Play & Community Animism Part 2 Childlike Animism
Couldn’t We Just Go Outside and Learn What the Earth is Like with like, our senseS before engaging with the Spirits?
Like I talked about in the introductory entry, animism, the more-than-human web of relations, sacred ecology, mythopoetics; our disconnect from nature seems to be leading us to other-than-scientific realms of engagement with the natural world. It seems every alternative space is looking to be engaged in ceremonial practice or asking the land for guidance or recognition. Conservationist groups engage in Green Man parades, spiritual retreats are incorporating earth reverence, druidic rewilding gatherings are making offering. Meanwhile, the worlds of so-called deep-diving work of purpose alignment or personal transformation are beseeching nature spirits to help with their rites of passage and authenticity-seeking endeavors.
We are trying to remember and humanity’s ancestral practices, I get the desire to reconnect. But I have been having a feeling lately, that perhaps we’re missing something. That because of how we’re wounded, going to ceremony feels like a shortcut while other aspects of reconnecting with the extra-human world that might ask us to go in to discomfort and take longer are not quite as highlighted.
I’ll give an example. In an online conference space related to decolonization, animism and the healing of trauma in a collective context, where someone mentioned being part of a group that “channels with the land” and my gut just felt off. Especially since their energy felt dissociated, flat, unfeeling and reminded me of science coldly looking at the material makeup of the natural world through a microscope and other other tools. It felt like channeling was being used to pore in to the spiritual makeup of the natural world in a way of extracting information and feedback; a colonial animism if you will, a controlled way to get in to the spirits of place, locus genii, it didn’t feel right. Even with good intentions, we can go about these spiritual approached in ways that are performative, even invasive, disrespectful and harmful.
So I want to ask, are we going about this the right way? Should ceremony or spiritual practices in general be our entry-point in to animism or deeper connection with nature? Do we need to focus on the sacred aspect of the natural world around us, and when we do, are we forcing this? Like, when you get to know another human being, don’t you spend time getting to know them on the outside and then make sure you get consent before dabbling in any spiritual encounters with them? So, before we go opening the veils between the world, I’m thinking maybe we can focus on the nature that is on our side of the veil, the here and now bio-wondrous 3-D world. So in this entry I want to talk about an animism of play, childlike animism I’m calling it.
I’ve Been Relating Without Any Sacred Practices
My experiences with the more-than-human contrast with this phenomenon. For the past few years I’ve been quite isolated, spending more time socializing with more-than-human than with human beings and while, yes, I recognize the sentience and spirit that surrounds me but I haven’t really engaged much in any spiritual or ceremonial practices. When I’m outside in the forest garden I tend to and that tends me I might be goofing off or just admiring, appreciating how cool everything is while telling trees and stones and lizards that they are my best friends and how great it is to share a life with them. Other times I might be in pain, dissociated or overwhelmed and just grateful that the more-than-human can offer me some company and hold space for whenever I am in one of those disconnected states. Either way, I am simply paying attention and trying to be receptive to my surroundings, noticing the differences in texture, color and pattern across different kinds of tree bark or trying to notice the ways that the plants sway depending on where the wind is coming from. I’m also open to irrational interactions, petting a rock, singing ridiculous R&B love songs when beetles are mating, or hanging from a branch while pretending the bramble thorns beneath are growing in size and becoming daggers!
My Besties:
And what I’ve noticed is that this curious, amiable-but-honest-about-how-I’m-feeling-at-the-moment approach seems to be building relationship. Sometimes I am excited to seek for the silly, effervescent interaction, sometimes I’m just letting myself be unwell in their presence and may or may not “receive help and healing.” I’m not there to get anything yet at the same time open to receive; I’m there because this place is the place I trust the most and learn from. And spending each day here, I have become emotionally attached in so many way, and I feel it is this emotional connection is part of a relationship that has been established.
