“What a long strange trip it’s been”

For ages, I’ve usually described myself as “a borderline Atheist with Pagan tendencies and Buddhist practices”, but this past year or so I’ve been reading quite a few books on Animism and Shamanism and now I’m thinking I might just as well say “I’m an Animist” and be done with it. 🙂 I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of the “spirit of the place” in mythology, religion and folk magic, and when online I often use the nickname Spiritus Loci, which means the same thing. Animists are people who recognise that “the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others”. It’s foundational to most indigenous religions and is a spiritual perspective that has gradually and intuitively I’ve come to resonate with more than other over the years.

I’ve been interested in religion and spirituality all of my life. One of the first songs I remember loving as a child was “Age of Aquarius“ by the Fifth Dimension and it pretty much set my expectation for what the future was supposed to be like (I was not well prepared for the 80s!). I’m very much a child of the 70s California Schools System, raised on songs by Cat Stevens and believing that if we all work together we can heal the planet and live in harmony with all other beings (I still do). I used to watch “In Search Of.. with Leonard Nemoy” every Saturday morning and dream of visiting Stonehenge some day, developing ESP, seeing Bigfoot… and was pretty much fascinated by anything paranormal and extraordinary.

As a teenager, I was the geeky kid in the “Occult and New Age” section of the bookstore, playing with Tarot cards, casting horoscopes, calculating numerology, and reading… reading all the time. In my 20’s I was often still seen sitting on the floor, but now in Fields Bookstore in San Francisco reading books by Starhawk, Margo Adair, Margot Adler and Scott Cunningham. My 30’s were spent looking at the historical origins of Judaism and Christianity, mostly through many authors of the Jesus Seminar.

The hero of my 40’s has to have been Ronald Hutton, (who I still have a bit of an academic crush on. I met him in person one day on High Street in Oxford and I tried not to be too much of a fanboy, but he was unbelievable gracious and kind). I also studied English Local History through Oxford University Department for Continuing Education for two years and focused on the development of religion in Oxford from the Anglo-Saxons to the Oxford Movement. My 50’s brought me into Buddhism and finally earning a Humanities degree through Open University with a specialism in Religious Studies as well as diving a bit more into “cunning folk: and the general idea of the “spirit of the place” in folk magic and religion. I also became a BAMBA certified Mindfulness Teacher.

Now in my early 60’s, my life was turned once again after finally reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” last year and resonating with pretty much every single word of it. Boom… she had written a book describing how I see the world and I realised that my view is very old and shared around the world. I now have a stack of books on Animism and Shamanism to work my way through, (Harvey, Abram, etc..), but have also been reaching out more to groups like the Oxford Pagan Moot and the Oxford Insight Meditation groups to meet like-minded people. If you think we should be friends, say hi.

Posts I’ve tagged as “Spirituality”: