Bio-Regional Animism in Less than Five Minutes

This is a speech I will be giving at The Unitarian Universalist Church of the Paluse, in Moscow Idaho, on Sunday the 23rd of September 2007.

Spirituality is everywhere to be found; it unfolds with the peddles of a rose, and gurgles in the song of a creek, and in the canyons, and running through the forest. This is the experience animism is built from. It is the belief in spirit. It does not distinguish from the spiritual and the material; instead, they are one and the same.

Our planet is a vast network of ecosystems that work in highly concentrated ways and have been surveyed for their resources then divided to be bought and sold on the market. Through this homogeneous market, our culture has become disconnected from our eco-systems, losing the sacredness of daily life. Nature is not a collection of resources for human consumption, but are equals to humans. This teaches us to relate our lives to what is needed for daily sustenance and to contributing back to nature, forcing one to realize that life is sacrificed to sustain life. This perspective demands empathy with our environment and to feel its reality in order to implement environmental, ecological, and social change. Humans are not above nature but as much a part of it in every way. However, we have been irresponsible, subjugating our environment to mere material and forgetting its spiritual nature.

Bio-Regional Animism seeks to re-cultivates the sacred relationship of humans and the eco-systems they inhabit by recognizing the lessons taught by animist cultures worldwide, past and the present, and applying the animist process to our eco-systems. It spiritually relates our modern culture to the forest, rivers, mountains, animals, energies, and scientific principles as individuals with inherent worth and dignity. Scientific understanding of the environment, like knowing where your water and food comes from, social activities of local wildlife, and the medicinal value of indigenous plants, builds the foundation for relating to our ecosystem through improvisational ceremonies and meditations. This is achieved by discarding the dualism of modern society, and realizing there is only spirit.

Bio-Regional animism is not a new religion or even a new tradition of neo-paganism; rather, it is a way of relating to our environment in a deeply spiritual way and can co-exist with other ways of life, given openness to the needs, desires, and unique understanding of their ecosystem. Bio-Regional animism is not the path for those who seek predefinitions and structure; instead, it directly challenges these notions, leaving us with the very soil under our feet and sky above our heads, and that is what we work with to grow our spiritual relationships.