Quest:
Go outside, anywhere where there aren’t too many people, a green space if you can, a park or a woodland or a backyard , even the potted plants in your apartment or the indoor gardens at the mall. Imagine you’re in a colorful 3D platformer. If you’re not familiar, these video games are lighthearted adventures where you jump on things, knock blocks and logs out of the way, discover hidden treasures, collect loot such as fruits and insects and meet the local fantastical creatures, silly characters with odd requests who tend to like things like nonsensical target shooting games or distinct puzzles. Imagine you’re meeting one of these characters, literally anything could be a character in this game, a plant, an animal, a branch, a drop of dew on a leaf, an imaginary dwarf living in the ground, a cloud in the sky, anything. Ask what they like, or what they need and imagine the answer, sit down and close your eyes if you need to. Whatever they ask of you, pretend like what they want requires special tools/ or a special ability or move to complete, use your imagination! Don’t be embarrassed to be exagerate with lots of pantomime or silly physical gestures, to really pretend your move or special tool has power! If you’ve had a perticularly fun time, feel free to share in the comments!
What Builds Relationship? Where Does Ceremony Fit In?
Relationship, for me is at the core of ecology, its what the whole thing is about, millions of relationships resulting in infinite stories and happenings, made up of all of these interactions and entanglements at the micro levels holding life together, not just for survival, but to diversify, exchange, create, connect, celebrate, have a yarn together, have fun and just be. Meanwhile the macro-organism slowly evolves and changes over the eons as all of these stories unfold.
Is ceremony the starting point of relationship with more-than-human or is this experiential process I have described a better way to go? Perhaps they are mutually constitutive? I don’t have the answer, I talk about this a little more in the next essay on community-building and ultimately I think its not something we can really theorize, but probably a messy process that we all have to figure out differently. only like living life and experimenting will helps us find out. Like, I can see ceremony deepening relationship, but also feel like some sort of already established rapport should come before diving in to ceremony.
It seems weird to me to make an offering to a place without having ecosystemic, sensorial and emotional relations with the place beforehand, without ever having watched where the water flows and gets absorbed during a rainstorm, or knowing where the puddles appear during the rain and having memories of jumping in those puddles! Or when I see people try to make contact with a landscape in the spiritual realms it seems strange to me to do so without having gazed at and walked the lines of that landscape’s topography to the point where one can picture them the way one could their mother’s face. Have you ever gotten to know a human being through meditation or offering before even knowing their name, sharing life moments with them, learning how they feel, their past, where they’re from, etc? It seems more courteous to me to get to know the outside before trying to dive inward.
My particular life experience had led me to emphasizing a senses-first, experiential approach to environing the landscape and being with extrahuman reality as a foundation, before focusing on ceremonial practice. (And also community-weaving before ceremony but that’s the subject of the next essay.) This physical and feeling-toned relationship with place can be through play, unstructured see-what-arises interaction, bushcraft and art, emotional resonance and expression, make-believe, ecological curiosity and discovery, consent practices and communication-learning or through many other methods. To give it all a term I’d like to call this remembering of sensitivity and reattunement to an innocent, wondrous and goalless approach to the natural world, childlike animism.
Being a Kid Again
From what I’ve read, people in land-based cultures spend fifteen, twenty or more years gaining traditional ecological knowledge, before entering phases of life where they take on more responsibility in the community’s spiritual connections and affairs with the more-than-human. They get to know their landscape, how to navigate it, the nature of each species, the locations of each resource and the stories held there on top of generations of rapport between the community and the place. They are not just learning the thousands and thousands of overlapping and interwoven cycles that surround them, they are experiencing them in a way that is profoundly embodied, that wires their experience and understanding of the world them in ways that we just haven’t experienced. They don’t just know about a cycle, they have lived it in their bodies, its not an abstract concept, these experience keep the cobwebs of dissociation swept away, there is being stuck in the mind or separation of inner and outer, its a a state of moving connection of everything feeling real and animate and buzzing. These cycles have become a part of who they are and given them a wider sense of Self where they are both the landscape in its entirety and a part of its whole. I want to talk about this more at some point because its not easy to explain without having experienced glimpses of this in one’s life.
Our Human community process, with our children, is Culture being built and reinforced. Besides child free-time in the woods, water, and fields, children can be taken on pilgrimages, up a creek, or into a forest, or up a hill, to special Places, where year after year they hear the same stories of Place and rocks, animals, plants, and wonder. With every season, every year, that special walk, with the whole community, ignites Love-of-Place.
