What is Animism?

The Earth is Alive

Spirit is not elsewhere and untouchable it’s everywhere.

Animism is a way of understanding the world around us. And it is the shared 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. We live in a relational reality, it is a fundamental truth of existence. The Earth is not a backdrop to human life, but instead our planet is living, and we are living inside of it. Much like the microbiome in your gut, lives inside of you. Earth is sustaining a breathing intelligence in which we are embedded.

Take the Carbon cycle or the Nitrogen cycle these tightly coupled feedback systems are responding, 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 connection we all share. It is not something that humans can simply opt out of, it is a part of you. And it is also a part of the more-than-human. 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 steer us away from this fundamental concept. You are predisposed to seeing the world as alive and relational.

Every culture has at its roots in an animist worldview. One that sees the world/surroundings as alive. 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.

To be an animist is to engage in relationship with the more-than-human world. It is to include the nonhuman in your decision-making & your ethics.

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

Why Animism?

Because healing, whether it be personal or planetary, it requires relationship. Relationship to disease, to health itself, to the experience and so much more. Because the ecological crisis is not just a crisis of carbon. It is a crisis of disconnection. 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 very new philosophy in the wake of human existence. Where does it come from?

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

Remember that intelligence is not limited to the human brain but is scattered through every being, every biome, every ecology, and every breath that is woven into the ceaseless dance that is life.