At the pond store in Monrovia. A person is saying their bullfrogs have disappeared and they suspect blue herons. “I love my bullfrogs but I also love blue herons!” The plight of the nature lover.

And of course anytime I hear about blue herons I always think of @toddgrotenhuis.

A couple of days ago I posted about the idea of a “Speaker for the Squirrels” and got some good responses from John and Donny.

John:

I agree we very much need speakers for the squirrels, the lichens, and on and on. It’s interesting that this (I think) circles us back to humans' special responsibility as stewards of creation.

I completely agree with this. There is a school of thought within environmentalism (how widespread, I do not know) that Earth would be better without humans. And it’s not hard to see why people would think that, especially given human history since the Industrial Revolution. And (if I correctly recall something I read at some point) as prehistorical humans migrated across the continents, they may have caused the extinction of megafauna. So our record is not good. Nevertheless, I do believe humans have an important ecological and–yes–spiritual function in the cosmos. On this, various indigenous traditions and the biblical book of Genesis agree (and likely many others). We are not the only intelligent creatures on this planet, but the unique character of our intelligence suits us for a stewardship role.

Donny:

I don’t have a quote but I do remember Abram talking about the role of the shaman or “magician,” and the fact that they lived (literally and metaphorically) at the edges of civilization rather than the center, and acted as something of a medium between the human world and the rest of the world.

This sent me back to re-read that section; I’ll quote some of it here. David Abram:

… such magicians rarely dwell at the heart of their village; rather, their dwellings are commonly at the spatial periphery of the community or, more often, out beyond the edges of the village amid the rice fields, or in a forest, or a wild cluster of boulders. I could easily attribute this to the just-mentioned need for privacy, yet for the magician in a traditional culture it seems to serve another purpose as well, providing a spatial expression of his or her symbolic position with regard to the community. For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed within the society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance. This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals–birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects–that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms–forests, rivers, caves, mountains–that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.

The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth. By his constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and “journeys,” he ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it–not just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise. The scale of a harvest or the size of a hunt are always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world that it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others.

For those of us who would never consider ourselves shamans, note that Abram says “every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life.” The shaman is the “exemplary voyager”, but every adult has a responsibility to attune and act as stewards. How does one attune? Well, magically:

The most sophisticated definition of “magic” that now circulates through the American counterculture is “the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will.” No mention is made of any reason for altering one’s consciousness. Yet in tribal cultures that which we call “magic” takes its meaning from the fact that humans, in an indigenous and oral context, experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many others. The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined. Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape. … Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives–from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself–is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.

“The experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences”–not the idea of it, the experience of it. Your daylight consciousness will only take you so far here. Call it magic, mysticism, meditation, awe–whatever works. The crucial thing is to get out of your head and into relationship. Get good at that and maybe you can be Speaker for the Squirrels.

Garden fairy

Could these actually be tiny, tiny grapes? This is very exciting.

Emphatically agree with this article. And I do not say that as someone who cannot manage technology; I do okay. I say that because it is increasingly apparent that high tech is a hassle with zero resilience.

Clare Coffey:

Things used to work in this country. This is the stock complaint of the Baby Boomers, and if you are lucky enough to inherit a piece of their technology, you may find yourself agreeing. But when I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy

We were meant to be inspired when Business Leader said his rule was, “better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow.” My rule, on the other hand, is this: become increasingly useless to people like Business Leader.

I was looking for the “always convalescent from some small illness” quotation a few days ago and found it (where else?) on Alan Jacobs blog. Recording it here for the next time I’m looking for it:

In the work that would make his name as one of the finest medievalists of his generation, The Allegory of Love (1936), he pauses at the end of a learned exposition of the poems of Ariosto and Tasso to make a confession: Samuel Johnson, [C.S. Lewis] says, “once described the ideal happiness he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity” — that is, if he did not need to consider any future consequences of his choice. “My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.”

Related to this: I’ve always loved the phrase “speaker for the dead,” though it’s been so many years since I read that book that I’ve forgotten its exact meaning there. We should have a Speaker for the Dead, who speaks in community about the needs of ancestors. And a Speaker for the Squirrels, who is familiar with their needs. Speakers for all sorts of beings, who give them a voice when matters that might affect them are taken up for decision.

There seems to be a natural affinity between animism and anarchism. Animism sees people everywhere. Human people are most obvious to other humans-—but nonhuman people are not hard to perceive for those with eyes to see. In animism, the world is a community of people of every size and shape, with unexpected and unknowable intelligences, carrying out their own purposes.

Alan Jacobs made a very useful distinction recently:

The goal of libertarianism is to increase individual liberty, while the goal of anarchism is to expand the realm of cooperation and collaboration.

It’s useful because it could be easy to lump libertarianism and anarchism together as “small government politics.” (In fact, the first politics I discovered and adopted in college was anarcho-capitalism, which is a right-wing version of libertarianism.) But Jacobs point neatly differentiates them: anarchism is community-focused, not individualistic.

At the same time, it rejects hierarchy and the domination of the powerful. It is mutual governance, not top-down rule. A politics based on cooperation among equals, with no centralized structure demanding conformity–sounds a lot like animism, don’t you think?

An anarchic animism, politically speaking, would be centered on local governance, in community with all the local, living beings. Decisions would be based on consensus and humans would not be unduly favored. Granted, hawks and chipmunks are unlikely to attend meetings. But their concerns should be taken into account by people familiar with the habits and needs of hawks and chipmunks. The political goal would be the flourishing of the local community of beings.

Utopian, I know. And, yet, is it not an serious indictment of our current system that such ideas are taken to be absurd?

Lovely video from Pete Larson on the rhythms of life.