Transcript for Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate (Or Objects)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel in space. If you listen to the old stories, you notice something right away. Everything is alive. In the myths and fairy tales, animacy is everywhere. There are talking trees and singing stones. There are sprites of broken wood. There are hedges that speak and move of their own will and snag on wary travelers in their brambles. and cliffs that swallow picnicking Australian schoolgirls, and there are wisps and whites and green cannibal lights in the northern skies. But it's not just natural phenomena in there on altered state that are imbued with this life, this vibrancy, this animacy, objects, fashioned objects, exhibit similar life in the old stories. mirrors, speak, swords, dance. There are flying carpets and farcey and eyeglasses and cloaks and boots with minds of their own. There are animate teapots and decks of cards and walking sticks that are talking sticks and quills that right by themselves and on and on. And this pervasive insistence in the fairy tales and myths and folktales and stories, this pervasive, almost rude insistence that everything. Absolutely everything is alive, that everything has eyes, even the least of creations, even a quill or a brush or a shoe or a ribbon, that everything has a voice, that everything is possibly sentient. This insistence butts up against modern rationality, right? It forces us into a place where we have to explain away the fairy tales as fantasy, as just for children. Adults grow out of that silly world in which tea bots talk. Don't we? And so, if anything, that animate vision is a leftover from a bygone era. But we can't explain it away that easily. Questions, linger, when the wind blows. Questions, linger, when the door creaks. Questions, linger with the clattering of stones and the ticking of clocks and the clopping of shoes. Questions like, are what we call objects just dead, lifeless thing, or are they imbued with life force? Are they animate? Are they alive in the way that we think of life? Do they think? Do they speak? Do they have spirit? Do they have sentience? Do they have agency? Our stones, animate, our stars, animate is the universe itself, animate. And for a long time, as you've heard me say, this wasn't even a question. The question of the animacy of things as arisen in the last 0.1% human history, to feel a living world, to feel sentience everywhere, is incestually encoded in us. The ancestral bodies that built us saw animacy everywhere. They saw open eyes in the world around them. It seems everywhere there are eyes. Have you seen them? In ritual experience in states of rapturous flow we see a world with eyes. Don't think that the trees have eyes? Fast for a day or two and then hike up a hill and then sit for a bit. The trees have eyes. Western culture for all it derides animism is steeped in the sandamacy. Neither monotheism nor rationalism nor science writes Stuart Guthrie in his book Faces in the Clouds, all thought antithetical to animism, have suppressed Western animism. Despite Descartes and Newton, he says, many Europeans continued to regard all matter as living, organic, and animal, and that all natural objects as organized forms of matter had their own life and sensibility. and that the whole organization of the natural world was capable of intelligent purpose. And this intelligent purpose, this spark of life, speaks through what we call objects. Have you ever noticed that after hearing a story of a golden spindle that spins by itself, or a doll that sings or a ring that transports or a golden key that unlocks hidden doors, The things shine just a little bit more in the waking world. That the everyday object becomes more than an object. It is suddenly lit with a hidden life, a hidden fire. For it is the simplest of alchemists to understand that for us to see a world awake, we need to wake something in ourselves. And this is interesting, right? Because a lot of people might be like, I get it. The animacy of things is really just about me changing my viewpoint. Things aren't inherently animate. Things aren't inherently alive. I just need to see them as alive. It helps me write better poetry when I see things as alive. It helps me live better, relationally. It's kind of like a lifestyle choice, right? And this is kind of the in-between space that a lot of people in the modern world who have, you could say, like, animist inclinations, dwell in. I want to see stones as alive. I want to shift my perception. But that doesn't mean stones really are alive. So we're at an interesting juncture now in the history of Western cultures, attitudes towards the animacy of things. For a few hundred years, the story has been that to see stones and trees and waters and clouds as animate, as alive, as having agency, is primitive. Modern Western culture has demonstrated a complete disdain, in fact, an outright vitriol for people who saw stones and trees as sentient. And now we've kind of moved away from the primitive view, right? It's no longer primitive to see the world as animate. It's what? It's more like a beautiful mistake. So for example, modern neoliberal culture kind of looks at native views on the animacy of stones and clay and says, It's so beautiful that you see rocks as alive. It's so beautiful that you call clay or grandmother, but if you dig a little deeper, it's still kind of seen as a mistake. How beautiful that you see rocks is sentient. It's not ultimately true, right? But what a beautiful mistake it is. There's a whole tangential discussion here on the colonial dynamics at play in the neoliberal embrace of indigeneity, but that's for another time. So if you want to see the universe as alive, just because it feels better to see it as alive, then that's a good start. But this episode is going to explore it a lot deeper. And I'm going to say, it's not a beautiful mistake to see life, animacy, sense, everywhere. It's actually much closer to the way things are, because things aren't just things. And animacy is a continuum. A continuum of life and death, sentience and incense, of time and space. Enough time and space and the living will die and the dead will live. and that stone will be your neighbor, and it will be you and you will be it. Within a porous world, we have to begin by blowing open the boundary between life and death, between conscious and not. In his writings on the worship of animate trees and stones in India, David Haberman writes, quote, by all of just today, even have difficulty deciding where to place the boundary between the living and the non-living. So right at the start we can say that science has a very hard time naming the exact place where life begins. All the atoms in your body are technically dead. At what point exactly do they become alive? The living is comprised of the dead. The supposedly dead teams with life. The breath that passes through you. Endiment or inanimate. The water that passes through you. Is it alive? Every single life form on the planet depends on it for life. Is made up of it? Is it inanimate? Is life separate from water? Is water just the matrix that life lives in? But then how do you separate the matrix from the thing? And of course, this is what modern science has always tried to do. Separate the matrix from the thing. And yet, as Lyle Watson says in his beautiful book The Secret Life of inanimate objects, quote, we are far more closely related to more subtly involved with the inorganic world than we once imagined. Let's just say that on the level of biology, animacy is being questioned all the time. What life actually is is being questioned all the time. What consciousness is is being questioned all the time, and things only seem inanimate if we isolate them in space and time, if we remove them from the matrix of life. Take the moon. The moon, which is responsible for all animacy on Earth. There would be no life on Earth scientists say without the moon. So is the moon just a lifeless stone floating in space? Or is the moon instead the very living center of a continuum of anarchy that extends across time and space and is pulsing with life? It's only inanimate if you isolate it from all context. From the waters it pulls on and the fish it sends spiraling and dances of longing. From the owl's its reflected light aids in hunting, from the hormonal surges it inspires and the poetry it gives life to and the lovers who have kissed beneath it. It's only inanimate if you separate it from the entirety of the context in which it lives. If you make it an object. This thing, this continuum, this source of life, is it an object? Is the moon an object? I almost didn't want to do this episode for one specific reason. I didn't want to have to say the word object over and over again. Such a terrible word isn't it? Object? Like, what is an object? But to my surprise, I found that even the word object has at its roots, a buried animacy. For the word's etymology implies, quote, that towards which a cognitive act a sensorial act is directed. Deep within the definition is the understanding that in order for there to be an object at all, there must be an animate subject cognizing it, that the two are linked more deeply than we imagine, and that this intertwining dance sparkles with life. For, in a world in which we co-arrows with everything else around us, in which there is no us without mountain and stream, There is no us without the sun and cloud. And there is no mountain or stream in any recognizable way without some type of perception of it to give it color and shape and texture and quality. So intertwined are we with ecology? That to use the word object does not do justice to this world. Is a stratavarious object or a quartz crystal or a star? or a pendant passed to you from your grandmother or a clay vessel upon whose surface you can still see ancient pinch marks. Or is it a continuum of being an extension of you and extension of life? Iron is what? It's a continuum. The continuum that passes from the fires of stars to terrestrial volcanoes to underground mineral springs, to stags blood to the hunter's arrow, to the king's lungs, to the dirt of his grave, to the worm that eats him to the falcon that eats the worm. It passes then to the falconer, and then to his blacksmith brother, and becomes a fire poker or a musical instrument that rings aloud and makes children laugh with delight. Think of that. The journey from the belly of a star to the laugh of a child gathered round of fire gazing up at that very same star. Over time, it brings color to ancient cave walls just as it flushes the cheeks of lovers. It delivers oxygen to every heart that has ever lived. It passes seamlessly from what we call animate to inanment. Crosses thresholds of life and death and life again. scientist Thomas Sibyak said, quote, there may not be an absolutely rigorous distinction between inanimate matter and matter in a living state. And more bluntly, quote, there is no certain line between the human and the non-human. Within this, what is animacy? What is a being? An intelligence, a knowing, a presence, an awareness, a listening, a field punctuated with certain confidences, a vibration that reconfigures itself over time as alive as dead, as subject, as object. What is it? Some will tell you that there is an animate being that lives inside anything. separate from the thing but residing in it. Others will tell you that only certain things have beings living inside them. Others will say that the thing is the animate being itself. Still others will tell you that the animate being exists both in the thing and beyond the thing. Or that perhaps the animate being is actually a confluence of things and lives somewhere in the space in between. I say, yes, to all this. I say, we need to expand what we understand as being and being. The Western world has long warned against the dangers of anthropomorphism. The dangers of ascribing person-like qualities to an external world. Both secular rationalists and theologians, says Stuart Guthrie, find anthropomorphism embarrassing. Secular thinkers, especially scientists, see it as an unfortunate and persistent flaw in human thought. Theologians see it as a discomforting sign that conceptions of God may be limited by, or even found it upon, conceptions of ourselves. But, looking at the world today, a world of dead, disposable objects discarded with no afterthought. A world in which economists will tell you that a forest is only a value once it's cut, in which school kids can't name five varieties of plants that live in their own backyard. In which are assumed right is to pillage the mountain and the watershed and the fragile desert without conscience. I say that not anthropomorphizing is the far greater danger, not seeing life around us, not seeing watching eyes upon us, not seeing a living world that demands respect and exchange. and with whom we are eternally connected like the tissue of one great being. This is the real danger. And of course, every step of the way supposedly inanimate objects do exhibit person-like quality. Trees long thought of in the industrialized mind as dead objects. are now being shown to exhibit sentience, interspecies communication, decision-making ability, and on and on. And we've rediscovered things like this just because we've stopped to look. Imagine what stones will reveal when we look deeper. Or what water will reveal. Or what all things long thought to be dead, sing to us, shout to us, all the time. Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Sophie Strand recently posted this quote from George Washington Carver, and the secret that things give up. If we take our loving attention to them, is that they are brimming with life. They are practically howling. The stones have been calling us by name all along. A great choir surrounds us always has, focusing songs from us, drawing our attention like a magnet draws clusters of filaments. A power has always lived here. In this place, this radiant web of things, this place of the music of clattering stones. So let's talk about things, about objects. Let's talk about mud, clay, and stones, and rocks, and bowls of string wound by clones that went unwound point the way through dark forests. Let's talk about flying carpets and magic chairs, and violins, and drums that have their own agendas, they shape human mood. Let's talk about the strange powers. The power of things to grab our attention and to wrap our fairy lives around them until it's unclear whether we are the ones in charge or the things are. Let's talk about how stones shape people over time. And time itself. For time burns the very notion of objects away. Just as it burns ideas of inanimacy away, as everything tends towards sentience. And without sentience, what is time at all? Let's talk about a living universe that shouts its story from every discreet thing. Have you heard? The story of this universe is alive and well, and each thing tells it to its own humming voice. The little pebble you rub between your fingers boldly proclaims the story of creation itself. And that stone holds warmth and sweat and tears and prayers and songs. And in the face of suggestions of a dead world, bucks and shivers and says, I beg to differ. Inanimate objects aren't inanimate at all. In fact, inanimate objects aren't inanimate or objects. this time on the Emerald. Somehow the discussion on animism always comes back to rocks. You know, mention to someone that you're an animist or have animist tendencies and they'll probably say something like what you think rocks are conscious. You think stones talk and that can be the end of the discussion because it brings up what awkwardness a kind of cultural shame in the modern western psyche. It tugs it deep cultural programming and that colonial divides between civilized and not. The worship of sacred stones shows that there is no limit to the follies of idolatry, said one colonial anthropologist in India. In fact, the practice of stone worship in India was reviled by the British. called despicable and evidence of a, quote, low civilization. And of story, right? You can't possibly think that stones are alive. And if you do, you're embarrassing yourself. Oh, but we're not going to end the story there today. For the mythic and ritual traditions of the world are teeming with animatists. Your ancestors, whoever you are, wherever you are, your ancestors felt the animacy of stones. The Lakota speak of stones as grandfather's. The cultures around Lake Huron speak of Flint as a trickster being. The Macbac have many varieties of stone spirit who live in mountain caves or rocky places in the woods. In the Lakota language says, lame deer, the old word for God and the old word for stone are the same. And this isn't just indigenous sensibility. David Haberman tells us that God is frequently referred to in the Hebrew Bible by the name Rock or Stone. Aboriginal traditions point to stones as former people and people as former stones and to stones that move of their own accord and stones that under no circumstances should be moved. There are stone beings everywhere in fairy tales and in the oldest stories on the planet and the fact is whether or not you feel that rocks are alive and think and talk Whether or not you feel that rocks are conscious, you can't get away from the fact that human beings have self-organized around rocks for a very, very long time. In Mecca, every year, two million pilgrims circle the black stone of the Kaba. A meteorite lived in the great temple of Artemis. You've heard, I assume, of the Blarny stone, Or the omphilos, the central sacred ritual objected Delphi. It was a stone. The temple Bethel housed a stone. The sacred geography of the Indian subcontinent is in a very real way. And that work of stone. And these stones are not inert. They are hubs of life, of activity, of praise, of emotion, of feasting, of festivity, of dance. I've seen 300,000 people go on pilgrimage, put themselves through it, to see a single stone. I've seen people fast for days just so they can be in the right state of reverence when they look upon that single stone. And in the height of trance, the smooth, fathomless black of the Shiva stone, or the goddess stone draws us in into stone time, into the vastness of stone. Yes, I've been sucked into a stone. I've been transfixed by a stone. And I've seen stones so teeming with vibrancy that I had to look away. So you can say the animacy is the context in which the stone sits. And then you can talk about the stones, themselves. There is something about the stones themselves. I've seen stones which were infused over hundreds of years with continuous chance and songs and offerings. And they practically honed with hidden power. One pilgrim described the feeling of being in the presence of the black stone at the Kaba as an electrical jolt. And of course to some it can sound like projection to talk about the power of stones. except for the fact that stones do hold and conduct power. The stones that were most sought in the ancient Greek world, Termalina and Amber, have definitive electromagnetic qualities. Courts, sacred in so many traditions, is an acoustic electric amplifier. Some stone seems to have a capacity for storing and releasing energy, says Lia Watson. It demands attention carries echoes and triggers memories, in ways that make individual pieces sacred and give larger arrangements such a strong spirit of place. If stones are simply passive, blobs of mineral, if stones have no inherent power to them, then why do they speak to us so? Why are they at the heart of so much ritual? Why are they held for luck and warn close to the heart for beauty and set in metal as talismans? And why do the park rangers at Ulluru receive hundreds of return stones in the mail every single year? Hundreds of sorry rocks they're called. And the same is true for Volcano's National Park in Hawaii. Thousands of pounds have returned stones per year. People feeling that their luck had definitely turned sometimes dramatically. After they took a stone from a place where the understanding was that stones shouldn't be taken. Watson tells the story of anthropologist and museum curator Kirk Hoffman, who once bought a collection of ritual stones in Vanuatu. Over the next few days, he began to feel lethargic. Week. He had to spend days and days in bed. After exhausting all the standard Western medical options, he went to a medicine man who took one look at him and said, it's the stones. The stones were literally cleared and immediately the melody stopped. And I usually don't go too far into stories like this. But if we're talking about stones, I have to include them because they happen all the time, like all the time. And why not? If a single rock in space can move all life on Earth at once, all waters at once, then what can a single sapphire or a single hope diamond do? If a rock in cuch can inspire 300,000 people to cross the desert for a glimpse of it, if opals can drive Australian would be minors obsessively mad, then at what point do we say that there's something inherent about the stones themselves? The stones do have a power to them. A presence. Have you felt the presence in the stones? I've spent a lot of time in the desert and there's something about those desert stones. Those walls of red and yellow sandstone. I remember I was 17 years old, hiking into one of the back canyons of Mesa Ulta near the Chama Basin. It was wild country. Up a sandy wash full of churped and alabaster and quartz. Have you ever seen white alabaster after a rain? Have you seen the old mud gods with their tufts of grassy hair? I've passed through there And the only way I can say it is The stones were watching The old stone gods were watching everything Do you remember that day that the stones were watching us? And you and I were just fleeting sparks, fleeting dancers in a world of old, old, stone? Do you remember how we danced like passing skeletons amidst a vast world of stone? Do you remember the moonlight? The moonlight on the stars? Were they watching? I felt like they were watching. The stones were watching us.

