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 we explore in 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 brook and wood.

There are hedges that speak and move of their own will and snag unwary 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 their unaltered state that are imbued with this life, this vibrancy, this animacy. Objects, fashioned objects, exhibit similar life in the old stories. Mirrores, 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 write 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 teapots 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 clumping of shoes. Things like, are what we call objects just dead lifeless things? 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?

Are stones 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 has arisen in the last.1% human history. To feel a living world, to feel sentience everywhere, is ancestrally 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 the states of rapturous flow, we see a world with eyes.

Don't think that the trees have eyes? West 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 this animacy. Neither monotheism nor rationalism nor science writes steward Guthrie in his book Faces in the Clouds. All thought antithetical to animism have suppressed Western animism. The Descartes and Newton 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 alchemies 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 your grandmother. But if you dig a little deeper, it's still kind of seen as a mistake. How beautiful that you see rocks as 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 indigenous Haiti, 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, sentience 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 incents 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, biologists 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. Animate 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 animacy 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 in dances of longing. And the owls it's 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 words 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-arrose with everything else around us, in which there is no us without mountain and stream, there is no us without 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 strativarius an 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 an extension of life? Iron is what? It's a continuum. A continuum that passes from the fires of stars to terrestrial volcanoes to underground minerals' brains 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 a 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 inanimate, crosses thresholds of life and death and life again. Most 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 it being? An intelligence, a knowing, a presence, an awareness, a listening? A field punctuated with certain confidences?

A vibration that reconfigures itself over time is 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 beings. 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.

Other 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 founded 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 our 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. Everything 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.

The great choir surrounds us always has, pokes 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, and clay, and stones, and rocks, and balls of string wound by the crones that when unwound point the way through dark forests.

Let's talk about flying carpets and magic chairs, and violins, and drums that have their own agenda as they shape human moods. Let's talk about the strange powers. The power of things to grab our attention and to wrap our very 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 in 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 awkwardness, a kind of cultural shame in the modern western psyche. It tugs at deep cultural programming and at colonial divides between civilized and not.

Quote, 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. End 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.

Or the mythic and ritual traditions of the world are teaming with animate stones. Your ancestors, whoever you are, wherever you are, your ancestors felt the animacy of stones. The Lakota speak of stones as grandfather. The cultures around like Huron speak of Flint as a trickster being. The Macbacca 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 Kaaba. A meteorite lived in the great temple of Artemis. You've heard, I assume, of the Blarney stone or the Omphelos, the central sacred ritual object in Delphi. It was a stone.

The temple Bethel housed a stone. The sacred geography of the Indian subcontinent is in a very real way, a network of stones. 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 time. 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 hummed 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, termaline 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 Liao 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 worn close to the heart for beauty and set in metal as talismans? And why do the park rangers at Uluru receive hundreds of returned stones in the mail every single year? Hundreds of sorry rocks, they're called. And the same is true for volcanoes national park in Hawaii.

Thousands of pounds of 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, weak. 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 ritually 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 a cut can inspire 300,000 people to cross the desert for a glimpse of it, if opals can drive Australian would-be miners 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. The 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, Alta near the Chama Basin. It was wild country. Up a sandy wash full of church and alabaster and courts. Have you ever seen white alabaster after a rain? Have you seen the old mud gods with their tuffes 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 stones were they watching? I felt like they were watching. The stones were watching us. They were watching us.

They were powered. They were powered in the stones. They were powered. They were powered. They stand like sentinels, silent watchers. They watch us come and go. They watch our little flittings back and forth. They see our wet eyes darting 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 stone 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 molybdenum? 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 them 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. Out 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. For function happens through sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium through the transfer of signals in a matrix of liquid stone. And it gets tripier 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-coded 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 semi-conduct makes all this, this humming world of electric light and sound possible.

The entire digital universe upon 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 intelligences that are causing wonder and alarm and raise questions of sentience and agency, these are all intelligence is 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 stones, 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 worshipers, 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 sentience, reaching for life. But that's for the next episode.

Let's just say that visions of the sentience of stones aren't unfounded superstition, demonic understandings of the capacities of courts aren't woo-woo. Chemist Don Robbins says that all stone, which is largely crystalline, should be seen as a kind of macrochip, a natural, if somewhat haphazard electronic system capable of storing energies. 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.

