Animism in the Field: Foundations for Animist Practice

After writing Animacy, Initiative, and the Trouble with Agency, I found myself picking at the same question from a different angle:

If agency is an incomplete way of talking about aliveness, what does practice actually look like?

I don't mean belief, interpretation, or explanation. I mean practice.

So here’s the content warning. Some of this is theory. I know,a potential rabbit hole. But this stuff matters.

When I started writing this blog almost a year ago, one of the reasons I began was because I could not, for the life of me, find what I wanted to read. I was looking for accounts of lived experience paired with some indication of how one actually undertook animist practice. You know, the how bit.

I was thinking, in part, of my younger self, who struggled to find language for what she was experiencing. The world has moved on since then, at least technologically, but much of what I still encounter falls into familiar categories: academic theory that feels bloodless, personal mysticism that is beautiful and validating but frustratingly vague, or memoir that is engaging but difficult to replicate.

So. Here is the boring shit I genuinely think you should engage with.

Think of it this way: if you've ever done project management, you'll know that one reliable way for a project to fail is a lack of planning at the start. Limited discussion of scope, benefits, risks, or goals. I’m not saying your animist practice will fail if you don’t think about these things. Realistically, it probably won’t

But having the right language, a solid foundation, and a framework becomes crucial when you hit that intermediate stage. You know what you’re doing, you’re experiencing all of the things, but then what? A question that can be a real show-steopper for spiritual growth when you’re struggling to answer, ‘where to next?’.

Hold my beer. I'm going to explain some stuff.

In much contemporary animist writing, practice is framed as connection: listening, dialogue, relationship, reciprocity. All of that matters. Those words point to real, lived experience. But if you make a connection with an animate being, experience reciprocity and dialogue, and feel all the feels, there is often an underlying question:

Was that real? Or did I just project all of that onto a park bench?

Another way to say this is that connection can collapse into projection. Even if your discernment skills are well developed, there is often that small, annoying voice that says, “Yes, but…”

In this essay, I want to offer some ways of practicing that builds attentiveness without rushing into meaning-making before anything has had time to show itself. Ways of practicing that let you tell that pesky voice to fuck right off, because you know your method was sound.

One way I’ve been trying to pin this down is by experimenting with a different starting point. One that emphasises restraint over expression, and attention over interpretation. Expression and interpretation will come later. This is the foundational work that comes before them.

Animist practice as discipline, not performance

When I say “practice,” I don’t mean a personal ritual style, arm waving and thick eyeliner under the Moon (although it could include that). I mean something closer to training perception.

Think of weight lifting, but for how you notice.

This kind of practice is not about deciding what a place is, what it wants, or how it speaks. It is about learning how to stay with what is happening without rushing to explain it, including to yourself.

That sounds simple. It’s not.

Holding back from interpretation turns out to be surprisingly difficult, especially if you’re like me and are already accustomed to relating to places, objects, or landscapes in a more explicit, dialogic way. There’s a strong pull toward naming, story, and connection. There’s a comforting kind of chaos to this approach, and resisting that pull doesn’t feel neutral. It feels like doing less than you’re capable of. What I’m discovering is that this restraint is more like attentiveness of a different sort rather than steppong back or disengaging.

Two exercises in attention

To explore this, I've been working with two simple field exercises. They’re deliberately unromantic. No invocation, no greeting, no attempt to establish rapport. Just structured attention.

1. Tracking without deciding

This exercise is about noticing movement without assigning intention.

The task is to sit or stand still in an ordinary place: a verge, a car park edge, a footpath, a managed strip of land. Track what moves. Not just animals or people, but wind, sound, shadows, litter, traffic, hesitation or certainty.

What matters isn’t who is acting, but what’s allowed to move, what’s constrained, and what reorganises flow.

In practice, this might look like noticing how a temporary obstruction alters pedestrian behaviour, or how people avoid stepping into a gravel verge even when it would be easier. It could be noticing how wind behaves differently against building facades, or how uncertainty is created in one driver that ripples outward and slows an entire street.

No conclusions are required. In fact, end the exercise when the urge to explain becomes strong.

2. Following maintenance

The second exercise shifts attention from movement to care.

Here, attention follows what is maintained and what is not. Where grass is mown and where it’s left to seed. Where fences are repaired or sagging, where rubbish accumulates, or where paths form without permission.

It quickly becomes clear that animacy is not just located in discrete things, it also sits between negotiations, between infrastructure and weather, between intention and neglect, or between design and use.

A new fence and an unfenced yard can sit side by side, both cared for, but exist in very different ways. An asphalt path can be straight and centred, even as its edges crumble and tree roots create ridges and trip hazards. Rubbish collects where wind and barriers agree, not where morality dictates.

Again, the point is not interpretation. It's pattern recognition without judgement and being present without letting your mind jump ten steps ahead into meaning making.

So what does it all mean?

Taken together, these practices train several specific capacities:

• sensitivity to constraint and permission

• awareness of shared corridors and overlaps

• tolerance for ambiguity

• patience with unresolved liveliness

They also recalibrate expectations. Not every place feels charged. Not every moment yields insight. Often, what emerges first is texture: hesitation, accumulation, wear, pause.

Animacy shows up here quietly, before anything speaks.

For those who have been around the track a few times, this may sound familiar. Liminality is often where spirit resides, or, if you like, shows through more cleanly. Where you’re noticing overlaps or constraints, or changes in patterns you’d normally expect, this might be where you’re experiencing an animate being, extending, exploring, or touching the context it finds itself in.

What I’ve found is that it’s important to be practiced in observation like this to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and where there’s something going on you didn’t expect.

Or, to quote my husband, get good.

On holding back, and what comes next

When I first tried this kind of attentiveness training, it felt very different from my usual animist practice. I’ll give you an example:

After spending time in the car park near my local Subway (not a product placement, I just like Subway), I began to notice something I’d missed despite my familiarity with the place. I knew the bollards, the rubbish bins, and the strip of “grass” that’s really trimmed weeds with a few trees.

Fire hydrant on a suburban verge. Nothing obviously happening.

What I noticed was that the water hydrant, a two valve set up built for firetrucks to refill and that always reminded me a petty coats (don’t ask me why), had created a space around itself. The birds didn’t hop there, the dust took a wide berth (even though it shouldn’t have), people avoided it. So, instead of letting my brain get stuck on petty coats and stop observing what was going on, I suspended interpretation and stayed with the pattern long enough to see that something was happening around an object that should not, on paper, have been exerting any influence.

My brain wanted to latch onto the fact that it reminded me of a petticoat and stop there. Instead, I suspended interpretation By altering the first step of practice, I discovered something real. This is what opens the way for later dialogue and rapport. I could now approach that hydrant knowing there was an active pattern present, rather than wondering if I was imposing meaning onto a pile of metal.

I’m accustomed to engaging with places relationally — sitting, listening, sensing response (like a petty coat vibe). If I’m honest, that’s how I’ll continue to engage with the world because that’s who I am. But at the start of these exercises, I stuck with temporarily suspending that impulse even though it felt awkward, even slightly withholding.

Over time, it began to feel less like withdrawal from the real me and more like preparation. Strength building. Foundational work that makes what comes next stronger.

These exercises don’t replace listening or dialogue, they come before it. They create the conditions under which response, if it occurs, as not something I’ve generated or demanded, but something that arose on its own terms.

Sometimes nothing happens, and a place remains opaque. That is not failure, it’s part of the practice.

Animist work does not need more performance. It needs better ground.