Aliving the World

When I was a child I was raised on a 1 acre homestead. I had chickens, sheep and goats as friends. I foraged from the hedgerows and birdwatched with my Dad, we planted seeds for fun. I was a child of the Earth and I am deeply grateful. But as I aged I lost that connection.

As I entered the adult world, my world became smaller, with more walls. I would leave my concrete box to get into a metal box, to drive to a different concrete box every day. I would sit in front of a lit up box and then get back into my metal box to drive back to my concrete box and sit in front of a different lit up box. My weekends were full of obliteration. I earned just enough to sustain my life of chasing the rent/mortgage payments and to pay for the substances and media that I needed to numb myself.

When I gave birth to my first son, that world revealed itself to be fractured. At the end of the 72 hour labour, I had nothing left and I felt this energy flow through me from outside of my body. I felt the Earth had gifted me some of it’s power, I had never felt a connection like it to anything larger than myself. I started to ask a lot of questions. Questions about the world he had been born into, about the future I was contributing to for him, about what I believed about being human on the Earth. When I miscarried his sibling, the grief wrecked me and my old world was totally shattered.

All I could see was this little boy, so in touch with the world around him that he talked to the sky, growing up into the world I had grown up to. His future full of numbness, sterility, obliteration, collapse.

And boxes.

There must be another way. There must.

I could keep that alive in him. He didn’t have to lose it like I did. I could protect it. I could reignite it in myself too, I could return.

This life where the world is dead. Where I merely exist in it, not even fully aware I am breathing. Where I hold on to the idea that if I don’t think about death it won’t happen. Where I live with this belief that dreaming, love, intuition are nothing more than chemical reactions and electrical impulses in my mechanical body. Where my body is entirely separate from my mind and has no spirit.

This is not the life or reality I wanted to choose for me or my kids.

I started to recognise that this belief that the world is dead is the belief that is killing the world and us. It’s the belief that holds together all the harm, upholding the human supremacy, colonialism and extraction, causing us to behave in careless and profoundly harmful ways. It creates a culture lacking in accountability, presence, grace and love. What we have is a problem of relationship, an essential ecological relationship I define as reverence. So this is how animism as a worldview came into my awareness.

I knew I had to start with me, I had to learn to walk in an animate world instead of a dead one. A world I didn’t have dominion over, a world where I collaborated with, respected and loved all the beings around me. A world that I held in deep reverence, that I walked with gratitude for every breath, every petal, every insect. Then I could help my son to walk that world. He didn’t have to lose the ability to see the aliveness everywhere.

We have so much sensory information entering our bodies all at once that we have to shut some of it out. Our senses in boxes are different ones to the ones we need out in the living world. The work of aliving the world has been slow and gradual for me, a shift of bringing awareness to different senses…

How it feels when my feet are upon the Earth instead of the pavement.
How it feels in my body when I walk up to a forest or a body of water.
How it feels to bring my attention to the birds singing instead of the cars driving past.
How the air feels when it’s about to rain.
How the woods feel when a storm is coming.

I needed to unpick the beliefs and behaviours that kept me numb. Numbness caused by substances, media, trauma, disassociation, productivity. The numbness that let me ignore the messages my body gave me, that let me shove my feelings aside. The conditioning that led me to believe my dreams to be only expressions of my subconscious, my intuition unworthy of respect and my imagination to be only fantasy. The conditioning that kept me from connecting beyond the human world, that kept me in my convenient boxes. The way I experienced these things was ultimately a matter of choice. I could choose a different way to see and be.

This is a very different way to walk the Earth. The way where everything around you is alive and vibrating with consciousness. The way where you can communicate telepathically with all beings and you are never alone. The way where you can feel the energies of the elements, the Earth and each other. You don’t have to pretend you don’t feel. You can feel deeply. You can grieve deeply. You can love deeply. Because you are held by the trees, the soil, the birds, the critters and the insects, the sky and the sea. You belong here. You can walk the alive world so differently to the way you walked the dead one.

Gradually I added more small changes to my behaviour and the way I walk the Earth. I ask consent before I take from a plant or enter a place. I leave offerings of a scattering of rose petals everywhere I go. I sing to the moon. I take my shoes off and consciously soak up the Earth energies with my barefeet. I dream with the trees. I honour the dead and the ancestors. I thank the directions, elements and spirits every day. I reach out with love to the birds. I talk to the plants to ask for healing. I create art, I build altars, I make medicine, baskets, clay pots, ink and paint. I touch the soil, I hold and marvel at the power of seeds and rocks. I drum, I journey to the plant spirits, I channel the land, and every little intentional thing I do, I go deeper into reverence and sink further into relationship with all that there is. Gradually, tiny step by tiny step, as my reverence increases, I compost more of my supremacy and separation, and become one with all of the web of life.

The first tree I started talking to, I felt so fake and silly doing it. Now when trees call to me I hear them. My shifted senses are always ready and listening. My son thinks I am some sort of magical tree whisperer. The last tree I engaged with, I stood beside it, sensing the distance that felt appropriate for a new friend, and said hello. I introduced myself and I stated my intention. “Hello, I am Sarah, I would like to speak with you a while, if you would like to?” The tree was so happy, I could feel it smiling at me. “We have been waiting so long for you to return to us, tell the other humans to return too, we have been calling out for you for a long time.”

Sometimes the trees are chatty, other times they send me visions, smells or light and oxygen. Sometimes they invite me into silence with them. Many humans seem to have needed science to tell us the trees are alive, conscious, intelligent, and that science is now out there. You can give a plant or tree an instrument and it will play it. Many don’t know you can also do that with rocks. Everything is alive and wants to sing.

Now I walk the Earth ready to listen and open to communication with any being, I often get information I didn’t expect, at times I don’t expect. I awoke one night recently with the idea I should try to sense the river. I knew I needed to stretch a circle with my imagination in a huge radius around me. I asked if I could feel the nearest river and suddenly I felt it as a barrier behind me. I could sense the river. I try now whenever I am in a new place to see if I can gain a knowing of the landscape far beyond my body, either by sensing it or asking the other beings. Our ancestors would have had an entirely different sensory experience of the living world. If there was a predator nearby they would have had to sense it. If they needed water they would have had to follow the energies of the underground waterways to find a river or stream. This numb way of sensing no further than our boxes that we have in modernity, it would have led to death. We all have the ability to wake these senses and ways of being with the living world because our ancestors passed it down.

This process of opening these gateways to truly be able to sense and listen, of shifting my worldview from boxed up athiest, individualist to one where the universe is alive with spirit, has taken time. This process of becoming won’t be over for a while. I am always finding new layers to this new world of communicating with the web of life. My friend Em Linford (who contributed to Wild Service) calls it “a journey to an ecological self”.

I think I will be my “ecological self” when I can lay on the moss and become the moss. Or put my feet in the sea and become the waves. This is what is being asked of us in this time. Awe, empathy, humility, reverence all require us to dissolve a little.

The Earth is calling. The land needs us to return to relationship with it. We are being asked to belong to the Earth. To raise our children to belong to the Earth.

With this post, I want to honour my teachers so far on my journey into Animism and Aliveness….

• Daniel For and Practical Animism

• Saskia Von Diest and Ecofluency

• Stephen Harding and Animate Earth

• Thomas Schorr Konn and Trackways

• Dr Patrick McManaway and the Animate Earth Collective

• Sandra Ingerman

• The Emerald Podcast by Joshua Michael Schrei

And of course, more than just an inspiration or teacher, my dear, beloved friend and elder mentor Gail Burkett.

If you want to chat more about animism, animism and parenting, or practices of nature reverence please comment. I’d love to hear from you.

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