The reason we are increasingly disconnected is because we are losing the places where we connect. Real places. Places with history. Places that bound up in a network of relationships. And if we are ever to find one another again, we have to find those places again.

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.

To be pagan is nothing more and nothing less than to be fully human, fully human in a more-than-human world. The alienating forces of civilization—including Christianity, yes, but also capitalism, industrialism, the Enlightenment, and patriarchy—have divided us from ourselves, from each other, and from the more-than-human world. The work of being pagan today, then, is to reclaim our humanity.

Civilized societies are not less violent than non-civilized societies–-though they may appear to be the more privileged citizens. One of the defining characteristics of civilization is the depersonalization of violence.

Though they’re often used synonymously, civilization is not the same thing as culture. Many of the things that are attributed to civilization, such as art and healing, existed before civilization and outside of states. And many of the lauded “improvements” brought by civilization were not really improvements, or else they were improvements which came at a terrible cost.

Capitalism alienates us from our body, so our liberation must begin with the body. An essay from Silvia Federici

the unbecoming
can be
as great
as the
Becoming.

From James Lindenschmidt: "Ancestral connection to place was strong enough to withstand centuries of hardship, famine, plague, warfare, and a thousand harsh Norwegian winters, only to be destroyed by something so insidious that people have to be taught what "enclosure" means."