There are powers. They stand like centenols, silent watchers. They wait. They wait. They watch us come and go. They watch our little flittings back and forth. They see our wet eyes starting about. All the things we think are so important. The things we think are so big. How important we think we all are. The stones sit in place. They heat in the sun. They cool in the breeze. They are scoured smooth by the wind. They are lit by the moon. They wave. Do you remember that day? How the stones watched everything? Every breath, every heartbeat. And the stones said, from us you came to us, you shall return. Do you remember how this body is made of stone? Made of iron and calcium, copper and aluminum, made of mineral salts and dynamic liquid flow? Do you remember John Seed asks, our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? rocks contain the potentiality he says to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on that with such a condescending air? It is they that are the immortal part of us. All this theater of life. 700 million years of vegetative growth and generation This liquid dance of scampering bodies, all of it takes place in a theater of stone from which all of it draws sustenance. Earth is a great theater of living stone. Without stone, no life, no animacy. And not only that, everything you've ever felt, you've felt because of stone. We talk about the unfeeling nature of stones. Don't let your heart harden like stone, we might say. And yet everything we've ever felt we feel through a matrix of mineral. Of stone. Nerve function happens through sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, through the transfer of signals in a matrix of liquid stone. And it gets trivial than that. Even the words that you're hearing now, you're hearing because of stone. What's transmitting the vibration? Copper. Stone. The iron and the strontium and the speakers, the calcium-coated bones in your ears that vibrate in response. The sodium salts that transmit those vibrations to your brain. This is the humming matrix of stone. Sound is perceived as sound because of stone, because of the mineral lithophone of your body. The capacity of mineral to hold charge to pass on current to conduct to semiconductor makes all this this humming world of electric light and sound possible. The entire digital universe of on which the modern world depends happens through a matrix of stone. Digital signals transmit and are stored through what? Silicon crystals, stone, worlds are shaped, stock markets rise and fall. Presidents are elected, social networks are connected through stone. You can separate the ages of humankind into the old Stone Age, into the new Stone Age, into the Bronze Age, into the Iron Age, into the Silicon Age, and every single age you are talking about is what? A type of stone. The internet is made of vibrational currents passing through stone. The intricate self-learning AI intelligence is that are causing wonder and alarm and raised questions of sentience and agency. These are all intelligence has made of stone. Funny, isn't it? We deride animist visions of talking rocks. and meanwhile we are completely owned by talking rocks. What's your phone? Your phone is a talking rock. It's a fucking talking rock people. Modernity laughs at traditional understandings of the sentience of stone. And now the defining question of our ages, what are we going to do with all these sentient stones? What are we going to do now that stones are smarter than we are? As much as we laugh about primitive stone worshippers, we worship stone every waking moment of the day, and maybe possibly we unconsciously long to place it back in its rightful place as the totem at the very center of our lives. We long to wake those sleeping stones. To hear them in tone and their ancient baritone voices to remind us that we are only passing individuations in this great theater of stone. So perhaps AI architects are not the all-powerful sorcerers we've made them out to be. Maybe they are unwitting servants of the stones themselves. Maybe the silicon is using them, speaking through them, finding ways to articulate and complexify, reaching for senseience, reaching for life. But that's for the next episode. Let's just say that visions of the sentience of stones aren't unfounded superstitions. Shamanic understandings of the capacities of courts aren't chemist Don Robin says that all stone, which is largely crystalline, should be seen as a kind of macro chip, a natural if somewhat haphazard electronic system capable of storing energy. Nerve conduction is crystalline. Connective tissue is crystalline. Everything you consider you, the body, the mind, the self-reflective capacity of your awareness, you owe entirely, to spiraling configurations of stone. Stones are the power through which everything on earth transpires. The fact that the discussion on animism always comes back to rocks isn't an accident. It challenges our very relationship between us and the supposedly separate world. We think that we're separate from those cold inert stones. And in fact, we are living stone in a theater of living stone. At one point says Brian Swim, the earth was molten lava, and then a few million years later those same rocks were singing opera. Consciousness and Music implied within the rocks. We are what the rocks have the potential to become amongst many, many other things. You feel it? Stones are the ancestors. To say, grandfather's stone or grandmother clay, these aren't metaphors. In dozens of traditions around the world, the first human beings were made of clay. You can find the story of the creation of life out of clay in the Abrahamic traditions, the Sumerian traditions, the Aztec traditions, and on and on. Quote. According to Chinese mythology, Nua molded figures from the yellow clay, giving them life and the ability to bear children. In the Babylonian creation epic Anuma Ellish, The goddess Ninhursak created humans from clay. According to Inca mythology, the creator god Vira Kocha formed humans from clay. The Maori people believe that Tanema Huda, god of the forest, created the first woman out of clay. And the Korean sang good narrative, humans are created from what? Red clay. The erubiculture holds that the god Obatala, likewise, created the human race from clay. In the Kichae creation story, Papal vuh. The first humans are made of clay. Central Asian mythologies, including Altag and Mongolian, have stories about how the god Ulgun created the first man, Erlick, from clay, floating on the surface of the water. The F.A. people of the Congo have a creation story in which the first man was made of clay. The Garo people in India believe that a beetle gave clay to the Creator God, who made humanity from it. Malagasi believed state that human beings were created when Zanahari breathed life into clay dolls that his daughter was making. And there are more. There are stories in the Hawaiian tradition and the Lao and Vietnamese traditions. And among the Inau and the Imaran and the Songye and the Buryat of Siberia, and the Dinkov Sudan. In Borneo, humans are said to be made from clay, breathed into life, with bird song. Clay and bird song.

