Syd

Found some friends blooming this morning around the stumps of the trees the neighbors had cut down.

@balthazaar@pagan.plus I've been thinking about this over the past few days and have to say I think our inability to witness other beings' perceptions is one of those things that just staggers me when I think about it. The physical world is vaster than any single human can experience fully, but even in one single anthill there can be thousands of universes of experiences and understanding that are forever hidden from everyone else. Everywhere we look there are these interior worlds we'll never know, and even with fellow humans where we can share thoughts and ideas through language and art more directly, we're still only getting reflections of what people actually experience inside. It's really beautiful to me and makes me value the little glimpses we do get to have into other beings' inner worlds.

It's always surprising to me how quick people can be to dismiss non-human animals as unintelligent or lacking interior lives, when I feel like I see constant evidence of how thoughtful the animals around me are. So often the animals I'm watching are watching me back and seem just as curious as I am--nearly every time I sit on the porch, at least one little spider comes up to see what I'm up to. Spider thoughts are surely pretty different than human thoughts or tree thoughts but it's wild to me to assume that they don't exist simply because they're different than how we perceive things. I do wish I could hear what those thoughts were.

@balthazaar@pagan.plus this is a short answer to a big question, but I understand "spirits" to be everything that is intangible about something--everything that is part of it that you cannot perceive directly, including things like internal experiences as well as the feeling or thoughts or connections other spirits may have with them. I believe that all things have spirits and that there are spirits that aren't tied to physical things, and that the differentiation between spirits is more a way of organizing our understanding of the world so we can talk about and make sense of it (rather than being absolutely definitive or actually separate.) I don't believe that humans have different souls than other beings and recognize personhood as existing far outside of humanity. For me animism is largely about recognizing and respecting the spirit in everything. If I try to honor every spirit I interact with--the people and animals I engage with, the food I eat, the roads I walk on, every object I touch--I am always trying to show compassion and treat the world around me with care, which helps me move towards being the kind of person I want to be. And I'm always aware of how closely connected I am with everyone and everything that exists outside of what I understand as myself.

It's been a week or two since I've had a chance to walk out to the vulture barn, and when I went out there yesterday, it had totally collapsed. I'm not sure if bad weather got it or if it just reached its natural breaking point but I was startled to see it fallen. Since last fall, my partner and I have been slowly reading through Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom, spending a few weeks to study each of the Major Arcana as we do. This week's card is the Tower, and I can't help but see it reflected here in this fallen barn, and think about how often I take for granted that things will last, persist, remain static for me to build my world around even as I try to center my spiritual practice on change.

On my first walk in my new neighborhood, I found some vulture friends hanging out by this abandoned barn, and it became my regular destination for walks around the area. A few times I saw my vulture buds there again--sometimes hanging out on the barn or the trees beside it, sometimes soaring overhead. It felt like a good place to leave wildflowers and rocks in their honor, and it became a casual shrine of sorts to me as I got to know the local vulture spirits.