Animist Rock

By David Hunt

The sharp sound of a breaking twig caught my attention. Lifting my eyes from the roots and rocks on the trail under my feet, I saw another hiker sitting on a rock. He looked my way with a friendly smile.

“Heading south?” I asked.

“Yep”

Staring at the man, something felt wrong with my vision. The rocks and the arching green canopy remained true, by the image of the man was hard to hold in my consciousness. One moment he seemed an illusion, the next as solid as the rock he sat upon. Fearing I might be suffering from dehydration, I took a long drink and approached him. I hoped our conversation would provide rest and return my perception to normal. Slipping my pack off, I sat on a rock opposite him. Dressed in the usual hiker apparel, nothing about him seemed out of the ordinary. Dark brown pants, forest green shirt and a nondescript pack. He appeared maybe ten years younger than myself, with a dark tan and five days of beard growth.

“Thru-hiking?” I asked.

He appeared quizzical at first, but replied “I guess you could say that. Not the usual hike with maps and such, just getting out in nature for as long as I can.”

“Sounds like an excellent approach to these beautiful woods”, I said, looking up into the trees. Returning my attention to the man, it suddenly struck me I may be speaking to a woman rather than a man, and found it difficult to remember the details of the person I encountered just a moment before.

“Sometimes I come out here and just sit all day,” the hiker said and taking off his cap, let loose a cascade of brown hair. A flick of the head made me more inclined to think I was speaking to a woman, and now her voice seemed to also confirm this. I shook my head as if that would force more oxygen into my brain. She looked at me and laughed. “I guess I’m not really a hiker as you may have thought. But I am headed south, like I said.”

“If you’re not a hiker, what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere, on a hiking trail?”

“Lots of animals use these trails. I’d hardly call them hikers.”

“No, I guess not.” I recalled thinking this person was wearing hiking clothes when I first saw her, but that seemed to be a mistake also. She was now wearing mottled clothes in a kind of grey camouflage pattern. And the backpack I thought I had seen was now gone.

“I guess you could call me an ‘animist’ if you need to call me something.”

An alarm went off in my head. New Ager, I suspected. If I didn’t move fast I’d be assaulted with a word salad about how the universe provides, then hit up for food when she was done. But she remained silent, looking up into the trees, then to something on the ground which was invisible to me. I started to rise and adjust my pack, sipping as much water as I could without seeming rude.

“Any water around here? I think I’m getting dehydrated. Feeling a little light headed.”

“There’s several springs the way you’re headed.” She gazed at me, looked me up and down, and said “You’re fine. But you need to sit a while more.” She then rose and stood up on her rock and began executing a series of yoga poses. I watched as I picked up my trekking poles from the ground, but suddenly stopped when it struck me I was not watching a man or woman, but a mountain lion stretching its back as a house cat would. I reflexively stepped back, promptly tripped on a root and fell backward. Struggling to my feet, I prepared to run when the man I thought I had first seen stood over me and extended his hand.

“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll just lie here a moment.”

“Suit yourself; I’ll go back to sitting on my rock.”

I laid on the ground. It felt safe. Occasionally I would glance over to the animist’s rock to see what was there. Once it was a small, barefoot child in overalls drawing circles in the dirt with her toe, another time it was a squirrel eating nuts. When the image presented itself as an old tree with winding roots encompassing the rock, I stood, feeling a bit taken advantage of, and spoke to the tree in a somewhat perturbed tone.

“OK, ‘animist’, you’ve had your fun. I’m out of here. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t think this place is good for me.” I stared at the tree with all my concentration, hoping to catch it doing one last transmogrification. But an instant later, I was speaking to the woman again, and all I could think was “why did I think she was a tree?”

“You’ve been hiking a long time, haven’t you?

“About five months.”

“And you see me changing into who knows what, and this is disturbing you.”

“Damn right, it’s disturbing me.”

“Please, don’t be mad, you should be happy. It’s not me that changing, it’s you.”

Now I was looking at a particularly robust growth of moss where the women had been. I walked back to my rock and sat down.

