“mom, there’s a dead bird on the porch. it’s brown and flattened and this big.” my oldest kid holds his hands about a foot and a half apart. my brain raced through the mountain’s catalog of birds and couldn’t find a match for his description. was it a small bird of prey? i’ve never seen those visit our porch. how the hell did a bird that size become flattened? “i can see the zig-zag of its legs and its wings are up.” he draws two zig-zag legs in the air. he is trying to remain calm but is visibly distraught. the image has already been seared in his mind.

i follow him to the door. he points at a pile of sticks and bark. I squint. it does look like a dead, brown, flattened bird. i’m relieved that i don’t have to face a gigantic bird pancake this morning. i tell him it’s like how we see pictures in the clouds. ”why do our brains do that?” he asks, still shaken as he processes this shift in his reality. i think in my head: “i don’t know, but if this freaks you out, you’re probably not ready to watch adventure time”. i say to the kid who cried over the mars rovers: “i think our brains want to see the life in everything.” 

as soon as the words leave my mouth, i consider their meaning and wonder if viewing the world as animate is just an extension of that tendency. like the animist’s brain takes that idea and runs wild with it in all directions. my gut says this is an oversimplification and my gut is usually not wrong. but i still take the morning to consider what that would mean if it was true and that’s all animism was: a brain that can’t stop extending life to everything.

children do this naturally. they see the life in toys, stuffed animals, empty rolls of toilet paper that could be used as a craft somehow, dead bugs, cool rocks, their food. eventually they grow up and our culture steers them out of it so they can become regular humans who don’t feel anything when they throw trash in the landfill or cut down a tree. some people argue that it’s like a narcissus myth, where a person sees their reflection (or an extension of themselves) in their surroundings. it’s not a pond, it’s a mirror to see yourself in. animists are just projecting themselves onto the environment.

i crinkle up my nose at this idea. anthropomorphizing is a useful and important technique, but the simplification feels limiting here. i don’t think of myself at all when i am watching the forest or looking at the mountain. there’s an absence of self when facing how insanely vast the world is and it clears my mind completely. if anything, i become aware that i am a tiny spec on this huge rock swirling through an infinite-seeming outer space. the context makes anything else, including my humanness, absurd. sometimes animism makes me feel more like the world is seeing itself in me. like everything on the planet is just an extension of the earth itself and i am no exception. 

when i was little, i found a book called “behaving as if the god in all things mattered”. the cover was a grainy picture of a hand holding a tiny, fragile animal. i never read it but i did spend a disproportionate amount of time staring at it. it validated my weird worldview when other people had disregarded it. i’ve come to find that when kids ask hard questions, they don’t actually want an answer – they want someone to witness it with. maybe he is ready to watch adventure time, we just have to do it together. first, i’ll sweep the porch.