While trying to write a simple "hey, brother" response to @SHEASHANNARA's entry here, I spun out into much more of a discourse on my own spirituality than I meant to. I felt that posting something so much about myself there would have been against the spirit of his own piece, so decided to move my own ramblings to my own space where they can put their feet up on the table without fear of offending.
So here's a little part of my spiritual perspective.
While I don't regularly recognize it in terms of supernatural beings, I have a kind of animist view towards the world. I think it's a misunderstanding to think that more primal spiritual systems necessarily require belief in the supernatural. To really believe that kind of thing in a way beyond teenage sentimentality is fundamentally to recognize it as not super natural, but inherently natural. For me it's a perspective on the world as it is, not an imagining of any world beyond. Worlds beyond, whether beyond death or beyond this dimension, are simply an imaginative extrapolation from this viewpoint on the very tangible world we live in every day.
Though I’m a rational science-based person generally, I've never lost a sense that everything - not just living things, but stones and walls and dishtowels - has a spirit. And I don't see those perspectives as opposed, really; or I don't live them as opposed. They're mostly separate: empirical evidence tells me a whole lot about a given thing, but that's simply data. It can tell me what a thing is, but not what that means. Engaging the spirit of a thing is how I as a mushy animal incapable of separating my perceptions from the mushy animal lens of humanity relate to that thing.
No, I don't think there's some little sapient being inhabiting a tree, but I do feel strongly that to chop off half it's limbs so they don't grow into power lines is an offense against it's spirit, while carefully pruning a tree for its health is honoring it's spirit. I can “speak to” the spirit of the tree and it certainly speaks to me. That doesn’t happen in words or telepathy, it happens in action because trees don’t have words or telepathy. But they “understand” action in that they react to it. Even if you don’t act on a thing, if you approach it that way, on its own terms and in its own “language”, you’re acknowledging its spirit. So if I take the time to listen, yeah; I can hear the tree tell me about tree stuff. Trees rarely have much to say about anything else, just as humans mostly talk about things that one way or another relate to ourselves.
Even cutting a tree down to make something suitable can honor the spirit of the thing, while killing it to make room for a road has nothing to do with the tree. In that case the tree is just in the way so it's spirit is disregarded, which sucks even though we must often cause such casualties. Nature's always been red in tooth and claw, one thing has always had to die for another to live, and we're never actually disconnected from nature. We just change our relationship to nature and increasingly we change nature itself. usually, nature’s spirit… doesn’t like that.
In that sense, I totally feel what @SheaShannara says about Urban Paganism and the spirit of a city. His gal ain’t the kind of company I like to keep, but London, Lisbon, and Las Vegas each has a distinct and different spirit of it’s own, and you’d have to be truly dense to not perceive that. You may get along with it or not, but to engage with it as a human being (rather than, say, as a data analyst) is to experience that spirit. And going beyond passively experiencing to actually relating to it? In four decades I’ve never found a better word for that than Animism.
