What I call “vinyl paganism” means consciously choosing technologies that allow us to slow down, pay attention, be present in place and in our bodies, and let the more-than-human world speak to us in its own way.

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.

The original heresy is the belief that the earth is not our home, that our real life is somewhere else—whether in heaven or a future technotopia. We embrace this heresy to make sense of that nagging feeling that something is wrong with the world itself. But the real reason we feel this way is because civilization alienates us from everything that makes us human.

We are a part of the natural world, though we may have forgotten it. Rewilding has become something of a buzzword in conservation. Rewilding aims to allow nature to recover from what has been done to it. Whereas conservation has measurable aims and is generally geared towards conserving what we have left at the moment, rewilding is more nature driven, and less of a human effort.

The protagonists of such stories venture into the forest with warnings ringing in their ears, told to stay on the path, you know how the story goes and what befalls them when they inevitably leave the path behind. The forests are full of monsters; witches who wait to feast upon the flesh of fattened babes or wolves that gobble up grannies. But not all folk stories pitch the forest as places filled with monsters. The forest is still a place to be wary but instead of monsters, ghouls and ghosts, there is instead magic.