Play & Community Animism Part 1 Why do we Start With Ceremony?

This Halloween, lets not worry about communing with the Spirits. Lets enjoy jumping in the leaves, stitching together our costumes and the spooky-exciting ambience like a kid!

This article isn’t directly related to Halloween, its actually an introduction to a few essays that I’ve written on ceremony and spiritual practice as the prevalent method for or way of engaging with animism rather than a playful more experiential, childlike approach. I’ll be sharing these essays on a weekly basis and as I prepared to share this introductory article, I realized Halloween was quickly approaching and that it would be appropriate to at least mention Halloween, as it is perhaps the day of the year that people most engage with pagan or animist celebration and ritual.

We offer plants we’ve never foraged. We invoke mountains whose ridges we know nothing of.

We have a memory of and longing for the living web of connections, our more-than-human kin, an ancestral past, for community within a shared and sacred matrix of storied history, the cosmos, and a the immanent mythological realm that lies beneath our own. A resurgence in animist or sacred ecological practices has emerged in response to our longing to reconnect with these forces and intelligences.

These ceremonies, which I am using as a catchall term, can be pagan parade, cacao rituals, art and performance, a rite of passage or vision quest/wilderness vigil, a monstrous workshop, a grief gathering, guided meditation, drumming, ceremonial dance, or temazcal, etc.

And I’ve been wondering for a long time, where does ceremony fit in with building a relationship with nature? Is ceremony the right starting point and how much should we focus on it? So, this initial writing entry addresses why we’re diving in so much in to these practices, what may be going on beneath the surface and questions whether it is such a good idea.

Following this introductory article, there will be a follow-up of three essays that offer the importance of 1) a playful, childlike animism and 2) real community as foundations for relationship with the more-than-human world before diving straight in to ceremonial practices with the land and all of its beings. I’ll talk about how I have connected more with the extrahuman world through these foundations than through any of these kinds of ceremonies.

My experience, when I have participated in or witnessed others in these spaces has been one of doubt, alienation, hesitancy and a curiosity for the others present and what was really going inside of each of them and all of us as a collective.

It’s like we’re in a movie theatre, we get to watch the same spectacle, but in the dark, each of us seated in silence, we don’t have to know anything about one another. And sometimes the movie is really good, even feeling divine or transcendent, moving me to tears and I feel like we’ve experienced something together, but when its over we all file out up the aisles, back to our lives, never to gather or meet one another again. And I always come back to the same thought, isn’t it weird to engage in ceremonial practice and then just go back to our destructive lives? Sometimes the movie feels like it was just about ticket sales, an escape or a distraction in to sc-fi or fantasy that give us a glimpse of a magical life that we don’t actually think we could experience. Sometimes the movie is good, sometimes not, and even when its a nice experience, something feels missing.

Some other times I’ll see something like a bunch of spiritual entrepreneurs and influencers screaming to “let out their traumatic angers” while “honoring their ancestors” somewhere exotic, like at a volcano in Bali, and I’m just like “no, nuh uh, this is some colonizer shit.” Their ancestors have never been anywhere near Bali, yet they happen to choose that pristine, eco-tourist hotspot rather somewhere war-torn or contaminated and littered, or perhaps, their own backyards? Isn’t that a funny coincidence? And when I see this consumptive, performative, self-seeking style of ceremony, it just makes me want to prohibit the whole thing, ban Westerners people from buying white sage or charging “volunteers” to learn their sacred ways or building yoga halls and retreat centers.

There are patterns and desires in us for shortcut instant access to the Holy in Nature, for quick solutions and bypassing the difficult or less fun phases in order to get to the satisfying moments of ecstasy. There are spiritual practices and artistic endeavors that stem from self-importance or low self-esteem or desire for attention and power that focus on the experience of self-worth. Once again, there is of course a genuine longing to reconnect to the more-than-human world but need to be realistic about our egocentric motivation. So I want to ask if we’re going about it in the right way? So I wanted to ask, what makes us go towards ceremony so much? And why does it seem to be more frequented than connecting with community and land?