“OK, you’re right. It’s me. I’ve become psychotic and can’t assess reality.”

The moss giggled, like only moss can. I quickly grabbed my camera and took a picture of the moss-covered rock. I reviewed the image I snapped — only a big hunk of bare granite. About what I expected.

“I’d enjoy our conversation much more if you’d pick a form and stick with it,” I said.

Suddenly, being a woman again, the animist said “But you’re also changing forms. When I first saw you, you were a mule, stoically trudging your way up the trail. For a while, you were a huge egg, like an ostrich egg, rolling off the rock. Now, you are a fire. It’s hardly fair to expect me to stick with one form when you take any form you please.”

“Fair to say. So, you’re saying we’re both animists?”

She thought a second, and explained, “You’re a novice animist. I have more experience. You don’t know what to do with the things you see, and more importantly, you don’t know what to do with the things you think. Over five months, you have thought many things that seem strange to you.”

“Yes, I have. I figured that’s just what happens to people when they spend most of their time away from civilization, and in nature instead.”

She considered carefully. “Your explanation is not untrue, but that’s not what’s happening to you.”

“Then tell me what’s happening, please, because I’m a little confused right now.”

Now the woman was gone, but a very cold wind began to blow. Too cold for a summer day. Her voice persisted, however.

“You are losing the distinction between yourself and the rest of the world. What you once thought of as yourself is becoming much more than just the flesh that hangs on your bones.

“I like the flesh that hangs on my bones.

“As you should. But look at it now.”

I looked down, but could no longer see myself.

“To your left,” said the wind

To my left stood my corporeal self. But not just what could be seen on the outside; what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Every muscle, bone, system, connective tissue could be seen at once.

“Meet your body.”

I looked at my body and suddenly realized that it, in addition to being me, was also an entity unto itself. Like a trusted friend, who had been with me my whole life but to whom I barely had given a second thought. I had treated it like baggage for carrying around my vital organs. Despite this neglect it had stuck with me. I felt humbled that after all these years, it was still my friend. At the same time, I felt an excited delight, like what one feels striking up a conversation with a total stranger and, realizing you have so much in common, end up talking for hours.

“Sorry about all that junk food when I was younger,” was all I could think to say to my body. Both my body and the wind seemed to laugh. The wind died down and now a lowly slug crept across the animist rock. My body joined me again and I rose from my rock and sat on the trail next to it. My face inches from the slug, I said “How am I going to function in the real world after this?”

“Why are you talking to a slug?” I spun around to see the original man once again.

“Sorry, I just thought-“

“Not to worry. It’s an important question. You could ask the slug, it has much to show you.”

“I’m sure, but this is good.”

“You’ve lived in civilization your whole life, is that correct?”

“Pretty much.”

“You’re good at it?”

“I get by OK.”

“As you do in nature. But you still lack much. Even out here, you have a lifeline to civilization. It supports you even here. The boots on your feet. The food in your pack. Without all that support, I’m afraid you’d die.”

“Dying out here doesn’t seem so bad. Rather here than some nursing home with tubes stuck in me, sipping pureed peas through a straw.”

“I see the life force in you is strong, I don’t think you should check out yet.”

“Agreed, I’d rather not.”

“Tell me. What are some of the things you’ve learned out here?”

“The first thing that pops into my head is nature doesn’t give a shit whether I live or die.”

This was met by hearty laughter. My animist friend struggled to catch his breath and compose himself. “Your comment was unexpected, but that’s a really important thing to learn. No wonder you can leave yourself and see so much of the life there is. Even some animists never get this.”

I looked down and shook my head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t see where all this is going.”

“You see, there’s that part you lack. On one hand, you know it’s not about you, on the other, you want it all translated into your terms. Consider, for a moment how animals kill and eat other animals. Translated into human terms, this seems cruel to many humans. But it is a matter of scale. Think nothing of the war raging in our bodies at a microscopic level. Microbes kill and eat invaders constantly. But it keeps us alive, so if we think of it at all, we’re happy with it.

