What is Animism?

The Earth is Alive

In animism nothing is inanimate. Life hums through mycelium and moonlight, microbes and mountains. Spirit is not elsewhere and untouchable it’s everywhere.

Animism is not a belief system. It’s a way of perceiving. And the way that our collective ancestors perceived for thousands of years.

It is the understanding that the world is not made of things, but of relationships. That stones have stories, rivers remember, and plants speak. That the Earth is not a backdrop to human life, but instead our planet is living, and sustains a breathing intelligence in which we are embedded.

Take the Carbon cycle or the Nitrogen cycle these tightly coupled feedback systems are responding, relating, experiencing and reacting to foster hospitable environments. These cycles participate in life.

The term animism comes from the Latin word Anima meaning soul. Many use the word as a bridge a way to speak of the sacredness of the more-than-human world in a language that can be reclaimed. It is not something that humans can simply opt out of, it is a part of you. All humans regardless of culture or country enter an animistic phase in childhood. Where they are predisposed to see the world as alive. It is our societies and modern day teachings that take that away from us. You are predisposed to seeing the world as alive and relational.

Every culture has at its roots, an animist worldview. One that sees the land as alive, the wind as a messenger, and fire as a presence not a substance. These ways were marginalized in the rise of industrial thinking, but they are not gone. They live in the body. In the gut-feeling when walking through a forest. In the grief we feel when a species vanishes. In the sudden sensation in our souls when the presence of an owl shows at dusk.

Animism is the soul of ecology.

Animism is not just a philosophy it is a practice of listening. Of reciprocity. Of courtship with the more-than-human world.

To be an animist is to speak with the plants you harvest to thank the rain, to wonder what the stones story is. It is to include the nonhuman in your decision-making, your ethics, your healing.

In a world that treats the Earth as a resource animism invites us to remember our beautiful blue planet, as a relative— the first relative of us all.

Why Animism?

Because healing— personal or planetary— requires relationship. Because the ecological crisis is not just a crisis of carbon but a crisis of disconnection. Because we are not separate from the world we are living inside of. The construct that the earth is a system, devoid of its own life, is a 400 year old philosophy.

Animism reminds us that the world is not made for us but with us.

To live animistically is to walk with reverence, to participate in the sentient web of life, and to remember that intelligence is not limited to the human brain but is scattered like pollen through every being, every biome, every breath.