Come fellow seeker, enter into the garden wild where mystery and wonder echo that which can be found in the wild landscape, a microcosm of it, if you will. Here the magic shimmers in the air, is held in the blooming flowers and carried in their scent, blowing gently on the breeze or perhaps heard in the singing of the birds and the buzzing of bees.

G&R’s community of readers and writers is diverse – we are all over the world and hold a wide range of spiritual practices. But if there is one belief that may unite us all, it’s Animism.

Animism brings us back to ourselves. It reminds us we are connected to the land and to one another.

You'll think this a strange tale at least, and quite likely you'll think me a liar, but for several years in my youth I was a fox.

There is a solitary witch in every wishing well

filling bucket after bucket with life’s blood.

- Look, this is how quiet I can be,

the child said to a star in the sky

Wildness is often used in our modern languages to suggest chaos, disorder. But I was granted insight in those few seconds, I think, into another kind of order that we supposedly civilised humans have lost, and that we struggle to recover.

In the day, the forest and I were one. I was an animal in an animal’s habitat. In the night, I was an unwelcome human being in a bustling community of other-than-human beings.

When one is an animist, environmentalism isn’t merely about protecting the natural resources for the sake of conserving the resource to be consumable in the future. Instead, it is a way to honor the spirits. It is a way of venerating one’s ancestors.

My mind keeps going back to the sight of that sign on the cave floor, warning that someone was watching, the feeling of sacredness I had in the cave, and the sound of chainsaws outside.

you were a spider busy with

consuming the prey, only to suddenly realize that the prey is a part of yourself.

Folk stories and folklore contain the shared knowledge of a collective. They may have their regional differences and several versions, but they convey truths and lessons, often hard ones. Folk stories and folklore are not some passive thing but instead form an active part of our lives today

Sliding scale and discounted enrolment

I feel at home on mornings such as this, want nothing more than to melt into the land, to glide through the woods unseen by human eyes, to breathe in that wood spice scent that only autumn brings. Even as my spirit craves this, instead I must retract my claws, disguise my wildness as I get ready for the day ahead, but for now, in this moment, this is enough.

This is what it is to be animist. We see and feel the spirit within the natural world and know we are not separate from it at all, but connected to it in every way.

With it’s backdrop of mist shrouded hills, lakes that reflect the sky, stretching further than the eye can see, stone circles and hidden waterfalls, it feels like you’ve stepped into the pages of some epic tale of magic and knights, monsters, dragons and witches.

But it is the violets that are perhaps my favourite of the spring time plants.

They start in the corner of my garden beneath the boughs of the mature linden tree and spread across the lawn, their purple flowers like jewels in a sea of green. Violet honey is one of my favourite things to make, though only in small batches because I just can’t bring myself to pick too many of the beautiful blooms!

There is still beauty to behold in this world. Not the fake beauty of photo-shopped pictures, whether of people or places, nor the beauty of expensive possessions and luxurious homes, but instead a beauty that inspires a quiet joyousness within the heart, within the very soul, perhaps.

Success to me means being able to live the type of life I want. Isn’t that each of us really want? And for most of us, this isn’t given. Just surviving requires a tremendous effort that leaves little time or effort for anything else. We have to push constantly against it.

Gorse moves exuberantly into the artificially stunted ecosystem of the field, introducing a hostile, rampant diversity resistant to poisoning and cutting, and sheltering the children of the old forest. This is an example we, as anarchists, can — and should — follow.