The Shadow Motivations Underlying Ceremonial Events

I want to go over a few examples of how I’ve noticed behind why people (including myself!), raised in industrial capitalism and devoid of any land-based or ancestral lifestyles are gravitating towards ceremony. I’m going over some examples because I feel its nice to do a little examination of conscience and try to understand the underlying motivations that drive these gatherings and encounters, to notice how we are operating under values of separation, solutionism, individualism, positivism or pleasure-seeking, among others. These are just some of my observations, I’d love to hear feedback about what you guys see and have experienced in this phenomenon of westerners engaging in ceremony.

Ceremony as a “Logical Solution”

We’re all worried about the state of the world and we’ve all been domesticated and wounded and schooled and all the rest. This acculturation by modernity, so to speak, not only makes us inclined to be stuck in chronic states of stress, worrying about climate catastrophe, it has us thinking according to how modernity words the worlds, how it defines progress and change.

Modernity has us thinking that problems are just a matter of finding the solution and employing the right plan to enact. We tell ourselves that these solutions will make things better, but more importantly, and often unconsciously, we want to turn off the trigger, we want the nagging feeling of doom to go away, “if I do this, I’ll be ok.”

So we reason “who are the people who know how to live in their environments without causing ecosystemic collapse? Ah ha! Indigenous peoples (or pagan ancestors, etc).” We look over at what they’re doing and without really knowing or understanding them we just see what stands out the most, which is that they are engaged in ceremonies that “honor the land” or “pray to the corn.” So our minds say, “ah ha, that is the secret, in order to live in harmony with nature, we need to engage in ceremony!”

We go through this train of thought while not being very familiar with their thousands of years of accumulated traditional ecological knowledge, how it was learned, how it is maintained and expanded upon and how it is passed on. Maybe we ignore this because this is the slow part, the part that says that maybe this isn’t quick fix, and maybe we’ll need generations of tending to the land and appropriate cohabitation with them in order to heal our “rupture from nature.”

Atonement Guilt - Obligation

Another phenomenon present in how we see ourselves in relationship to Planet Earth are those of guilt and shame. Our psychological wounds, our family traumas, our domestication and emotional injuries tell us that we are inherently bad if we don’t try hard or make up for our sins, They make us feel like we are inherently harmful.

We project these bodily feelings (some call them beliefs but they feel more like indoctrinated somatic triggers, pains, tightnesses and sensations) of unworthiness on to environmental issues and hope that some sort of spiritual intention can bring regeneration for the Earth. And so perhaps a religious contrition arises, a feeling of devotional obligation. This is the right thing to do. I owe nature this reverence. I need to apologize for what humans have done through this offering. I need to show how that I really am thankful by stressing this gratitude ritual.

Something For Me to Feel Better

Another phenomenon is nature being turned in to a therapy or a place of mental health benefits where its like “I go outside so nature makes me feel better, and then I go back to my routine of seeking success or security (or whatever)”. Then, after we’ve heard that nature is good for our nervous systems and gone on some nature walks and tried some mindfulness exercises we want to take things to the next level searching for something more, to feel better, to feel bliss, to feel peace, or to feel more empowered in our life goals.

So we devise sacred ceremonies, invoking plant and animal spirits in to emotional or profound experiences as even greater sources of healing than just watching the clouds or hugging a tree. Ceremony becomes conflated with a healing practices or methods of raising vibration (whatever that means) and it becomes another extractive colonial practice for human beings to try an escape their pain or lack of fulfilment.

But of course the nagging feelings don’t go away, the ceremonies don’t wash away dissatisfaction and unhappiness like we were promised and we have to do more! We resist acknowledging that it is normal to feel worried, that feeling pain is normal, with everything happening in the world. It would be really weird to feel totally at peace or happy with the all the things going on in the world.

So while of course nature can be a part of our trauma journeys, its not some hack in to getting out of the painful and violent realities of our times, realities that cannot be washed away through individual methods of solitary healing.

I feel there is a longing for the divine, for transcendental experience but that people want to access it too effortlessly, our without being connected. For example this quote from a well-known instagram druid.

I’m hesitant to share the source of this quote because on instagram I can’t tell if someone is a charlatan, just promoting their services, someone with sincere intentions or a little bit of both (if you’re curious feel free to ask). Anyway, this kind of language can appeal to the longing in people, maybe hoping that ceremony will fill a void or heal a wound that’s been nagging them. And the language of “true-meaning” and “essential nature” is a bit iffy for me, a lot of practitioners of animist spirituality get caught up in eurocentric-monotheistic belief patterns that spiritual experience is more real than or beyond than the material reality we find ourselves in, that sacred ceremony is “above” or separate from this mundane world we live in. Or that somehow the center or central aspect of animism is ceremony rather than the daily experience of recreating life together as a community on a landscape (cultivating, crafting, telling stories, harvesting resources, building homes, etc).

“Authenticity”

The last example I’ll talk about is ceremony as a tool for finding or releasing one’s purpose or authenticity. It is used to awaken our “power” or “service” and usually predicated on a sense of self-worth within the parameters of modernity and very much entrenched in its story of progress and greater individual comfort.

Coming back to the example of the volcano, (which is real and I don’t want to share because I don’t want to bring them attention to that channel but you can find them on instagram easily) people with no relationship to this sacred mountain, are screaming and flailing before this god because healing fads have taught them “that venting anger is good.” So they spam these histrionics as a sort of trick to becoming more authentic, because with their “trauma out,” they can go back to love and pleasure and most of all their dreams and purposes, which are more about success and status than true service.

While of course we want to get closer to our truer, wilder selves, take off our masks and reverse our over-domestication, this becomes about forcing it on a mostly external and superficial level. If spiritual bypassing is using spirituality to try to stay in some sort of state of isolated stability, where I can always find peace within myself and I can create my own reality, this is like spiritual corner-cutting where we try to access the gods and spirits of the land for our own objectives. It feels like the age-old features of animism are turned in to a mere hobby to be placed in the personal improvement toolkit.

Liveo Game Improv: Pretend its the 90s, Al Gore is still vice president and hasn’t yet informed us all of impending doom yet. Go outside anywhere its not too crowded. Pretend you’ve just put on what will become one of your favorite movies or that you are in the intro of a video game that you love. Maybe something from Japan, Ghibli or Squaresoft or maybe 80s fantasy before CGI with puppets or claymation or some sweet 90s hand-drawn animation like Fern Gully.

Pretend you’ve just entered this new world presented by the movie or the tutrorial phase of a video game. Are you looking at the world differently? Admire the background, what do you think the background says about the story here? Are you going to have to journey somewhere? Are there any fears or desires coming up? Maybe you are looking for the characters that stand out (who may or may not be human)? Maybe you notice the differences in hardness or softness of the ground where you walk and wonder if this determines whether you can use a movement ability or not. Where might something leap out that you might have to dodge or that might be a power-up? What is normalcy here in this world? Open up a journal and keep track of the emerging stories and interactions.

So, if want to connect with nature, what should we do?

So, my primary interest and intention is not to point out the spiritual narcissism present in ceremonial practices or how the wounds and thought patterns of modernity keeps us replicating it in spaces where we are trying to break from it, I just thought I little intro would be appropriate before getting in to what I want to talk about, what alternative approaches can we take to developing relationship and connection with our more than human kin?

So, as I mentioned at the start, I am going to be following up this entry with a few essays on what I really want to talk about, which is working on our relationship with nature through these two fields, basically seeing that relating to land is important for relating to people and that relating to people is important to relating to land as we try to find our place, find a new way of living with the more-than-human world on this Planet Earth of the anthropocene, so-to-speak.

I also want to say, before you check out the next essay, hopefully, that I don’t think I am the best at explaining this or writing about this, I just really care about this right now. Its like my central occupation and this is what foresnauts is about, looking at the human world, listening to the extrahuman world and seeing how cultural experimentation, can lead to communities that are tightly woven and in relationship with their landscapes. Foresnauts are looking to lower the waterline through play, getting people to deeper intersubjectivity and hopefully helping along the forest succession of groups of people, by adding game-compost, in to more complex and interconnected ecosystems.