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. Stones 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 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 Elish, the goddess Ninhursak created humans from clay.

According to Inca mythology, the creator god Virakocca formed humans from clay. The Maori people believed that Ta-Neh-Mahuta, god of the forest, created the first woman out of clay. In the Korean Sang-Gut narrative, humans are created from what? Red clay. The Aruba culture holds that the god Obatala, likewise, created the human race from clay. In the Kiche creation story Pappal-Vu, the first humans are made of clay.

Central Asian mythologies, including Altaiic and Mongolian, have stories about how the god Ullgan created the first man, Erlik, 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. Malagasy belief state that human beings were created when Zana Hari 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 Ainu and the Imaran and the Songye and the Buriyat of Siberia and the Dinkavs who donned. In Borneo, humans are said to be made from clay breathed into life with bird song. Bird song and clay, 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 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 ploys. 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 are catalysts and can replicate, says one study for the National Center for Biotechnology. The origin of life, it says, began in the clay world. 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 aquias solution. So what if all those creation stories were right? What if life was made from clay? This vision of clay as 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 has always been alive.

In Japan, ceramics 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. In 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 ceramists 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, sang Homer, come goddess of pottery, with hand upraised 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. 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, daemonia karamakoi that needed to be placated so that they wouldn't wreak havoc on the potter's efforts.

There was suntribose who shattered pottery and smatagon who smashed it and asbestos who scorched and charred it. Yeah, you heard right, asbestos. So I don't know who exactly thought it was a good idea to name asbestos, the toxic insulation material that still claims 90,000 lives per year globally after a Greek trickster daemon. But to me, that seems doomed from the start. Speakers have a way of re-emerging. Anemonees have a way of exerting themselves. Stones have a billion-year agenda.

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, kneading it between her fingers, and a being is springing 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 to get her MFA from RISD, and people spoke of clay as a collection of dead chemical components.

I used to struggle in school because you have to take materials and processes and ceramics. And you have to study all the different materials, like the raw materials and how they affect so you can formulate the perfect clay or the perfect glaze.

I would walk into the materials room, which is like, here's a bucket, a lithium, here's a bucket of bentonite, and here's a bucket of kale and you sort of weigh it all out and make the perfect thing going how it's going to affect with different temperatures. And you're like, A-L-2-O-3-S-I-O-2-O-2-O is good.

And I would walk in there and all I would see was like a bin full of hands and a bin full of elbows and a bin full of ankles and nose and like, and you were building the perfect and maybe I was projecting because I see clay as female. And it was almost like you're building the perfect woman. And I would get very mad. I would get super triggered by that like, oh, you know, the woman as it is like the clay from the side of the road or that's sticking out of the mountain isn't perfect, right?

Right. So you have to formulate the correct and perfect one that will meet your needs rather than modifying yourself for appreciating the clay, ask herself. Ask yourself. And I used to, who would I use to blog me? You know, when you grow up thinking that everything has its essence and everything has its soul and its consciousness, that when you take it apart to its like scientific particles, the power of trip in it, the objectification really, you know, this is destructive, it feels destructive.

I like what you said about looking into the clay and seeing like noses and elbows. I don't think I was aware that I thought different. Right. Until I left, you know, and I was like, oh, this is like a deep belief in something that I was given that I see a beam in the clay, right? Or that I see a consciousness in things. For my experience of the art world has been so much that it's objectified, right? Yeah. And I'm like, I'm not making objects.

I don't know what you guys are doing, but I'm not making objects. It's not for use. It's not for consumption. It's not for objectification. It's about relationship. And when you're in deep relationship, you have to be very, very self-aware. Rose goes on to describe an installation she did in Western Massachusetts of nine foot tall statues adorning clay. One foot watchers, sentinels that sprang to life when she gave them eyes.

Well, the backstory of the piece was that this curator wanted to do a piece that would be at Plumins Rock. And she asked me to do it. And I was like, whoa, what would I say? And what I wanted to say was, check yourself. You know, like, let's all think about this. And we all consider all of it. And before we get racial with it and cultural, let's talk about the fact that we're being watched and this place, the place itself has seen this all the day.

