Animism — the understanding that the world is alive, that rivers and stones and animals and plants and weather are not inert matter but presences with their own form of awareness, agency, and relationship — is likely the oldest human spiritual orientation, the background against which all other traditions have developed. It is not a primitive mistake that more sophisticated traditions correct but a perception that many of humanity's most advanced contemplatives have rediscovered: that the world is not a collection of objects but a community of subjects. Contemporary thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her work with Potawatomi plant knowledge, and David Abram in his phenomenological philosophy are recovering animism as a position of great philosophical rigor and ecological urgency.
Rumi