Animism

How Do We Name That Which Cannot Be Named?

It was early morning. The trees shuddered softly in the breeze, their leaves catching the first slanted rays of sunlight as I walked through the woods. The ground beneath me, damp from the previous night’s rain, exhaled a sweet scent of wet earth and pine, a smell thick and syrupy, nestling into my nostrils like the ghost of something older than memory. A crow, perched high in the mossy branches above, issued a sharp cry before launching itself from the tree, its wings clapping through the air with a deftness which demanded acknowledgment. I nodded, as if to say, I hear you.

Animism is a word, and like all words, it is insufficient, lossy. It is the clumsy attempt of language to package something too vast, too foundational to be reduced to mere sounds and syllables. But if language is indeed the best tool we have, and animism must be named, then let it be called what it is: a way of being, a way of understanding, of relationship. It is the recognition and a remembering that the world is not a lifeless stage, or some backdrop upon which humanity acts — but a living, breathing, sentient chorus of which we are only a single voice. It is not belief in the way one might believe in superstition or dogma, but rather a relationship—a mutual knowing—between oneself and the great, innumerable presences that surround, enfold and pass through us.

To speak of animism is to speak of the dignity and interconnectedness of all life - of those living, and dead. It is to reject the sterilized lens of modernity, the lens that flattens the planet into resources, into profit margins, into things, and instead to see our world for what it is: alive, and teeming with agency. The rock, resting by the river’s edge, is not merely a rock, but a being, with its own history, its own slow, secret, patient existence. The river, gurgling and gliding over curving surfaces and gradually growing distances, does not move without intention. The wind that whistles through the tall grass, that whispers at the back of my neck, is not an unconscious force.

It has something to tell us.

To accept this is not to impose human qualities onto the non-human world, but rather to surrender the arrogance which assumes personhood belongs only to us.

What a strange and brittle fiction, human exceptionalism. How small it makes the world, how lonely. To believe that intelligence, language, memory, love, belong to humanity alone is to stand at the center of an empty universe and imagine we are kings. But we were never at the center. There is no center. There is only a great web, a tangle of roots and river paths and migratory trails; the endless interchange of breath and decay, creation and return.

In the soft liminality of those precious pre-twilight moments preceding the setting sun, I sat on a fallen log, resting my palms against its rough skin, feeling the slow, unseen work of mycelium threading through its core, breaking it down, feeding the wood back to the soil. I imagined the hidden fungi beneath my hands, their hyphae stretching out and weaving, speaking in subtle sentences much older than speech; composing a language of composting, of death and renewal; endings and beginnings that are, in truth, one and the same thing.

There’s rustle in the brush. An albino deer, half-hidden, white and watching. My eyes widen, but I do not move, do not reach for my phone to capture the moment, do not interrupt the stillness with the sound of my own surprise. I simply let it be, accepting us as we were—two beings, separate but not separate, entangled in the kind of quiet knowing that humankind has, for too long now, forgotten.

This is what animism offers: not dominion, not mastery, not control, but participation. To be a part of the world, not apart from it. To listen, to observe, to recognize that we are not the only ones with stories to tell.

And, perhaps most importantly, to know that we never were.