You and I. In the Indian traditions, the goddess Kubjika, Kundalini herself, the vibrational power of creation, is associated with the cast of potters. The primal vibration molds the clay of the universe like a potter stooped over a wheel. And I've always felt that there's something primordial about clay, about the material that can be shaped, right, that lends itself to creation's stories. But of course, in fine modern fashion, I'd always assumed a certain metaphorical component to these stories. I'd never considered that there is much, much more to clay than just the fact that it can be fashioned into other things. For clay is a mysterious substance, indeed. From Watson, quote, crystalline structures in clay are even more lifelike than regular geometric mineral crystals, arranging themselves into complex layered structures which have the capacity to evolve. They grow and change absorbing other molecules into their fabric. Responding to changes in their environment by finding and using new patterns and toys. Clays, in other words, are self-starting, self-assembling, and self-replicating. Yes, clay evolves. Clay demonstrates many of the hallmarks of what we call life. In fact, new scientific research is looking at the strong possibility that life originated from clay. Clay's our catalysts and can replicate says one study for the National Center for Biotechnology. The origin of life it says began in the clay world. And another study from Cornell says In our view, the most promising theory to explain the origin of life is centered around the interaction of active sites on clay mineral surfaces. It's called the clay hypothesis. It postulates that complex organic molecules arose gradually on pre-existing non-organic replication surfaces of silicate crystals in contact with an Aquius solution. So, what if all those creations stories were right? What if life was made from clay? This vision of clay is a living being as the primordial source may explain the reverence that traditional ceramic cultures have for clay. For there have always been clay gods. Clay is have always been alive. In Japan, ceramicists traditionally offer to the clay gods, keep them fed and watered. The preparation of clay deposits is done with the grandchildren in mind. With the right ingredients offered, the clay will grow and spread and birth and evolve like the living being it is. And this tradition of honoring the clay god extends into modern pottery. Ceramicists before firing kilns make a little effigy to place over the kiln. The clay god or the kiln god And it's one of those things, right? If you ask most modern ceramicists of their animist, they'll probably say no. And yet, they still never forget to put the clay god over the kiln. In ancient Greece, of course, there were goddesses of clay, and patron deities of specific potters, clans, and supplications and offering songs for good kiln firings. Come then, saying Homer, come, goddess of pottery, with hand up raised over the kiln. Let the pots and all the dishes turn out well and be well-fired. Let them fetch good prices and be sold in plenty in the market. Grant that the potters may get great gain and grant me so to sing to them. But, if you turn shameless and make false promises, then I call together the destroyers of kilns The destroyers of kilns, yes, there were even specific classes of trickster spirits. Diomonia Caramacoy, that needed to be placated so that they wouldn't wreak havoc on the potter's efforts. There was some three-boss who shattered father. And Smodagon, who smashed it in, as bestows who scorched and charred it. Yeah, you heard right, as bestows. So, I don't know who exactly thought it was a good idea to name, as bestos the toxic insulation material that still claims 90,000 lives per year globally, after a Greek trickster demon. But to me, that seems doomed from the start. Tricksters have a way of reemerging. Animacies have a way of exerting themselves. stones have a billionaire magenta and clays speak through people. My friend Rose B. Simpson is a sculptor from Santa Clara Pueblo. As we talk, she is working with clay, needing it between her fingers, and a being is bringing to life, right before our eyes. She tells me how she grew up with a certain animate vision of clay, and how it shook her when she went together MFA from RISD, and people spoke of clay as a collection of dead chemical components.

