We may never be able to capture or recapture the animist vision that Quinn describes. The important thing is to have that vision at all. It’s one thing to know, intellectually, about primary, secondary, and tertiary consumers, the food web, and the basics of ecology. I can tell you that living beings eat other living beings (or, at least, beings that were once alive) and that energy from the sun kicks the whole thing off. And you’d know it in your mind, and that would be fine. But to have a vision, a moment, where that relentless and drowning flow of STUFF is revealed to you will inevitably change everything. When Quinn talks about the importance of vision in response to the futility of programs, he’s talking about this very thing. You may not behave differently if I tell you that the trees growing along the curb on your street constitute a special kind of forest — and urban forest — and that they’re in a relationship with everything surrounding them. But if you can stop for a moment and see it — truly see the life burning through the trees and the soil and the insects and birds and people and even the concrete and asphalt — you’ll engage with the place differently. You may even approach it with reverence and care for it as an extension of yourself and all the people you love.

And so we get to the point where movement through a place (in this case, a forest of street trees) might help get some glimpse at this massive, overwhelming thing.

I agree! I couldn’t help but feel the same way. There we were, yapping in a circle like there was a campfire in the center. Even just strolling up and down the block would have been preferable. There’s something, though, about anchoring anxious New Yorkers who are always on the move… I almost feel we couldn’t have grabbed their attention as long as we did if we had been covering terrain. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. I’m willing to try. Let’s make a point of that Saturday to get started: strolling story telling…

As we discussed, I caught you mimicking/embodying tree as we looked at the red maple with the neighbors. Here’s my challenge- how much more obviously can we do that?

How much more blatantly can we change our physical comportment? For example, during the sweet conversation all six of us were having today, we were standing in a circle looking inward- all human. I personally felt a little physically stuck and rigid in that traditional, verbally-centered formation.

Could we have circled around a tree instead? All looked up or down the block together? Stretched while we spoke, or made our conversational gestures large enough to use our whole body? How different can we be without losing people- I think we can push it

Thank you for your thoughts about the animism concept. There’s a lot to explore and respond to here.

I’m really intrigued by the relationship you’ve woven between animism as a spiritual concept and animism as a way of thinking about dance and movement. I’m starting to feel that in order to arrive at a deeply meaningful exchange between practitioners of movement and dance and practitioners of ecology and environmental management we’ve needed to meet “halfway” in the realm of the spiritual. That makes sense, of course, given that we started our collaboration in dialogue around our readings of THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS. It’s official now, though: the Rosetta Stone that translates the two practices and encodes a collaborative language is found in what I’ll call, for now, an animistic experience of the world. You might literally say that we meet and dissolve into our mutual practices when we both come under the spell of the sensuous.

For lack of any better or different way to label the way I experience the world spiritually, I’ve been calling myself an animist since I was at least sixteen years old (over twelve years now). I recently found myself explaining animism as a worldview that needs no reconciliation with science (in particular, ecology). It relies on metaphors to describe the same phenomena that ecology strives to describe and understand; phenomena related to material and energy flow through a landscape and the relationships between living and “non-living” things in a place.

Daniel Quinn (whom you refer to in your post) has described the animist perspective as an appreciation for “the fire of life” — a metaphor for the energy stored in any organism and the availability of that energy to other organisms in the form of food. Everything that’s alive eats. Likewise, everything that’s alive gets eaten. That endless exchange of energy, from death to life and back to death, is the fire of life burning through a place, animating all of the things that live in a place, dancing uncontrollably and unpredictably.

Indigenous societies expressing an animist appreciation of the world have repeatedly (though in different ways) described this flow as the experience of one organism living on in another over time. It’s become a cliché in our culture to appropriate these metaphors, but I think the ideas become fresh again when we realize that the stories are not simply describing the passing of, say, the “spirit” of a cricket living on in the “spirit” of a turtle. They’re literally describing the assimilation of one organism’s energy into another, and with it the spirit, or the fire, that animated that organism.

I’m admittedly mixing evocative prose with jargon from ecology. The word “organism” doesn’t play nicely against a phrase like “the fire of life.”

So, now, dance and movement. I agree with you wholeheartedly: “there is no way to be receptive to the animateness of the environment without being animate oneself.” Humans are no different from any other species. We are animated with the same fire of life, the energy that burned in some other organism before we took it into ourselves in the form of food. And because we’re able to reflect on ourselves and our experience in this world, our species has, throughout its history, looked to movement and dance to express an understanding of the world. To interpret the world, and to interpret our place in the world and our relationship with other species in the world. We dance with the flames of the fire of life in order to find our place in its patterns and rhythms.

“We are accustomed to learning about ourselves through ourselves, as if our bodies are animated with secrets that our mind doesn’t immediately comprehend, and can hear only by inviting and listening to the body’s language.” The same is true of the landscape in which we find ourselves, no? Sometimes we can only hear the secrets of the world by moving with the world, slipping into the same dances and movements that we see other species perform. If I’m a nomadic hunter, how else can I understand my prey? How can I hope to stalk it and kill it if I don’t understand such that I become it, through the mimicry of movement and dance? I wonder if the same can be said of anyone trying to care for trees in an urban environment…

Jackie, this has been really helpful. As always, having the opportunity to reflect with you is opening my mind to entirely new dimensions of this work…