an animated world

Long before any ism or religion existed in humanity's consciousness, animist practice was the embodied experience of living beings. 

Animism is not a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It was simply how things were. A common understanding - across the entire world, for all of time. 

The fabric offerings tied to a tree mark offerings to a being of the landscape.
Olkhon Island, Irkutsk Oblast, Russian Federation. Roberto Quijada, CC BY-NC

Animism is not a religion one can convert to but rather a label used for worldviews and practices. It identifies and describes acknowledge relationships between nature and the animal world. A driving force and influence over humans and a way of being that needed to be respected.

For ninety eight percent of human history 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted within a world that they saw and felt to be animate - imbued with lifeforce. Inhabited by and permeated with energies with which we exist in ongoing relation. 

This animate vision was the water in which we swam - consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of interacting in the world and our place in it. 

Indigenous and animist perspectives illustrate that there are many different relationships possible between humans and the world around them, and many environmentalists are finding these alternatives instructive - despite the troubled history of the term. 

Helping individuals to remember their animist consciousness can lead to a shift among all of human consciousness. A direly needed direction that steers us back to a state of connection and equilibrium with the natural world. A regenerative turn that could well be our salvation.

Shifting our consciousness toward one of connection and reciprocal relationship with the natural world would heal us and the Earth. A return to our natural way of being - for all that live is the only way we can stay alive.

This is our whole purpose for being in this world and on this earth. Let us return to it soonest.