I like what you said about looking into the clay and seeing like noses and elbows.

Rose goes on to describe an installation she did in Western Massachusetts of nine foot tall statues adorned in clay. Nine foot watchers. Sentinels that sprang to life when she gave them I was the back story of the piece.

So you can see the light coming through it.

And did they wake up when you did go?

Animacy reminds us that the world has eyes. It reminds us in a very real way that we're being watched. We've forgotten that we're being watched.

The very first revelation that comes with an understanding that we live in an animate universe is that there are eyes everywhere. There is a presence everywhere. The first feeling that comes with a recognition of a living world is not just some kind of feel good glow. It's more of like, uh, oh my God. I'm responsible for everything that I do on this planet. We think that we're prancing about here in this place like kings in a world that is our plaything. Do whatever we want, dig here, clear cut there, nobody's watching, but there are eyes everywhere. And who am I in this world of eyes? At the moment we realize we are actually in the animate vibrational field that we've always talked about existing. The moment we realize the song of interconnection is a song first and foremost of responsibility. It's the moment we truly open up to the flow and spark of the animate. who am I to work with Clay Rose asked. As she reflected on a recent gathering of 4,000 ceramic artists in Cincinnati, Ohio, at which she was one of the keynote speakers. I turned out to talk too much about my native culture.

For to take things from the earth and change them to mind stone, to dig clay, is no small thing. These days, international mining companies blast the tops off of the old mountain gods. Cut their throats, shred their insides. Poison the streams that emerge from them, decimate the cultures that depend on them, without even a second thought. But even something as extractive as mining was not always this way. Mining for ore in certain traditions was a sacred act. It required fasting and ceremony. it required offering back. To enter a mine in ancient Egypt was to enter the womb of the mother herself. Sexual abstinence had to be observed beforehand. There were deep protocols to mining ore into working with metal. Those who worked with metal, who knew the animate magic of the forge, were revered as were their tools. In Angola says Watson, The hammer is treated like a prince and pampered like a child. Yes, in some traditions, tools are named, assigned personhood and familial roles, invited to ceremony, offered food from the ceremonial feast. The crisp knives of the Balinese myths are revered as animate beings. The forging process makes patterns emerge in the steel that give the blade a particular name, identity, energy, and animacy. The knives have agency. Some, they say, so powerful that they can slay, merely by being pointed at their target from a distance. Steel weapons have character, personality, swords have names. Excalibur is born of the primal waters and delivered to humanity by a nature spirit. Weapons are intertwined with places and beings, and they home with life. Cimitar's sings. The ringing sound of a sharp cleaver as it is removed from a cutting block is alive. That knife is ringing with knifeness. That is what it is to be a living knife. The human being helps bring the being into its actuated state. The human is a vehicle for the animacy of things to express itself in its fullness. Who makes who? Are we the instrument maker or the instrument?

That balance that you're talking about about like the clay speaking to you and telling you what it wants and like you kind of working to create. How do you see that in relation to animacy? Like, is the claywork in you or are you working to clay both happening?

Do you feel like the beings that are being brought forth through the clay work are on a plane and you're giving a form through which they can speak or do they come into being them over the eyes or put on them or is it a reflection of something that's that brought into being or is it a being unto itself?

Okay, so like as I put eyes on the stones, so we can have my own eyes.

And I'm seeing myself in need and you didn't be. Yes.

And ultimately that's the relationship we want to have with the whole universe and like good.

