G&R’s community of readers and writers is diverse – we are all over the world and hold a wide range of spiritual practices. But if there is one belief that may unite us all, it’s Animism.
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Animism brings us back to ourselves. It reminds us we are connected to the land and to one another.
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You'll think this a strange tale at least, and quite likely you'll think me a liar, but for several years in my youth I was a fox.
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Wildness is often used in our modern languages to suggest chaos, disorder. But I was granted insight in those few seconds, I think, into another kind of order that we supposedly civilised humans have lost, and that we struggle to recover.
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In the day, the forest and I were one. I was an animal in an animal’s habitat. In the night, I was an unwelcome human being in a bustling community of other-than-human beings.
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When one is an animist, environmentalism isn’t merely about protecting the natural resources for the sake of conserving the resource to be consumable in the future. Instead, it is a way to honor the spirits. It is a way of venerating one’s ancestors.
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My mind keeps going back to the sight of that sign on the cave floor, warning that someone was watching, the feeling of sacredness I had in the cave, and the sound of chainsaws outside.
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you were a spider busy with
consuming the prey, only to suddenly realize that the prey is a part of yourself.
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This is what it is to be animist. We see and feel the spirit within the natural world and know we are not separate from it at all, but connected to it in every way.
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There is still beauty to behold in this world. Not the fake beauty of photo-shopped pictures, whether of people or places, nor the beauty of expensive possessions and luxurious homes, but instead a beauty that inspires a quiet joyousness within the heart, within the very soul, perhaps.
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Gorse moves exuberantly into the artificially stunted ecosystem of the field, introducing a hostile, rampant diversity resistant to poisoning and cutting, and sheltering the children of the old forest. This is an example we, as anarchists, can — and should — follow.
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Stanton Moor is a beautiful place, rich in history, nature and, of course, magic. It is an early Bronze age burial ground with over seventy barrows and cairns. When you’re there on an early October morning you can feel how special this place is. The land is full of spirits, and you can feel them here. Perhaps these hills are liminal places, wild spaces where the veil is thin at most times, but even more so at this time of year.
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There’s something special to be found in all the seasons, but my heart belongs to the growing dark. I find something soothing in the winding down, in the retreat, and as an introvert, it feels like coming home. And of course, there is a beauty in the slow decay that comes with autumn. The trees put on a colour show far more beautiful than any illuminations.
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Every day, it seemed, I had to watch the people around me destroy plants and animals with a determination I seldom see humans apply to anything else.
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As an animist, the consciousness of trees is a given, but there is still a question about what that consciousness is like and how to interact with it.
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‘When I discovered this secret, it excited me, as an animist, as I took it as scientific evidence for the intelligence and agency of sphagnum mosses as builders of peat bogs.’
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Sometimes it is the beauty of a tree, it’s branches bare with the sky as a backdrop that catches me unaware. Familiar as these trees might be on my journey from work, still their beauty enchants me. The sky might be the pale blue of early evening, or grey and low, pregnant with the prospect of snow, sometimes a dazzling golden pink with clouds that would put any Michelangelo to shame.
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