Esoteric Potato

Animist practice is often framed as connection: listening, dialogue, relationship. But connection can slide into projection. This essay explores a different starting point. One grounded in discipline, restraint, and training attention before interpretation, so that whatever responds does so on its own terms.

For a long time, I was satisfied with the idea of agency. New materialist thinking helped loosen the human habit of treating the world as inert, reminding us that action is shared and distributed. But lately, agency has felt incomplete. Animacy names something quieter and more fundamental: the tendency of things to act, persist, and express themselves according to their own nature, whether I’m paying attention or not.

Summer in Tasmania brings fire, heat, long evenings — and the sound of lawn mowers drifting through the valley. What used to be background noise has become an invitation: a way of listening that shifts how the world feels and how I inhabit it. This piece explores attention as participation, spirit as presence, and the subtle animacy that reveals itself when we lean in.