Of course your house is alive.

Home design and tending is an animist, shamanic practice. What does that mean?

Often, if someone has a question (or a subtextual apprehension) about space clearing, or land tending, or house listening, or shaman-ing, it’s because they have no context for that.

 If ‘energy’ isn’t real, then what is a space clearing? Waving sage while cos-playing a healer-type in my kaftan and crystals? Am I really ‘clearing the space’, or am I a fabulously dressed charlatan wackjob? How can someone believe a technique is effective if the basis for the work is so far outside their cosmology, there is no space for it to be real?

It’s a reasonable question. Let’s look at it.

My first significant experience with the animate was in Borneo, many years ago. The forest there was alive in a new way for me. Teeming, thrumming, pulsing, undeniably alive. Alive beyond anything that a humanist, Cartesian, rationalist lens was going to see. There were eyes everywhere. Beings everywhere, that were not ‘real’, interacting with me. It was intense.

 In retrospect, it was my first interaction with a place in which the locals fed the spirits of the forest continuously for tens of thousands of years, and therefore, those spirits were still alive. They were the forest. Not just of it or in it.

Recently, I attended an open house for the cutest house for sale. Vintage adorable everything, lots of potential, splash of long term neglect by previous owners: this is my favorite sort of potential project, good bones and room to improve. Alas, the place was crawling, oozing, vibrating (!) with malevolent energy that set my teeth on edge. It too, was alive like the Borneo rainforest, only in a bad way. (And it too, had been fed again and again to get to that state, it needs to be said.)

At the open house, there were spaces that were sort of ok and others that had some seriously uncomfortable energy. I observed more than one man push his wife out of the way to get out of the home’s more uncomfortable energy. Cold spots, spaces where you just don’t want to be. Places that every part of my reptilian brain said, get the hell out of here. Everyone felt it. Everyone. Whether you have the language or not to describe this, you have been in places that you want to stay, and others that you need to leave immediately. That’s energy, my friend. That’s the animate, the unseen forces, breathing down your neck.

This kind of real time experiment in which people are interacting with the unignorably loud animate, and I get to watch is rare. I was fascinated.

Which brings me back to my question about people that resist “the woo-woo bits”. Riddle me this, dear reader: how can people be so afraid of something that they don't believe exists?

Because: we know it exists, this realm beyond human. In our bones, we know. Our bones are composed of this song.

And: we’ve (largely) lost our ability to interact with the animate. The collective grief and shame around that loss cuts deep.  

For the vast majority of human time, the animate, animism, was simply what was.

Meaning, of course water is alive, and there are elves in the forest. Of course your house has guardians that need feeding. Of course the air that touches your skin, the moon that moves the water in your own body and in the oceans, the earth under your feet, the wood and glass and leather and dirt and pigment in your home, the stone in the ring on your finger, is alive, is sentient, is supernatural. So are you. You are part of this web.

There are spirits of all kinds, for everything, in the woods, and under bridges, and ones that protect the harvest, or animals, or childbirth, or children, or travel, or food storage, or the full moon or the waxing moon, or the waning moon, or the balsamic moon.

There is a force for, and of, everything. Every quotidian task can be ritualized. Every hour of the day.

Of course. Humans were a part of this system, rather than apart from it. And all our domesticated tools, shelters, plants were as well. Animism isn’t wild, or other. It’s not contained to the forest. It simply was.

So much so that we didn’t even have a word for animism until the 19th century, which is really late, all things considered. Nobody had a word for it before then, in any language because it was so woven into our blood and bones.

Then, somewhere around 500 years ago, some people in power convinced everyone, generally with violence, that animism wasn’t ‘real’. There is but one god and he (and of course it was a he) is separate from you.

Think of how wild that is: 500,000 years of living in balance with all that is, and then, a hard pivot around 1500 (the age of enlightenment! the age of reason! lol, deism!) all because a handful of people needed nature to be disrespected, and people to see themselves as separate from it, in order to get on with their crime-ing. And they still had to burn a hell of a lot of witches to get people to forget and to go along.

The arrogance of 3 or 4 generations turning around to 10,000 + generations of ancestors stretching back to all of human history, every ancestor they’ve ever had to say, “it’s silly to talk to rocks and there’s no such thing as a nymph and trying to balance the earth energies for healing is dumb, and land for the collective well-being is illegal now…”

That’s some crazy hubris.

 Let’s look at the definition of animism: “The attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.”

Denial of the animate is baked into the definition. To understand this word about the world being alive, and you being part of that, you have to assume that the world is dead, and you are separate from the world.

Modernist, humanist, rationalist theories are a construct about the separation of life, rooted (see what I did there) in a colonialist rubric whose survival depends on an understanding that the world is hierarchical, not relational. That scarcity is the norm. If the water and the rocks are already dead, who cares if Nestle and Rio Tinto extract them for the benefit of the very few?

Phrased another way, if you make the immortal mortal, they’re going to die. If you turn the unseen forces of nature into an abstraction, how do you to interact with them? As an art piece in a white walled gallery? As a fanciful idea? Something in a jar of formaldehyde? No wonder we’re disbelieving when we do directly experience the animate again. (There’s no way that a dark force of nature lurks in that upstairs closet right? I mean, this is a great neighborhood…)

We call them unseen forces now because we don’t see them anymore. But we used to. All of your ancestors (all of them, up to the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, anywhere in the world) were in deep and constant relationship with the animate. That’s not the weird bit. It’s weird that we’re not anymore.

The question isn’t: why do some people “still believe” in giants and djinn, and the importance of a house blessing, and of honoring and balancing the energies. Much more interesting to consider is: what was so powerful about animist, spiritual practices that to make modernity work, we had to kill the forest fairies and the witches first? What does that tell us about the goals of modernism? (And, does that mean that your very home is a temple to modernity rather than a sanctuary for your family?)

It’s a more interesting to ask, if we live in a world of abstractions and ideas, rather than one of relationships and reciprocity and personal responsibility, which patterns will get amplified and which denied?

And now, at this wild confluence of the birth of AI as a sentient thing (you know, where your phone is alive) and a very last minute effort to keep the earth alive, we have to do some serious mental and metaphysical acrobatics to live in both systems at once. It’s exhausting. And does nothing to address the needs of your very alive, very sentient house. Or you, for that matter.

To feel your way back to an understanding of animism you can’t do it in your head. You can’t “believe” your way there.

 So go outside and talk to rocks and plants and birds. Or the stuck door knob in your house. Thank your coffee beans. Tune into your ancestors. Talk to the water in your body. Ask your furniture what it wants to be happy.

Animism is about actual relationships rather than the ones in your head. You cannot be in right relationship with your house, your car, plants, your neighbors, your ancestors, and the earthworms in your garden, without loving attention. Without respect.

To see light dance on water and know what it is saying, or to feel how an antique piece vibrates with its lived experience you have to listen, and look. Bend time, and concentrate your awareness. You already know how to, in your blood. Every living thing responds to positive loving attention. Try it, and see what wakes up again.