38 Quotes About Animism

We are all but symbols of some greater thing—totems of ourselves--subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path.

God did not create evolution--evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism--polytheism--monotheism--agnosticism--atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists.

In England, a portion of land called "the good man's field" (gudeman's croft) was allowed to survive into the seventeenth century. This was a piece of land that was never plowed or planted and was instead allowed to lie fallow. No one harbored any doubt that it was reserved for some spirit or demon. What we have in gudeman is not the adjective good but the Anglo-Saxon noun god (the Germanic Guda).

Everything is full of gods, ‘ cousin James once said, quoting somebody.

Everything is full of gods, cousin James once said, quoting somebody.

The reality is, it takes daily cultivation of a spiritual path, preferably with spiritual kin in proximity, to sustain not the feeling of elation, but the focused, mindful path of steady growth.

The only 'elephant' left in the room is love.

This afternoon I sat at my window and alternately wrote at my new serial and watched a couple of dear, amusing, youngish maple-trees at the foot of the garden. They whispered secrets to each other all the afternoon. They would bend together and talk earnestly for a few moments, then spring back and look at each other, throwing up their hands comically in horror and amazement over their mutual revelations. I wonder what new scandal is afoot in Treeland.

We are the most open-feeling that we can be, when we can no longer be as we are.