And what happens when the place, when we're aware that the place is watching, right? So then I proposed 12, 9 foot tall earth colored figures that have holes all the way through their head. So you can see the light coming through the light. And the idea is the trees, the sky, whatever is there is watching. And they're all standing watching. And they're more feminine, right? So they're not aggressive warrior figures. They're more feminine and they have necklaces.

So they're in a state of self-respect and composure. And they're watching. And it didn't end up being at Plumins Rock, which I was actually grateful for. I made them out of wood. I made three original ones. They cast them into these concrete beings. And they're huge. And they're out in this field, which is up. You drive up this little road. You take this corner. And it's just like football line of hope standing there.

And it's just like, you know, when you get to a certain point, you see the light. Which was so interesting because the fabricators from Medium decided that they weren't going to put the holes through. And when I got there, they didn't have the holes through. And I was like, everything matters, right? This is everything. So I went and got like a diamond bit found a drill. I stood on like a 10 foot ladder and personally drilled every single eye 24 holes through the cement.

And I was like, oh, I had to wake them up. Like that was totally, that was not an accident. And did they wake up when you did that? Oh man, didn't they? You know what I mean? And it had to be me that did it. Right. But this idea that just wanting the vision I had was that we think about what we're doing. Because we went in a state of our independent entitlement, we forget that we're accountable and responsible to our world.

And to the story we're all co-creating, you know, and that we can be a little bit more conscious about it. I don't even remember that we're being watched. And like every single one of my pieces is a Trojan horse of consciousness that enters into spaces that are unconscious or entitled. And it sits there and watches people until they realize they're being watched, you know? 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. I think one of the main problems with modern American world is that we forget we're being watched. Yeah. We think we're so human-centric that we forget that we're being watched. And I think as soon as you realize, like, do you're being watched, you know? Like, and the feeling of being watched by something that you might judge as an animate, right? And as soon as it's watching, you change the way you're being.

I would say you're more conscious of what you're doing. You know, you're not a sloppy. 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, 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?

The moment we realize we are actually in the animate vibrational field that we've always talked about existing, the moment we realize that the song of interconnection is a song first and foremost of responsibility is the moment we truly open up to the flow and spark of the animate. Who am I to work with Clay Rose Ast? 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 try not to talk too much about my native culture, especially in those situations. Take, take, take, take, take. You can do that and other, and so on. Give us something like this. Great. And so on this, like, how can I do this without giving them that satisfaction? Exactly. And so I try to not give too much of my belief systems.

But Virgil Ortiz got up there and he was like, I just want, like, none of us 4,000 people would be here in this building in Cincinnati if it wasn't for grandmother Clay. You know what I mean? And I was like, fuck yeah, dude. And there was this thing of like, nah, he did the thing and it was done well, you know? And I was like, well, I didn't have to, but it was really like, like, let's all sit in a knowledge grandmother Clay.

And he was just like, remember to talk to her, remember to show reverence and think her, you know, and when your Clay is not working out the way you wanted it, maybe you need to check your relationship with grandmother Clay. Yeah. Make my conscious about your relationship with the material. And the fact that we've objectified the material. With the thing.

Or all night, you know, to me, I walk around in Jesus like the National Council of Education and ceramic arts and all these people that are just entitled little two year olds with the body of our mother, you know? And they're just all, we am just having fun. And, you know, the fact that you take Clay and you put it in the calendar and you fire it and you take the resources of our Earth to feed this fire, to make it stay on this planet forever. Right?

When it's vitrified, it is how we study ancient cultures. You know, it's here for good. Right? And the entitlement that you would think that you have the right to even start with. It's like, why don't you start with introducing yourself and say, may I please and what would you like and assist my intention and I'm going to come with humility and say, I'm going to do this and let's do this together. What can my hands turn you into that will honor your being? Yeah. You know, and how can I do this?

For it to take things from the Earth and change them to mine 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. People abstinence had to be observed beforehand. There were deep protocols to mining ore and to 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 smiths are revered as animate beings. The forging process makes patterns emerge in the steel that give the blade a particular name, identity, energy, and the 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. X caliber is born of the primal waters and delivered to humanity by a nature spirit. Weapons are intertwined with places and beings, and they hum with life. Cimitar's Singh. 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? How much do I let it be? How much am I just listening to it become and how much am I controlling what that is? That balance that you're talking about, the clay speaking to you and telling you what it wants, and you're working to create. How do you see that in relation to animacy? Is the clay working you or are you working to clay? Both happening.