What if animacy is far more intricate than we see it to be? What if, as some traditions will tell you, the clay may use of the potter to give voice to a being who is already there? I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I said him free, said Michelangelo. What if this world is one of overlapping presences? And who was first in a world in which we were once stone and will be again, in which supposedly inanimate objects give birth to billion-year wheels of the intimacy? and individual beings are only a fleeting expression of what is constantly passing through them, is not so much the question at all. In this way, we can shift our view a bit, and see that we're not making things. Things are making us. Things are in the saddle, said Emerson, and ride mankind. The relationship between us and things is an inextricable weaving. Guitarist and guitar are one you've seen it. The fusing of the player and the played is Charlie Parker's trumpet inanimate. Mingus' bass is an object. Eddie Van Halen's guitar. Lovers know this to be true. The universe is know this. Dancers know this. We are constantly both player and played. And who's to say, who's to say that all of this, all this movement of humanity, all the strife and tears, isn't just so that through us, a great music could come to be. A great music could be played. And we are simply the instruments. For many cultures, instruments predate us. Before there were human flutists, there was the cosmic flute player. And before he played the flute, there was a home and as hollow belly. The flute is a reflection of a larger pattern, a larger being that exists beyond the immediate flute and within the flute in once. How many animacies have the simple flute, a hollow read, a hollow bone stirred into being? How many hearts have been moved by it? How many have wept, longed, consumated that longing, because of air through dead bone? Drums in certain West African traditions are simultaneously instruments fashioned by human hands, and spiritual forces that predate that fashion. As Amanda Vue Pasteur says in the book The Aruba God of Drumming, quote, the ancestral Ion presides over the craft lineage associated with making and playing drums. He is simultaneously a force of nature that resides in living trees and the sonorous wood of drums. The drum got iron, lives, as a spiritual force, and is the tree that gives the wood to fashion the drum, and is the drum itself, and is the voice of the drum, and is its effects on the bodies of the people. The drum wakens the nerves in the head, opens the veins in the eyes, sends the trans-practitioner into violent blissful rapture. Sometimes, for an initiates as one priest of iron, it is enough to simply hear the sound of a drum. The sound sends them into full trans. The drum guides their lives. The instrument plays, then Drums change things. They change mood and changing mood. They change outcomes. They change communities. Some of you, I bet, met your future partners while dancing. That was the drum god changing the very course of your life. Such power can only be seen as alive as secret. And so the drum once made is an extension of the body of the God itself. The drum is fed, sung to, offered to, treated in all ways as a living being. Quote, ion drummers consecrate drums by sealing a secret inside the shell, or by making sacrificial offerings to the drum in the form of food, herbs, or animal blood. The drums are named and conceptualized as a family unit. And the way the drums interact is along familial role. rhythmic harmony among drums relates to familial harmony to ecological harmony and to cosmic harmony. And when there is a disagreement, adversaries put their heads upon a drum. and then speak the truth. Because you don't lie before the rhythm of the universe. That rhythm is truth itself. The instrument lives. The instrument impacts all aspects of the individual's life, the community's life. Where does the instrument end and the individual begin? Violin players who have the rare opportunity to play a strataverias, very few of whom would probably call themselves animist, describe the experience directly in animate terms. They say the strataverias is alive, and the way that they can tell the difference between a strataverias and a copy is because the strataverias is alive. Look at that one corner, said one violinist, how all the movement meets there. Look how the flames of the wood move with the shape. It's alive. Each stratavarius is named, each one has personality, each one seems to want something different from the player. Each one begs them backends, asks to be held against the skin. British violinist Nigel Kennedy says this, quote, They are emotional things. Each with its own personality. And I'll tell you an interesting thing, he says. They all play their very best in the Hill's near Kremlin. Yes, they play the very best in the Hills of their making. Why? Is it the familiar humidity that recognition in the wood of air pressures and winds? Or is it something deeper? is it something to do with place and spirit and being and how what we call objects are infused with and carry with them the song and emotional continuum of a place. In this case a place that resounded it is said with happiness resounded with happiness For it was said of Antonio Stradivari, the greatest violin maker the world has ever known. It is said that he was happy. Quote, he was a passionate and loving man, and he kept each completed violin in his bedroom for a month before, furnishing it. It just lay there, picking up the energies of two active and happy marriages, the second of which lasted until his death at the age of 93. Animacy leaps from strings it reverberates through wood and hide it rings out from supposedly lifeless iron and bronze. Bells traditionally are deeply linked with animacy. They call certain animate forces and dispel others. Mines are calmed by bells, evil spirits sent away, clarities awakened, ceremonies initiated, There's no denying the power of the bell. One observer described hearing the peel of a 74-ton Japanese bronze bell that requires 25 monks moving in unison to ring it. It was, quote, mysterious, thrilling, and solemn beyond all imagining, penetrating the body like a tingling current. The acolyte who rings the morning bell concentrates on bringing the Buddha's voice out of the bell. If he focuses and does it just right, that voice will leap into being. For bells have voices and mouths and tongues. And the voice of the bell rings out and becomes the voice of our very lives. For the bell rings at birth, it rings for the initiatory ceremonies of adulthood. It rings for marriage, it rings for death and mourning. Our lives are just passing live, but the bell keeps ringing. This very universe, in fact, you could say is a bell sounding of itself forever. sending lightning thrills through all of creation. Bells in many traditions were powerful beings. Sometimes they even demanded human sacrifice. One Korean bell still rings with the call of its sacrifice victim. Mother, it calls when it rings. Mother. Imagine that. to pass from this world to the next, with your last living vision, a monstrous ringing bell. On all Saints Day in 1970, the great bells in the monastery of San Niccolo and Carpeña Italy began to ring out, which wasn't by itself unusual, except for the fact that no one was ringing them. They continued to ring by themselves often on for months. Each time the authorities were called and they investigated and they couldn't figure anything out. And just when they thought it would stop, the bells would start up again. In possible, we cry. Bells can't ring of their own accord. And our cries of protests seem increasingly faint in a world in which silicon stones are currently programming each other to learn on their own. Moving on, just fine without us at all. The animate surrounds us. We make it and it makes us. the supposedly inanimate, the cold metal rings with animacy. The western understanding of music was born through the sound of a hammer ringing against steel. Music, the movement of music, the animacy of music, the scales that sway human mood, the effective frigion minors that stir mysterious longings were articulated by Pythagoras after he heard the sound of supposedly inanimate iron, striking other iron. Is music inanimate? Is sound inanimate? Is a story animate? A song? Watch a pop song animate a crowd of 20,000 teenagers and set them screaming. Where did that come from? What is a song? A story? Where does it come from? The thoughts that stirred the story transpired through a matrix of stone. And the moonlight that stirred those thoughts awake was light reflected off of a stone. And the years that heard it vibrated and processed it through living, breathing stone. The story that I am speaking to you is made of stone, air, and water. This story is made of evaporated cloud. The living body of the story extends across thousands of years. A story is not a thing. A story is a being whose humming tendrils reach through all the mouths that speak it and all the ears that receive it and all the moods that change from it and all the lives it touches and changes over thousands of years. I mean this literally, a story is a being. feel into this, what is the living feather tentacle body of a story? The story of Taliesin and the Caldron emerged from the rhythms of the natural world, from the bubbling of ancestral Caldron's it spiraled into the ears of the Oracles. Passed from their mouths as vibration in air reached the hearts and minds of the people and shook understandings awake as the story was passed across time, across generation. When I say the name Taliesin, I am adding to the body of a being and allowing the being to add me to it all at once, because a story is alive. Do you hear this? Storytellers. The stones have a story to tell. The story of Persephone is not a story about the underworld. It arrives through darkness and tree roots and winter frost. Those who spoke it received it directly from the darkness. The stones of the underworld, the hollow darkness of the underworld are in the story. Your old pair of swan-shaped scissors has a story to tell. Your old knit cap, your mud-caked boots, the granite boulder and the creek bed. They are working through the vibrational ethers and the waters to plant their story on your lips. Stories are living currents that spiral around bright shiny objects. And objects in stories stand out like listening river stones. Calling our attention to fixed points in the midst of eternal flow. Objects plant themselves in stories in order to wake us up to their immediacy in order to give us points of bright focus that gleam and back in. For why the stories spin themselves around supposedly inanimate objects. Around dolls and spindles and quills and bells and spoons. When a golden key appears in an old Czech fairy tale, a key that shines in the dark and unlocks hidden doors. What is that golden key? What is it? Who placed it there in the story? It's a spirit helper, placed in the living body of the story by the original story teller. Just as it was planted in their consciousness, by some fortunate confluence of natural powers, and in the evolving body of the story over the ages, the key that little golden key lives dormant like a river stone. Until it is spoken awake by the next storyteller and it leaps to life. and is planted in your consciousness. And there it shines, like only golden keys can. And there it unlocks the same secret doors that did unlock hundreds of years ago. If we have a place to hold it and keep it. Here, there's a golden key. Take it. Unlock hidden doors. In the story of Vasalisa the beautiful. Vasalisa's mother gives her a little doll and tells her that all she needs to do is to make sure she feeds the doll every day. Just feed this little doll and everything else will be fine. How would that work? How would our lives be changed by simply turning our attention to one doll, one inanimate object, and feeding it? The fairy tales are teeming with such bright objects, boots that leap a hundred yards, blankets that seamlessly blend the wearer with their surroundings. After apprenticing with an old crown for three years, the young prince from the Lithuanian story, the son princess and her deliverer, is given something very precious. What could it be? A little ball of string. All that service, all that work, and that's the gift, a little ball of string. But then that string, when unwound, points the way through the forest. It's a navigator. The focus, the attention, the respect, the care that we learn in those long apprenticeships becomes for us, a guide, a spirit helper, something that we could not have obtained without the gift of repetitive focus. And so, objects Our relationship with objects is calling us into a deeper attention, a deeper focus. It's an invitation to love things so that they give up their secrets. These days, of course, we have what you could call a disposable relationship with everyday objects. disposable, razors, disposable bottles, disposable partners, disposable lives. But this is not how it always was. We innately see things as precious and alive. Our consciousness naturally constructs itself around the gleam and shine in the value of things. Look at how children review everyday objects. My toddler invokes the name of a book or a sock, as if it's the most interesting thing in the world. My older son adores scissors. The care with which he uses them, how they become an extension of him when he holds them in his hands. His adoration of the magic of the everyday hasn't been numbed out of him. He hasn't arrived at a worldview of disposability. and get us out of the city, get us away from Walmart, and our attitude towards things changes very quickly. That one camping mug becomes a vital extension of us. To have one knife out in the wild makes all the difference. Have you ever been way out in the woods without one? It's the difference between life and death, or at least the difference between not so much work and time and energy and a whole lot of work and time and energy. Things take on more value, the less of them we have. And this value transcends the material value of the implement in question. The value is in understanding that how we treat anything is how we treat everything. And how we treat the littlest thing, the gypsy moth, the spotted owl, the termite, the supposedly lifeless pebble, might determine whether or not we survive. The lesson of the fairy tale is simple. Pay attention, pay close attention to things, to the life and things, to the care of things, the immediacy of things, the animacy of things. And when we do, we find that the ordinary is the portal to the eternal. That's the key. Pay attention to the shine on the teacup, the curve of the spoon, The coiling power of the spring, the beautiful simplicity of the hinged box, the little configuration of springs and hinges and metal teeth that when turned remind us that life glows. Then we find that everything we interact with has somewhere to take us. And the loving attention we take to it unfolds entire universe's teaming with life and vibrancy. Everything we interact with is a portal to consciousness. Everything. Even cars. How bad that everyone listening to this has treated their car at one point or another as an enemy being. You know, how did it lovingly after it gotten over that mountain pass on almost no gas? pasted something, spoken to it. And of course, we certainly want cars to be inanimate. We give them names like Ram, Mustang, Bronco, Wildcat, Cougar, Jaguar, Firebird, Lotus, Ferrari decides upon a rearing horse for their logo. Lamborghini responds with a charging bull. We adorn cars with fins and wings and tooth some grills and winged spirits of ecstasy. The cult of the sacred cars, as anthropologist Andrew Greely, has its add-ups and its initiati. Rose B. Simpson, the sculptor who sees eyes everywhere, also has a thing for old cars. There's one in particular that grabbed her attention one day. An old El Camino by the side of the road, and nominating that's a boom. And she'll say, no uncertain terms that the car found her. The car made use of her.

