Whole Earth Animism

A Field-Guide to the Future

[art: Black Bear Dreams of the Mountain mural in Kingston, NY from O+ Festival]

For millennia patriarchy has stuck itself inside a linear belief-sphere of hierarchichal domination, the idea of progress at all costs, and human supremacy above all else. It’s a story, like all straight lines with a clear beginning, a muddled middle, and always an an end times. No wonder our stories—in our books, our media, in our own heasd—are filled with anxious dystopias and inevitible doomsdays.

But the stories the earth tells are very different. What goes around comes around. The moon and the tides. The sun and the seasons. The rain that falls on the mountaintop and finds its way to the sea and back to the clouds and back to the clouds and back to the earth again. Worlds are born. Worlds die. And worlds are always reborn. To live inside those circles, inside a belief-sphere where beginnings are arbitrary and endings are temporary is to experience a radical reorientation of who we are and who can be and what we are meant to do.

To disrupt the civilized narratives and recover those generous cycles of eternal return we need to tell new stories to ourselves, each other, and to our descendants. We need to learn how to listen to the stories the stones are telling, the trees are concocting, the birds are singing, and the stars are whispering.

This coming year my husband Clark and I will be offering an extended journey into this project. Together we have been trying to do just this for over thirty years—to align our heartbeats with the heartbeat of the earth and to use our voices to tell the stories of our beloved moss-covered mountains where bears are now falling asleep and offering to us new dreams that we, too, can enter.

Clark and I have been gathering these stories and telling these stories for a long time—and now we want to invite our friends to imagine with us stories that renew the world rather than destroy it, stories that can guide our descendants through collapse, stories that can hold us when we are reborn into the world we’ve made.

Clark has been walking under the stars since he was a little boy, sneaking out a night to let the darkness hold and guide him. He went to a Zen monastery as a teenager but it was the snakes in the graveyard and the mountain lions in the forest who were his true teachers. The owls find him wherever he is. When he starts a fire, all the raccoons gather round.

About myself I can say that I have always known everyone has a story to tell and for years I dedicated myself to helping people tell those stories—as a teacher and as a ghost writer. How can we all be ghost writers for the earth, translators for the trees and the ferns, mediators for the mushrooms? If we have one story to pass along to our grandchildren that will save their lives, what will it be?

Clark’s work as a haiku poet will inform this journey. My work with the dead informs everything. But this a new venture for us and one we feel is both urgent and fecund. I think we are going to have a lot of fun together.

You can read more about us and the practicalities of the course here:

https://takebackthemagic.com/whole-earth-animism/

The course begins in March but we are offering a reduced fee if you register before January 1. Why not give it as a gift to yourself? Give yourself the gift of a whole new belief-sphere and a long story that does not end.

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Clark Strand is the author of Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey as well as Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. Together they are the founders of The Way of the Rose and the book by the same name. They live with their soul kin, their blood kin, and their fur kin in the Catskill Mountains.