Social Forestry - Tomi Hazel Vaarde
So, for most of us, the last time we took the time to get to know our environments, just because, just to know their secrets and surprises and sensations and scenes, was in childhood. How much time have you spent just being there, just walking and see who is there, what features are present? Do I feel affection and curiosity for the life that surrounds me? How do I find the things I need? What is edible? Are the problem spots I should know about?
Yes much of this was passed down as knowledge, but it was also experienced through the trial and error of children playing in their environments and trying out the knowledge handed down to them and gradually venturing further, and further out, bonding, exploring, feeling, connecting.
Kids Have Natural Love For More-Than Human
So I’m thinking, what if we took the time to act like children, getting to know the more-than-human with with care, excitement and a bit of mischief? In a felt-way, allowing experimentation to let in all of those tangible and .visceral sensations.
Have you ever seen how much kids love animals? They go nuts for every species like you can’t believe in an unabashed, enthusiastic, emotional, almost mercurial unfiltered passion for the more-than-human. They feel empathy and care for just about any being. They aren’t thinking about making offering because that is how traditional peoples do reciprocity, it’s the “right thing to do.” They just really care about and like other beings and enjoy bringing them little gifts
Have you ever seen how much kids pay attention to and recognize and find little herbaceous plants? I was with a kid recently, who was six-years-old, from North America but in Europe for the first time, who recognized apple mint as a mint the moment he saw it, even though apple mint (mentha suaveolens) is not native to America. Kids are interested in the weeds among their feet and pay attention to their detail without every having taken a botany course or learned which ones are the “spiritually beneficial” ones.
Kids are in dialogue and relationship with the more-than-human without having to beat a shaman drum or prepare an elaborate altar with chocolate and tobacco or sit through through a guided meditation with any plant and animals spirits. They know how to grieve without having to attend a workshop about it.
So, if we wish to awaken our relational faculties with nature, perhaps we should look back to being kids again, rather than racing forward to become shamans and druids. Let’s just play and spend the quality time with our landscapes without worrying about having to make an offering or channel a spirit. Let’s remember (or experience for the first time) what its like to be a kid rambling through the woods.
Quest:
Go back to when you were a kid. If, like me, you don’t have that many childhood memories and felt kind of disconnected, you can imagine you are a kid now and make new memories and if it just isn’t happening, no shame, I couldn’t connect at all for most of my life, you can try fake it ‘til you make it ro just forget about this one!
Make a map of a place, anywhere, but the wilder the better. Go around the place just for the sake of doing so, no criteria, not looking for any pros or cons. Walk in slow motion or go around making animal noises or grunts of a made-up language. What do you find? What happens? Do you feel anything? Get any ideas? Map these happenings and the routes among them. Mark down the things/beings you find and give them silly names or made-up purposes. Do different places or routes between them bring up different aspects of yourself? What was the coolest thing. Was there any treasure? Did you meet any new friends or “see” a place for who they are?
Relational Faculties Numbed - Blocks
With good nesting, children are aware of energies around them and if encouraged will maintain and build that awareness, rather than suppress and forget it, as many industrialized children are forced to do.
-Darcia Narvaez, Restoring thr Kinship Worldview
And I want to recognize that this isn’t something we can turn on like a light switch, I myself have a lot of blocks accessing my sense of play and childhood faculties. Most of us are in serious mode, looking-for-solutions mode. The childlike instinct to play and connect is largely repressed in many of us, to different degrees.
For me, attachment, family and developmental trauma, largely from the absence of healthy, loving relationships as a child have resulted in my relational faculties being dulled, my protective disconnection with people also resulted in a disconnect with the more-than-human. So, to get past these wounds that resulted in intense dissociation, for me its been about consistency. I’ve been going outside, to the same exact five acres, over and over, for years, even when I can’t feel the connection.
What the Experience is Like - Sample
And along the years, little by little, during moments, there are shifts where the surroundings become more tangible, more enchanted. I’d like to share some vignettes in the second person, because I think this is something that isn’t exclusive to me.