I made the series of dishes. I went to go sign them and there was that moment where I was like, did I make this? So I made me on the bottom. I was just like, I'm just the tool. That thing is using to create itself. I think with clay, there's water in it. And water, I feel like it's incredibly receptive. And so in that way, we're in collaboration. And the water in me is relating to the water and the clay and it's becoming itself via that relationship.

Do you feel like the beings that are being brought forth through the clay work are beings that exist energetically on a plane and you're giving a form through which they can speak or do they come into being the moment the eyes are put on them? Or is it a reflection of something that's that brought into being or is it being onto itself? People ask me that, like, who am I modeling off of? And I tell people that I only know my own story. So I can only tell my own story. And so they're all me.

But they're themselves. So there's like the millions of facets of who I am. So there are all pieces of me. But then if you think about it, this whole world, we're all pieces of each other. So maybe seeing the animacy in something else is actually seeing oneself in all the things around us. So there's so many dimensions of myself. And there's so many experiences of myself. And when I'm making something, I'm finding myself, I'm looking for myself. I can only tell my own truth.

And so when it wakes up, maybe there's a part of me that's waking up. And the part of me that's waking up is a part of creation that's waking up. So it's not just me. But because I can claim it, and I have gotten deep enough into my own truth of what that looks like, that what I wake up and what wakes up to me is a part of who we are. And I think the more that we witness those deep parts of ourselves wake up, the more we can be aware of the consciousness and all things.

Yeah. So like as I put eyes on the stone, so waking up my own eyes, and I'm seeing myself in it and it in me. Yeah. And ultimately that's the relationship we want to have with the whole universe and like go ahead. And the person that put those eyes on that stone, put those eyes on that stone for everyone who would witness it. What if animacy is far more intricate than we see it to be?

And if, as some traditions will tell you, the clay made 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 animacy.

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's bass is it an object? Eddie Van Halen's guitar? There's no this to be true. Universes 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 hum in his hollow belly. The flute is a reflection of a larger pattern, a larger being that exists beyond the immediate flute and within the flute at once. How many animacies has the simple flute? The hollow reed, a hollow bone, stirred into being. How many hearts have been moved by it? How many have wept, longed, consummated that long, 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 Villpastur 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 god, ion, 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 awakens the nerves in the head, opens the veins in the eyes, sends the transpractitioner into violent blissful rapture. Sometimes, for an initiate says one priest of ion, it is enough to simply hear the sound of a drum. The sound sends them into full trance. Drum guides their lives.

The instrument plays them. Drums change things. They change mood and in 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 a long 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 strativarius, very few of whom would probably call themselves animist, describe the experience directly in animate terms. They say the strativarius is alive.

And the way that they can tell the difference between a strativarius and a copy is because the strativarius 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 strativarius is named, each one has personality, each one seems to want something different from the player. Each one begs and beckons, 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 hills near Krumama. Yes, they play the very best in the hills of their making. Why? Is it the familiar humidity, the 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. He was a passionate and loving man and he kept each completed violin in his bedroom for a month before varnishing 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 it birth. It rings for the initiatory ceremonies of adulthood. It rings for marriage, it rings for death and mourning. Or lives are just passing lives. 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 Nicolò and Carpania 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 off and 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 had stopped, the bells would start up again. Even 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, frigen miners 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 inanimate? 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 a story extends across thousands of years. A story is not a thing. A story is it 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 it being? It's still into this.

What is the living feather tentacled body of a story? The story of Taliessen and the Cauldron emerged from the rhythms of the natural world. From the bubbling of ancestral Cauldrons it spiraled into the ears of the oracles. Past from their mouths as vibration and 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 Taliessen, 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 story tellers? The stones have a story to tell. The story of Persephone is not a story about the underworld. It arrived 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-caged boots, the granite boulder in 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 glistening river stones, calling our attention to fixed points in the midst of eternal flow.

Things 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 beckon. For why do 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 check 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 storyteller, just as it was planted in their consciousness by some fortunate confluence of natural powers. Within 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 it unlocked hundreds of years ago, if we have a place to hold it and keep it. 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 100 yards, blankets that seamlessly blend the wearer with their surroundings. They're 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 an navigator. To 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 and the value of things. Look at how children revere 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. When we find that everything we interact with has somewhere to take us, and the loving attention we take to it unfolds entire universes, teeming with life and vibrancy. Everything we interact with is a portal to consciousness.

