New Animism Info
A Digest of Animist Thought

A story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle pasted a huge smile on my face. It’s about the Butters Canyon Conservancy in Oakland, California, which recently passed a significant milestone—sealing the deal on the last for-sale property along a green stretch of urban creek.

Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle

The story juices me because Butters Canyon was my home for some years, and I founded this land trust in 2001. I never set out to work in land conservation. It’s just that I got radicalized by a little urban creek flowing far below my kitchen window.

My partner and I bought the hillside house during…

Continue reading “Radicalized by a creek” »

Just got a book to review, “Eaarth,” by Bill McKibben. Not a misspelling.

Imagine we live on a planet.
Not our cozy,
taken-for-granted earth,
but a planet, a real one,
with dark poles
and belching volcanoes
and a heaving, corrosive sea,
raked by winds,
strafed by storms,
scorched by heat.
An inhospitable place.
A different place.
A different planet.
It needs a new name.
eaarth

McKibben says: “I make the case that we’re going to have to figure out how to stop focusing our economies on growth and start thinking about survival. …We’ve built a new Eaarth. It’s not as nice as the old one; it’s the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we…

Continue reading “Everything Must Change” »

One day Solomon decided to humble Benaiah ben Yehoyada, his most trusted minister. He said to him, “Benaiah, there is a certain ring that I want you to bring to me. I wish to wear it for Sukkot which gives you six months to find it.”

“If it exists anywhere on earth, your majesty,” replied Benaiah, “I will find it and bring it to you, but what makes the ring so special?”

“It has magic powers,” answered the king. “If a happy man looks at it, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy.” Solomon knew…

Continue reading “This Too Shall Pass” »

Lots of folks seem to point to the big winter storms this year as disproving global warming. Maybe this will help clear some things up:

Thomas Friedman…scored a bullseye in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded when he pointed out that what we’re facing isn’t global warming but “global weirding:” not a simple increase in temperature, but an increase in unexpected and disruptive weather events. As the atmosphere heats up, the most important effect of that shift isn’t the raw increase in temperature; rather, it’s the increase in the difference in energy concentration between the atmosphere and the oceans. The thermal…

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When you were an eagle

And hung in a tree,

flesh falling to field,

slipping between the worlds

invisibly

came a pig, transforming

flesh back to flesh

* * *

O little pig

so long I have endured pain

I am worn and weary

O little pig

I am neither alive nor dead

Rhiannon’s birds call over the waters

O little pig

the wild one teaches me

like Myrddin I long to be free

O little pig

I am full of fear,

carry my news to Gwydion

* * *

Then you were a man

with a long spear

to pierce stone;

like an eagle’s beak

it tore flesh from bone.

Continue reading “LLEU” »

Reality TV pretty much sucks in my opinion. It brings out the worst in people because it rewards the worst: selfishness, self-promotion, deception, manipulation, viciousness, gossip, greed, etc. But it didn’t start out that way.

In 1978, the first reality show was made in Britain. It emphasized cooperation, community, working out problems together, self-control for the good of all. It was called “Living in the Past.”

“In 1978 12 adults and 3 children were selected from around 1000 volunteers for the first ‘reality tv’ series by living for a year on an Iron Age farm as Iron Age people. This film looks…

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Some decades ago the American poet and producer James Lipton revived interest in an old word tradition—giving fanciful names to groups of animals. An Exaltation of Larks explored how English hunters and word lovers in the fifteenth century pursued with imagination the collective names for the beasts they pursued in the woods with bow and arrow. Most of their terms died out as markers of class—intended to be used to show off superior breeding—while a few slipped into common usage; today we still speak of a “pride of lions” and “gaggle of geese” as well as a “school of fish.” Lipton…

Continue reading “A peace of eagles” »

This has nothing to do with bioregionalism. It is 5 am as I begin writing this, and the full moon shines brightly. The season is turning rapidly now.

I.

I haven’t read anything classic or literary or important or which takes effort, for a long time. My reading muscles had atrophied since my youth. I had never read “Candide” and just finished it the night before last.

Before I picked it up at the library, I had no idea what it was about. I only knew Voltaire had written it, and that it was important. and that over the years, it kept…

Continue reading “Candide, Books, Memories, Death” »

I don’t know about Helena, but Great Falls, about 90 miles north, has put out a nice summary of this winter’s weather conditions (thanks PrairieMary!):

“Cloudy days: 12/1 to 2/21, normally we have 55 and this year we had 21. I don’t believe it.
Clear days: normally 14 but this year 33. The rest were mixed. Hmmmph.
SNOW:
October: 6.9 inches.
November: none
December: 9.5 inches
January: 30 inches.
Entire snow period: usual average 37 inches; this winter 49.4 so far, last year 57.6.
FOG: average 4 days; this winter 12 so far; last year none. The constant fog caused remarkable hoarfrost that became so heavy it…

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Tŷ Ddewi (St Davids), as cathedral cities go, is more like a large village than anything you’d expect of such a place. It sits on a headland at the end of the northern peninsula of St Bride’s Bay (with the village of St Brides at the end of the southern peninsula). So Bride, or Brigid, is equally celebrated in the naming of places in this land- and sea-scape. Co-incidentally, further north up the coast in Ceredigion, there is a village called Llannon, suggesting that it contains a church dedicated to Non (who was David’s mother). But the name of…

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