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.

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.

The mundane and the spiritual are entwined, twisted together like the ivy that wraps around the fence posts in my garden, not a burden, but each supporting the other, for the fence is rotted and it is only the ivy keeping it standing, but alas I digress.

Hermeticism tells us that all things are connected, that what happens in the microcosm is a reflection of what is happening in the macrocosm. With this in mind then, my local issues are a reflection of national and global issues. The loss and destruction of land and the displacement of peoples is happening all over the world. And the poor are always the worst affected.

We struggle to understand that which our eyes cannot see, and so our minds revert to the years of conditioning we all have had….

From the microcosm of personal grief, to Western civilization's atrocities throughout the ages.

We need the courage and creative resources to imagine things can be different, and Paganism can help us imagine new possibilities … and then create them.

While the Pope comes to many right conclusions about anthropogenic climate change and the limits of capitalism, his environmental encyclical is nevertheless plagued by a lingering anthropocentrism which he never manages to root out.

From the time I woke up until I went to bed, there was the fear. It was the fear that there is not enough.