Everything, even cars. I bet that everyone listening to this has treated their car at one point or another as an animate being. You know, padded it lovingly after it got over that mountain pass on almost no gas, pasted something, spoken to it. And of course, we certainly want cars to be animate. 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 bowl.

We adorn cars with fins and wings and toothsome grills and winged spirits of ecstasy. The cult of the sacred cars as anthropologist Andrew Greeley has its adeps and its initiati. Those 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 non-made in Exibone. And she'll say in no uncertain terms that the car found her. The car made use of her.

But the thing I think about the most is my car. It was like, I got this 85 El Camino right on the side of the road and on the side of the road and on the bit. And I was like, I need that. And I didn't need it. What I needed it. And then I ended up building a relationship with it. And I just kept like, oh, I'll just do this and then I'll sell it. I'll do this and then I'll sell it. I'll just pull these dents and I'll sell it.

And then one day I went, I painted, when I first painted her and I painted her like a pop. And I remember pulling her into the driveway, she was right out here in the driveway. And I had a little folding chair out here. And I was sitting there looking at her and my friend was there and we were staring and I was like, wow, that's a beautiful car. Right? And he was like, good job. And there was nothing in me that could take any credit for it. I was like, wow, look at who you've become.

And I was looking at her. And I felt like she was looking at me. And there was this like, she needed me to make her and to who she needed to be. And so I was just listening and doing the thing she wanted me to do. And she became this funky al Camino on the side of the road in Ambe. Had a destiny. Through all this hard work I was revealing her truth. And it wasn't me, I was just a tool for her becoming.

And that to me was like, that was one of the main points where I really realized like cars to me have energy. And if you haven't seen Maria, the 1985 al Camino that rose adorned in traditional son of the Fonzo Black on Black glaze and named after Maria Martinez, the Pablo 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 al 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, animate agenda of the car. They have a fight, like they have an essence and a being. There's character, there's personhood.

Yeah, we name cars and we build relationships with our cars and cars, our power objects and their energy things. You know, they become identities and we choose them and they choose us. I don't choose cars. We're coming together and we meet and then we build a life together. And we have this journey we literally go on together. And the fact that being in a car is like a life in this situation often and we're in this almost like we're trauma bonded. That's the way.

But then I have a really hard time letting go of cars because it's like a heartbreaking end of a relationship. It's that's all about being. I'm saying goodbye to you. And then I look for them on the road and I see them in a machine that they're mad at me for letting them go. And then like, you know, you don't talk mean to your car because it won't break down. My mom is totally like that. And my mom is like, just watch what you say to the car. Like, totally have a name. It's you.

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 spatula 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 Welch reminds us.

And if someone runs a feather across it, we feel it. How does that happen? Obi-Wan Kenobi feels the voices cry out on Alderan, 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 families, the size of our houses, the size of our communities, the size of our ecologies, perhaps even the size of our world.

And I feel that there are some souls, some saints, some live wires, some who might be able to feel the whole world as their body and their body as the whole world. And each thrill of ecstasy that humanity experiences moves across their skin and each cry of longing, tucks, and ther heart. And everything that pains the world, pains them. Perhaps this is what a saint is. Someone who feels the whole body of the world. That once, they're overflowing heart. But back to houses for a second.

Houses have personality too, have you noticed? I mean shit, let's talk about houses. You know, like, you know, my mom talks about walking to the polo and licking the different buildings to see what they take. Because the different buildings taste different. You know, and then they have personalities and we came like this house, like, talk to me. And it was one of those moments where, oh, I forgot you are a being and you are holding me and you're watching me and protecting me and guiding me.

It's a relationship. The house is a character, which is why houses have literally been portrayed as characters. When Ray Bradbury's short story, there will come soft reigns, 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, Stuart 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? There's a whole lot of it in the myths and folk tales. 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 Basra, the enchantress Shawahi sails 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 Yagaz mortar and pestle through which she grinds her mind altering medicines and coctions is also her transport across the universe. In the right conditions, everyday objects indeed fly.