The 1985 El Camino that rose a dorned in traditional son of the Fulnso black on black glaze and named after Maria Martinez, the Pueblo Potter famous for that style. Maria is worth looking at. She is a power object. I'll tell you that car had a destiny. When I first saw her, she tugged at me. And that eventually led me to reach out to Rose for this interview, and that's kind of how this whole episode happened. So everything that we're exploring about fairy tales and consciousness and keys and stones and being, you could say, all this was conjured up by an old El Camino by the side of the road in northern New Mexico. Oh, great mystery. that car needed to fulfill its beingness. And the artist was merely a servant in the larger animal agenda of the car.

There's character, their personhood.

My mom is totally like that. When we feel things this way, we feel that we are completely interrelated, intertwined, and interwoven with the world around us. We realize that all those things we say about the interconnectivity of all things isn't conceptual in the slightest. It is literal. The world is one great living tissue, within which we feel through phantom limbs. We sense through dreams. We know that the pasta is done by feeling through the tip of the spatulas somehow. That time you pulled your car a little too close to that thorn bush and it scraped the side, you didn't just hear the thorns against the car, right? You felt it in your extended skin. This is a real thing. Extended proprioception, we feel our cars, literally. The human sensory field, the neural patterning grows to the exact size and dimensionality of the shape of the car. A few minutes in contact with a prosthetic limb, Dr. Claudia Welcher reminds us, and if someone runs a feather across it, we feel it. How does that happen? Obi-Wan can Obi-Wan feels the voices cry out on alderon, light years away. We feel it when the forest burns, or maybe when one stone is moved in a creek bed that we love. We are linked to a network that is not only the size of our material bodies, but the size of our family the size of our houses, the size of our communities, the size of our colleges, perhaps even the size of our world. And I feel that there are some souls, some saints, some live wires, some might be able to feel the whole world of their body. And their body is the whole world. And each thrill of ecstasy that humanity experiences moves across the Earth again. And each cry of long him talks in their heart. And everything that bames the world, paints them. Perhaps this is what a saint is. Someone who feels the war, body of the world. That once, in their overflowing heart, But back to houses for a second. Houses have personality too, have you noticed?

