I think I was an animist long before I knew there was a word for it.
The natural world has never felt entirely mute or inanimate to me. Animals, trees, places, objects and landscapes can carry a presence that is difficult to explain but very easy to recognise.
Over the years I explored different traditions and practices that gave me ways of approaching those experiences. They were important to me, and some remain part of the ground I stand on, but my practice has continued to evolve.
These days I am less interested in elaborate cosmologies or in deciding exactly where an experience takes place. I am much more interested in relationship, imagination, symbol and what can happen when we give something our full attention.
ANIMISM
For me, animism isn’t a belief that I need to persuade anyone else to share.
It is closer to a way of being in relationship with the world.
It asks what happens when we stop treating everything around us simply as scenery, resource or object, and begin to encounter a world made up of other presences, human and more-than-human, with their own lives, character and mystery.
That doesn’t require me to pretend I know what a tree thinks or what an animal wants to tell me.
Sometimes it simply means paying attention.
THE IMAGINAL
The imaginal gives me another way of understanding this territory.
An image encountered in a dream, a journey, a painting or a moment of deep imagination does not have to be reduced to either literally real or just made up.
There is another possibility: that we can meet the image on its own terms.
Rather than immediately asking “Is this real?”, I find it much more interesting to ask:
What is happening here?
What does this image want me to notice?
What changes when I enter into relationship with it?
This is one of the reasons the work of people such as Carl Jung, James Hillman and Henry Corbin has become increasingly important to me. They offer different ways of taking images seriously without having to turn them into fixed beliefs.
A PRACTICE THAT KEEPS EVOLVING
My own practice has gradually become simpler.
Less concerned with cosmology, more concerned with relationship.
Less interested in finding the correct interpretation, more interested in staying with an image long enough for it to reveal something unexpected.
This has changed the way I make art, the way I work with oracle and tarot, the way I approach readings, and the way I walk through the landscape.
This isn’t to say that answers don’t come. They often do, sometimes with surprising clarity. But I’m interested in answers that emerge through attention and relationship, rather than ones imposed too quickly upon an experience. For me, leaving room for mystery doesn’t mean leaving everything unresolved.
Perhaps most importantly, it allows mystery to remain mystery.
But mystery, for me, is not an end in itself. I’m interested in what these encounters bring back into our lives: greater attention, deeper relationship, new perspectives, healing and sometimes unexpected clarity.
I would like my work to be an invitation to deepen our experience of being alive.