So why is the flying carpet so prominent in the Arabian tale? 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 kneel upon simple carpets and fly? The ordinary is the portal to the eternal. All 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'm in 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 character's heads and storylines and coasted you above imaginary ranges and mythic cities and into the blood that pulses in 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 minds 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 at Layton University is known as the Einstein chair. As it was the physicist's usual seat when he visited his friend Willem DeCittor to discuss cosmology. What worlds were glimpsed in that seat? What animacies sprung to life? What arcs and bends of space-time? Or something very powerful about simply taking a seat?

I mean, what animacies arise when you stop and take a seat? Like maybe you went on a walk in the woods one day and found your favorite sit spot, a stone perhaps or a log. Or perhaps you sat in a meditation hall upon a cushion. Or an old oak 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 hummed with life.

These arothes, 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 Yurumana Stereon 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 Shante Zinath isn't really a place so much as a practice of perception, a commitment to the derational intimacy of noticing what exists where 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 mourn 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, Achaancha, described 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 and pass 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 Anemonees arise upon the great seat of Numinous Space Time.

All things exist in relation to the foundation that they sit upon. Place and the Anemonees are inseparable. So now we arrive at last at the place, the throne, the throne of the universe. For if Animate universe is common, go, there still must be a throne upon which they sit. Have you heard her name? The name of the throne of the universe. She's known as ISIS. ISIS. Throne. The goddess. Throne. The Numinous 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 hieroglyphs 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 hieroglyph 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 seat, the womb that holds everything. It is the same vision in the book of Revelation of a sacrificed lamb 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 the Zoggen texts, is unchanging reality. The word 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, for how could the seat 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 seat, 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 fire stick 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 the seamless continuum.

Present simultaneously with in 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, 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 that return of the rains, it of itself sings. This tapestry woven of light and time and minerality, this is her living tissue. This is the pulse of her effulgence, this blazing filament of life.

It says, all this lifts, all this lifts. From the spiny forest to the crystal latticework of stones to the elements comprising the stones, the need 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, roaring. There she dances, roaring. Energy and dark matter, there she dances, roaring. The music and the space in between the notes, there she dances, roaring. Her, the goddess of consciousness. How is consciousness described in the text? Consciousness is clay. Consciousness is stone. Consciousness is a vase. A vessel. Consciousness is space. Consciousness is a crown. It is a moon. It is a drop. It is a column. It is a throat.

It is a goat that prods 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. A jewel. Consciousness is all these things. Consciousness is the 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 river's 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 among 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. We're flowing 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 dot 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.

Absolutely beautiful, she's also part of that collective starling arrow. Many thanks to Pia Lutzie 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 barred Ben Murphy from the school of mythopoetics provided the beautiful deep singing and throat singing that really helped give voice to the stones. D.D. Bay sang on this episode and her work is on Spotify at S.I.D.I.B.E. and she also watched my dog a bunch this month.

So thanks for that, D.D. Bay. Andy Aquarius offered some incredible heart music on this episode and you can find his work on Instagram at Aquarian Renegade. 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 Zamfir and is about the animacy of stones.

And as always this episode contained reference to many books, movies, articles, etc. These include the secret life of inanimate objects by Lyle Watson highly recommended. Facing stones and people trees to 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 Kloeprog 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 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 Nocturns 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 eruba god of drumming by Amanda Villapastur. The story of Vasili's of the beautiful. The story of the sun, princess and her deliverer, Alitha Wainian tale. You can find a written version by a Makunite in Adina Zheleznova. 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 Baudis. La Vienn Rose, the 1945 song by Edith Piaf.

Star Wars, the 1977 film by George Lucas. There will come soft rains, a short story by Ray Bradbury. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Stranger Magic by Marina Warner. Einstein's Chair, an article on Atlas Obscura. Shante Zeneath's post on sit spots you can find her work at Earth Poet Edge Weaver. Make the One Seed an article by Jack Cornfeld in the 1993 Summer Edition of Tricycle magazine. The Daunting Moon of the Mind by Susan Brindomoro.

Everything is illuminated by Keith Dauman, William Blake and the City by Kathleen Reign, 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. That 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 in 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. And it's patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. I'm gonna start this episode with the whole thing about stones, but you know, because it always comes back to stones.

If you say you're kind of have like animus tendencies or whatever, people are like, you mean you think that stones can think and feel... Fuck out fights.