The house is a character, which is why houses have literally been portrayed as characters. In Ray Bradbury's short story, there will come soft rains. The protagonist is an automated house that survived the great human apocalypse and continues to function on its own. With lights going on and off, sying vents, automated toasters and window blinds set to the rhythm of invisible timers. An animacy that humans brought into being, but that outlasts us. For this, Bradbury says, was the one house left standing. For Charles Dickens, Stewart Guthrie reminds us. Everything is animate and houses are no exception. They are often not only alive, but human Guthrie says. So Dickens describes a house leaning forward to see who's passing on the narrow street below. He describes the skin and teeth and breath of houses. Among artifacts says Guthrie, quote, Dickens most often animates houses, furniture, clothing, and portraits. But no object is too large or too small to animate. And animate houses, of course, are full of animate furniture. What else would they be full of? Animate furniture. There's a whole lot of it in the myths and folktales. Magic Flying Furniture is commonplace in the Arabian Knights, says Marina Warner. In one of the tales of Aladdin, the lovers embark on their great quest on a flying sofa. In the story of Hassan of Bazaarah, the Enchantress Shouahi sailed through the air in an old Greek emphora, a jug. And of course, these things do transport us. Couches transport jugs transport. What do I mean? All two lovers need is a couch and they can sail across the universe and touch the humming pulse of the center. You know what I mean? A jug of the right brew and you are flying into the stratosphere. Baba Yaga's mortar and pestle through which she grinds her mind altering medicines and concoctions is also her transport across the universe. In the right conditions, every day objects indeed fly. So, why is the flying carpet so prominent in the Arabian tales? What is it about carpets that lend themselves to flying? The carpet is also the prayer rug. The carpet is the place upon which one surrenders to the universe. Of course it flies. Deep in the rapture of prayer, how many each day, you know, upon simple permits, and fly. The ordinary is the portal to the eternal. All of the simple objects, gleaming in the periphery of consciousness, are inviting you to fly. Which brings us naturally to the humble chair. Oh, chairs. I have to say that I have kind of a love-hate relationship with chairs, because the amount of time human beings are expected to spend in chairs these days is ridiculous. I mean, one right now, in fact. The fact that school kids are expected to sit for multiple hours a day in chairs, right at the time when their bodies are wanting the most movement, the most exploration, this goes against every somatic principle I hold dear. And yet, The chair, too, has its animacy. The chair, too, is alive, and has its living part to play in the story. The Arabian Knights tells of a merchant who has an ordinary, shabby old chair that transports him across the universe. He uses it for nightly journeys, nightly explorations of the infinite. Until a well-meaning house cleaner thinks that the chair is past its prime and breaks it apart for firewood. I mean, how could they have known? Was it a simple chair, or was it a doorway to vast universes? Perhaps if you're a writer, you know such a chair. The chair that, when you took a seat in it, transported you across the cosmos, flew you into characters heads and storylines and coasted you above imaginary ranges and mythic cities and into the blood that pulses and lovers veins. Where did James Joyce's chair take him? What about Emily Dickinson's chair? Or Einstein's chair? Quote, Einstein is one of the most famous mines in history. Because of this, many objects associated with the physicist are considered priceless artifacts, such as Einstein's blackboard and sink. An old observational chair, with laden University, is known as the Einstein chair. As it was the physicist's usual seat when he visited his friend, Willem Desitter, to discuss cosmology. What worlds were glimpsed in that seat? What animacies sprung to life? What arcs and bands of space-time? There's something very powerful about simply taking a seat I mean, what animacy is arise when you stop and take a seat? Like maybe you went on a walk in the woods one day and found your favorite sitspa. A stone perhaps or a log. Or perhaps you sat in a meditation hall upon a cushion. Or an old, old chair in your local library. And in taking that seat, and evening out and deepening the breath, and finding the soft and pointed focus of vision, suddenly the whole universe onward with life. Animacies, eros, battles were fought, oceans sailed, art forms birthed, as you sat breathing in that seat. I remember walking through an old meditation hall at Lama Yudu Monastery in Ladakh. There were no people there, only cushions dented from so much sitting. But the seats themselves were alive. Somehow they were pulsing. Imagine all that had taken place in those seats. A sit spot says Shantazinith, isn't really a place so much as a practice of perception, a commitment to the directional intimacy of noticing what exists for you are. And I'm going to build on that and say a place. In and of itself is a place of perception. There's no such thing as a place that is not a place of perception. Place implies awareness. For a place wouldn't look anything like a place without awareness, without perception. A universe without awareness would be an utterly non-localized universe. Nothing to more it or anchor it anywhere. Perception gives birth to place, perception and place are one thing. What gives a galaxy its shape and its color and its relationality to all that is around it is perception. Is consciousness. So the taking of the seat is the arising of awareness itself. The Buddha did what he took a seat and followed his breath and became one with the arising pulse of all animacies. All universes past, present, and future. All it required was awareness and a place to sit. From Jack Cornfield, quote, my teacher, Achancha, Describe this commitment to awareness as taking the one seat. He said, just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the seat in the center of the room, open the doors in the windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise in past and out of this wisdom and understanding will come. The middle way he says rests at the center of all things. One great seat in the center of the world. On this seat the Buddha opened his eyes to see clearly he says, and opened his heart to embrace all. All is available to those who are able to simply sit with what is. All animacies arise upon the great seed of luminous space-time. All things exist in relation to the foundation that they set upon. Place and the animacy are inseparable. So now we arrive at last at the place. The throne. The throne of the universe. For if animate universes come and go, there still must be a throne upon which they sit. Have you heard her name? The name of the throne of the universe?

Throne. The goddess. Quote. Isis is the Throne. The luminous ground of space itself. Osiris is the active principle within this radiant surround. This pervasive inevitability of disintegration and resurrection. The mother is the Throne. meaning the space in which all things arise. The word for throne in higher glyphs is a picture of a chair, sit, seat, the Arabic word for lady, Sayida. The Greek spelling of this Egyptian word is ISIS. Mary with Christ on her lap is the higher glyph itself. taken from the standard representation of ISIS as the chair that contains the falcon of the sky that holds the rising star serious in the east, the hinge of the astronomical cycle of the year. This vision is of the goddess as the seed, the womb that holds everything. It is the same vision in the book of Revelation of a sacrificed land seated at the center of a throne. This universe of life, death, and rebirth of cycles, all transpiring in a place. All that transpires needs a place in which to transpire. What remains eternal is the place, the throne itself. The essence of the throne say that's our gen text is unchanging reality, quote, in immaculate spaciousness, an imminent location that is no location, a mandala of clear light that cannot be delineated, that is the supreme, all inclusive throne. So in this vision, the seat, the place, the throne, the universe, is animacy is consciousness itself. For how could the seed upon which animacy transpires somehow be separate from the animacy? Can you separate the place from what transpires within it? This theater of stone from the life within it, space infinite space from the light and current and life that pervades it. Do you see what I'm getting at here? The place in which animacy transpires is by definition itself, animate. The universe is a theater for consciousness, and therefore a theater of consciousness. All of this is alive. All of this is the inseparability of the place and what transpires within the place. For, as Psalm 45 says, thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. And that forever and ever lives within each one of us. In an infinite universe, where is the throne located? Every place. Every place of perception is the throne. Everywhere we sit with what is is the throne. So here, in this place, in this seed, we are invited again, breath by breath to feel the animacy of everything. To feel the crystalline home of consciousness. What we feel when we actually connect to a place is the home of every place. When we connect to an object, when we find the immediate smoothness of the stone, or the heat of the firestick, or the shine of the silver tea kettle, we are opening up a door right to the center of the universe, right to the universal throne. And as in the fairy tales, our relationship with the whole is determined by the quality of our loving attention to the specific. The living universe arises where your attention goes. And so it is our task says Rilka, to imprint this temporary perishable earth into ourselves so deeply. so painfully and passionately that its essence can rise again invisibly inside us. We are it and it is us. We are nature and it is us. It, she, thou, is not an object but a seamless continued. Present simultaneously within and without. We are what we are because of her. She is what she is because of us. There's no separation between the two, no extraction of us from the universe, no neutral observer, no subjectless object. Rather, all of it is a continuum of living, animate, fire. so much has become unavailable to us because of our attempted extraction of ourselves from the tissue of the world. Yet all this is the living tissue of the goddess. All this is the web of life, all of it. You can no more extract yourself from it than you can rip a hole in space and step outside. There is no outside. but it of itself blazes. It of itself trembles. It of itself shakes and quakes this living fabric. The light, the dark, the evaporating waters, the return of the rains. It of itself saves. This tapestry woven of light and time and interality. This is her living tissue. This is the pulse of her effulgence. This blazing filament of life. It says, all this left, all this left. From the Spiny forest to the crystal lattice work of stones, to the elements comprising the stones made of atomic powers. And within those atoms, deep within those atoms, vibrating energies, finer and finer and finer. finer and finer still to find the very thing at the center. The very thing that quivers with life. The violin string of life. The harp string of life. A trillion times finer than the finest subatomic particle we've discovered. There she dances. there she dances more energy and dark matter there she dances more the music and the space in between the notes there she dances more the goddess of consciousness how is consciousness described in the text consciousness is clay

