Roots and Branches

Animism and a new paradigm of creativity

Behind the scenes in my own work, I’ve been exploring new realms of relating to creativity that are not fully ready to come to light in a public way (but you can get a taste below). 

I’ve been weaving together various aspects of my own private creative practice with the work I develop and share in my capacity as a guide and mentor for the creative work of others, including an expanded perspective on who (and what) our community is.
And perhaps imagining (or remembering) that our ideas can be collaborators and partners, rather than products we churn out. 

Whatever we make from our ideas will reflect how we treat them during the creative process: The final product richer, deeper, more fully textured and alive if we allow ourselves and our work to come alive in the process, versus a monotone, flat, and surface-level creation that comes from minimal engagement and a rejection of process.

For me, this line of work begs the question: What if we brought an animist perspective to the idea of creativity itself? Or to how we treat our own ideas?

Animism is, put simply, the worldview that consciousness exists in beings outside ourselves. Animism is very common around the world, and its exact boundaries depend on who you talk to: For some people, other mammals are considered conscious, for others it’s every animal. For others it’s every living being (plants, fungi, microbes, etc. as well as animals) or every tangible entity in the world (including rocks and other natural features, and sometimes also human-made ones like homes). 

A lot of my work asks me to extend my curiosity outside where it comfortably resides and to ask questions, as any researcher does, about what exists at the edges of our knowing. In my work on understanding creativity, I do this too, and I’ve found exploring animism and creativity to be a fruitful area for exploration. In it, I’ve started to play with ideas as part of the conscious world. As collaborators or energetic streams moving through a creator, a connective thread between us and the larger world rather than an isolated experience manufactured by my brain to be spat out onto a page or canvas.

One feels alive and exciting. The other feels like an assembly line.

Playing with animism and creativity has also been fun because it demands that we step away from trying to find objectively right or true answers about how something works.

You know if your creativity flows (or doesn’t) because you see evidence of that in the work. It ultimately doesn’t matter if your belief that ideas are alive, or aren’t alive, or whatever else, is factually true.

While evidence-based practice is key in other areas of our lives, when it comes to creativity, it’s not about being ‘right,’ it’s about being aligned with you. And for me, exploring animism in relation to ideas has been a part of that process.

This perspective on creativity, and animism in general, push us outside our comfort zones because we are used to seeing ourselves as the apex of creation. The most intelligent creatures. The best at being alive. 

Seeing ourselves as one part of a web filled with beings that deserve our respect challenges everything we’ve been taught. But I want to live in a world where the books I write, the ideas that come to me in fevered dreams in the night to be captured in a phone note or rattled off at a fast clip on a call with a friend, also become friends in their own right. Friends who take on a life of their own and continue on whether or not I’m here to actively remind people they exist.

I want the traditions I learn and carry on to have their own consciousness. Their own identity. They become community members who I am introducing to others, rather than just being a skill I teach. 

One of those things you learn and maybe forget. The other becomes a partner to your life. 

Creativity and the realm of the descendants

I’ve been learning a new form of energy work, playing largely in the field of possibility and the realm of descendants (as opposed to ancestors, where I usually hang out). It asks me to consider legacy in a new way, as in, not only what projects and tangible stuff am I leaving behind, but what is the fingerprint of my work upon the world?

Energetically, emotionally, does my work weave through lives like mycelial hyphae, or push the future in given directions like a glacier? Am I creating something that has not just the physical impact, but the relational impact I wish to have on the world?

As part of this, I’ve been thinking about what it means to parent (to me, as a person who has intentionally chosen to not have children). In my view, expanding this perspective to include various forms of care asks us to crack open our understanding of stewardship and kinship and allow them to be larger. Fuller. More flexible. 

I recognize that’s not a perspective everyone has, or wants to have, but if you’re curious about what the journey and thought process look like for me, keep reading.

Taking this expansive, intentional perspective allows me to view how I engage with a deep level of care and stewardship in relation to what I am responsible for, rather than gaslighting myself (in the same way society often gaslights non-parents) to believe that what I’m creating, or who I am, is less because it doesn’t fit a given pattern.

A month or so ago, I recorded a long rambling voice note about this, the text of which I’ve cleaned up slightly below so it is more sensible to people beyond myself. I emailed it, in a rush of excitement, to friend and mycelial co-conspirator Sophie Strand, and eventually to a few other friends too. The voice note being partly inspired by Sophie’s newsletter issue on mothering (and on her own mother’s work), which views mothering “as a verb available to everyone.” Rather than a purely biological event or a specific kind of relationship, mothering becomes “a way of turning towards the world with care.” 

The below is messy, vulnerable, and in-process but, I believe, also contains the seeds of some powerful ideas that are ready to burst into fruit through my work with clients and collaborators in this next season.