One day you notice that the flexibility of a branch helps you feel what flexibility actually means.
Another day you come in to contact with a town of bugs that you’ve walked by over and over again, but this time you feel awe and a tender knowing of kinship that makes you feel like a gentle giant.
In another instant you just feel like walking around on all fours because you’re wondering what the boar sees (and smells) with his head so close to the ground.
You check the spot where the lizard is usually basking in the sun and yourself feel energized and warmed.
You go down to the creek to listen to the murmurs and suddenly there are stones who you feel wish to be piled up to dam and slow down a little section of the current.
Your feet learn where they get muddy and where they get prickled, they just know.
When you’re investigating a brush-pile or weeding a garden bed, your hands and arms know where to touch and where not to, like little eyes on your fingertips.
Gradually you start seeing stories rather than just things and creatures, the chains of events, the you see the transformation and happenings at different scales of time and different scales of space.
Personalities start arising, not in fixed ways, but depending on which lens you take, at which scale you are looking. You feel the overlapping consciousnesses who share space and whose bodies emerge depending on the context and angle. You walk in to a clearing and feel it as a whole, but from a distance and from another perspective, you see them as a part of a larger whole, or fragmented in to multiple little niches and happenings. The clearing may appear and dissolve across the time of day or the season. Its an earthy and textured kaleidoscope that happens across cycles and pure magic to witness.
Then, after seeing all of these stories and meeting all of these beings, maybe an inkling this certain stone might really like to join that clearing or a certain log might want to be in a shadier spot and join the town of bugs. And maybe this autumn leaf has dried in a way that its color would fit nicely in to a little leaf mandala that one has left as a gift for the fairies. And maybe that leaf mandala has a scattering of some chestnuts and apples adding aromatic pigments to the land art that hopefully bring a boar’s snout in the recipe, creating a playful and childlike offering.
For me its been like that, without feeling like I have to, or because I read in a book or did a workshop that its what animists do, I sometimes just feel like giving someone something. The “offering” or the more sacred aspects of my relationship with the extrahuman germinated from the soil of my experience with the place.
Unlearning the Modernity Adult
During this process across the years, it hasn’t just been allowing the kid to be there and sink in to the experience with the more-than-human. I’ve also been with the domesticated-adult inside of me, the one who wants to formulate a business plan, turn this somehow in to a career, build an audience around my work (rather than letting it gather naturally) and make sure I don’t lose modernity’s guarantees and comfort. He also worries about making sure we do everything on the regenerative checklist, always looking for work to do in the forest, for things that “need” to get done.
I’ve been with him, completely broke for years, trying to forget about how to commodify my experience or thinking about making plans for a secure future and he keeps seeing that we’re still alive, that we haven’t starved and that in spite of not focusing on work, no one has died. And so this domesticated-adult, the “pessimist” I call him, has allowed the wild-child to take the wheel of the bus sometimes or allowed the lover to expand in my body and feel this place and appreciate it all. So I keep going outside because I love it, not because I’m worried about climate change. Although I am worried about climate change hahaha, I go out because it just feels great to relate to this place and gradually my interests and instincts are guiding me, rather than my fears and the logic of modernity.
Conclusion
Does this journey of childlike animism resonate with anyone else? What have your journeys looked like? How do you wake up your wild-child? What do you think about engaging in ceremonial animist practices in the absence of a life lived in connection with the land? What are your relationships with the extrahuman like and how do you awaken your relational faculties?
Sacred land practice, animist ceremonies, spiritual engagement with the more-than-human, I’m not against it, but I’m uncomfortable with how much of a fad it feels like, or how its the first thing people seem to be gravitating to in practiving relationship with the more-than-human. I feel we’re putting the cart before the horse and that a nice solid base of childlike animism should be considered before getting too deep in to the spiritual.
The other thing, I think we are lacking, along with childlike animism, is relationality with one another and community building. So in the next entry to this series I’ll be talking about the importance of community in relating to the land (the land is also our teacher of community) and how learning relationship with one another is vital to learning relationship with the more-than-human.
Thanks for reading!