It is a moon. It is a drop. It is a column. It is a throne. It is a goat that prads us forward and a hook that pulls us back. It is an arrow. It is a sword. It is a club. It is a bow made of sugar cane whose arrows are the five senses. It is a wheel. It is a reverberating conch shell. It is at last a jewel.

Consciousness is all these things. Because consciousness is this world of things. This world of resplendent faceted shimmering things transpires within consciousness. All things transpire upon the throne of consciousness. And all these musings on thrones and universes and subject object relationality are all for something very, very simple. Perhaps after diving like this into the animacy that surrounds us. Perhaps the world itself appears to have a little more shine. Perhaps the light upon the fountain reflects a little differently. Or the curved surface of the spoon throws back a little more spark. Perhaps it draws our attention differently. And perhaps we are more willing to let her attention linger there. In these days when our attention is a precious commodity, What would it be to dive into the immediate? To find there the golden key of loving attention. What would it be to walk a living world? What would it be? In the taking of our attention to things, to places, to the immediacy of the object that is right before our eyes, We open the possibility for the world itself to live. Environmental historian Neil Everndon says, we need to not only treat things differently, but see them differently. The environmental crisis demands not the inventing of solutions, but the recreation of the things themselves. How we are in relation to the object? The object of our focus, the object of our loving attention, is at the heart of determining what kind of world we will create. It's about how we are with the other, with that which we perceive as separate. It's about how we are with the entirety of the human and more than human family. It's about how we are with the cosmos itself. It asks us if we want ultimately to inhabit a world of dead objects Do we want to wander, lost, and anxious ghosts in a sea of dead lights? Or to live in a world that is constantly spilling its secrets? Because it is so loved. Welcome to the world of the animate. Yes, the stones speak. Yes, the rivers dance. Yes, the eyes are watching us. Yes, the instruments have voice. Yes, there is a gold key. Waiting in the swiftly moving current of the story of our lives. It says, welcome to the world of consequence. Welcome to the world of ripples. Welcome to the world of movement, the world of life. Now, who are you? How do you walk upon sentient grass? How do you carve out a home amongst singing stones? How do you offer back to this world of mouths? Who are you, traveler? Who are you? Take a seat and tell me a story. For you are welcome. Welcome. It says, welcome. Welcome to the world. Overflowing with love. First of all, I want to express my deep gratitude and thanks for the many artists and musicians who made this episode possible. Many thanks to Rose B Simpson for an awesome conversation and you can find out more about Rose's incredible sculptural work at RoseB Simpson.com. Many musicians participated in this episode and gave voice to the stones in a beautiful way. Many thanks to Maria Stark. You can find her work on Spotify. It's absolutely beautiful. She's also part of the collective Starling Arrow. Many thanks to Pia Luzzi, who also contributed on this episode. You can find Pia's work on Spotify as well. It's P-E-I-A. Fellow mythic traveler and bard Ben Murphy. From the school of mythopoetics, provided the beautiful, deep singing and throat singing that really helped give voice to the stones. CD Bay sang on this episode, and her work is on Spotify at SIDIBE, and she also watched my dog a bunch this month, so thanks for that CD Bay. Andy Aquarius offered some incredible heart music on this episode, and you can find his work on Instagram at Aquarian Renegade. And there was a particular track that occurred throughout the episode, and that is the soundtrack to a 1975 Australian film called Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was directed by Peter Weir. And it features pan-flute by the legend, Xom Fear, and is about the animacy of stones. And as always, this episode contained reference to many books, movies, articles, et cetera, these include the secret life of inanimate objects by Lyle Watson, highly recommended, loving stones, and people trees, two books by David Haberman, faces in the clouds by Stuart Guthrie, Thinking like a mountain by John Seed, Canticle to the Cosmos by Brian Swim, Clay's and the Origins of Life, the Experiments. This is by Jacob Kloprog and published for the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Clay may have been the birthplace of life on Earth, a study by Cornell University published in Science Daily on November 2013. The kiln, or a hymn to the goddess of potters, possibly Homer, possibly not. The song Clay by Rising Appalachia, off the album The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know. The knock turns by Frederick Chopin, the four seasons by Vivaldi, specifically Summer, performed by violinist Nigel Kennedy. The song Dedications solitude also by Nigel Kennedy. The guitar solo eruption by Eddie Van Halen. RIP Eddie. The Yeruba God of Drumming by Amanda Villapastur. The story of Vasily said the beautiful. The story of the sun princess and her deliverer, a Lithuanian tale. You can find a written version by a Machu Nite and Irina Jelas Nova. And Tom Hirons also tells a mean version of this story and I recommend looking it up. The key of gold, 23 Czech folk tales translated by Joseph Baudius, Lavillon Rose, the 1945 song by Edith Piaf. Star Wars, the 1977 film by George Lucas. There will come soft reigns, a short story by Ray Bradbury. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Stranger Magic by Marina Warner, Einstein's chair, an article on Atlas Obscura. Shantay Xenith's post on Sit Spots, you can find her work at Earth Poet Edge Weaver. Take the one seed and article by Jack Cornfield in the 1993 Summer Edition of Tricycle Magazine, The Donning Moon of the Mind by Susan Brindmoro. Everything is illuminated by Keith Downman, William Blake and the City by Kathleen Rain, Psalm 45 and the Book of Revelation in the Bible, the song, El Camino by Currency. And of course, the album, El Camino by the Black Keys. If you liked what you heard today, please consider becoming a patron. It costs as little as $6 a month and patrons get access to twice monthly study groups in which we go into the mythic topics in these episodes and a lot more detail. It's a great way to show your support for the podcast. It keeps the podcast up and running. It allows me to pay for musicians and artists to collaborate with and studio time and all this fun stuff. And you can find out more at patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. That's patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. I'm gonna start this episode with the whole thing about stone, but you know, because always comes back to stones. If you say, you kind of have like analyst tendencies or whatever, people are like, you mean you think that stones can think of you.