, but remembrance—of a way of being that still lives quietly in many cultures, despite centuries of being told to forget.
Dear Nature Brother to the North, I'm speechless. I will have to come back and back and back again to this post (it's so much more than a post.) Your photos are spectacular, as always. That stone being from Fairy Creek jumped right through the screen. Your dedication to the plants and stones, and animals does not go unnoticed by them, which I am certain of. I'm sure they're all whispering with delight to each other, "Here comes Gavin! And Johrey! :))
Thank you for sharing my writing. Sleeping Turtle Rock will be pleased. 🐢
Signed, Little Crone, your Nature Sister to the South XO
What you describe feels deeply familiar to me.
In our Hindu culture, this way of relating to the world has never been considered strange or symbolic—it is simply how life is understood. Trees, rivers, stones, mountains, and the sun are not viewed as inert matter but as living presences, worthy of reverence and relationship.
We perform puja to trees not because they are “useful,” but because they are alive, generous, and ancient. We thank rivers not as resources, but as mothers who carry, nourish, and cleanse. The sun is not merely a celestial object but a sacred being whose light sustains all life. These practices are not metaphors; they are expressions of kinship.
For many of us, reaching out with the hand, the heart, and the inner eye is not a rejection of reason, but an expansion of perception. Long before modern narratives insisted that only humans possess sentience, our traditions taught attentiveness, gratitude, and communion with the living world.
So when you speak of touching and knowing with the hand of the spirit, I hear not fantasy, but remembrance—of a way of being that still lives quietly in many cultures, despite centuries of being told to forget.
Dear Nature Brother to the North, I'm speechless. I will have to come back and back and back again to this post (it's so much more than a post.) Your photos are spectacular, as always. That stone being from Fairy Creek jumped right through the screen. Your dedication to the plants and stones, and animals does not go unnoticed by them, which I am certain of. I'm sure they're all whispering with delight to each other, "Here comes Gavin! And Johrey! :))
Thank you for sharing my writing. Sleeping Turtle Rock will be pleased. 🐢
Signed, Little Crone, your Nature Sister to the South XO