“Magnify the scale a million times and imagine yourself on the savannahs of Africa. The cheetah raids the nest of the mongoose for it’s young, the mongoose eats the lizard, the lizard eats the bird eggs, the bird eats the flies whose larvae might eventually consume the remains of the cheetah. A macabre ballet playing out for millions of years.

“While you see the life that is yourself, this other life form is practically invisible to you. You are aware of it at some level, but your thoughts do not coalesce it into a life with an identity of its own. Even as you talk to me, you see only vignettes of this larger life, one at a time. Its totality escapes you just as the microbes in your body are unaware of your existence”.

“Can we talk a about you for a minute? Are you part of some tribe, or cult, or something?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you even a real person?”

“Ummm, yes.”

“Where do you live?”

“Here”

“What do you eat? Do you even have to eat to survive?”

“Most definitely. As to what I eat, I eat everything.”

“So, you’re an omnivore?”

“Not exactly. See this root?” He bent over and yanked a plant out of the ground. “There is energy in this root. I eat the root (he gobbled it down) and now the energy is in me. Before it was in the root it was in centuries of other life, plant and animal, that died and became soil. So, I eat a plant, I eat an animal, it’s all the same to me. But I prefer to eat the plants. Animals eat plants, but they shit out lots of the good stuff, so I usually go for the plants. The total package.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “I never thought of it that way. Let me ask you another question.”

“Sure.”

“When you look at, say, a lizard, how do you know it’s a lizard, and not the lives of the insects it ate, or the plants the insects ate, or the nutrients the plant took from the soil?”

“Well, there’s more to a lizard than just the insects it eats, or the plants the insects eat. Also, a lizard is about the size and shape of a lizard and moves like a lizard.”

“So, you just see a lizard?

“The lizard and the insects, and the plants. The soil, rain, sun, it’s all there.”

“I would think that’s a lot to process.”

“It makes life more wonderful. Much easier, I think, than all the baggage your mind hauls around. But then, you don’t really deal with it, because it’s you. It’s all neatly confined in the package you call you. I’m surprised when I look at you and see all you carry around that is about you. But let me ask you a question.”

“Please.”

The man was gone and a 400-pound black bear appeared in his place. The bear growled, rose up on its hind legs then crashed his front paws onto the ground. ‘Threat display’ I assured myself as I struggled to clamp my sphincters shut. The bear circled around me, its hair raised along the length of its spine, ears pinned back. I remained motionless out of fear and tried not to look at it. It sat in front of me, and I began slowly walking away, backwards, looking up in the trees so it would not feel threatened by my gaze.

“You could have been food.” My attention riveted back to the spot the bear had sat. An ancient woman now sat on the rock, her face more creases than skin, with wispy, white hair that grabbed at the air all around her.

“Shit, I wish you wouldn’t do that. You scared the hell out of me.” At that, I half lowered, half collapsed to the ground.

The old woman’s eyes sparkled with laughter. “I didn’t do that one. You brought it on yourself. But no matter. You were teaching yourself a lesson.”

“I was?”

“Since you can see yourself, at least a little, as part of a bigger world where all things, one way or the other, become part of the life of something else, you were wondering about yourself as food for other living things. You are conflicted because you know you want to exempt yourself from that part of life. You want to live.”

“I’ve always known that. It’s hardly a lesson.

“Hush,” she said seeming annoyed. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You are wondering if all these other living things have the same desire to live, and fear of death that you have.

“It was crossing my mind before a bear started to attack me.”

She waived her hand in front of her face in a dismissive manner. “So, what do you think; do they?”

“I don’t know. I’m pretty sure we have no choice. Digested in the belly of a predator, or consumed by microbes, our fate is sealed.

The old woman drew in a long breath and let out a frustrated sigh. “I know you are bothered by your fate. Do all things have the same desire to live and fear of death as you?”

“Seeing as they all have defense mechanisms, I suppose they do.”

“My, my, my, you are so logical. And a biologist too! You know why things have defense mechanisms.”

“So they can keep on living.”

“Really. Billions of years of existence of the universe all happened so you could keep on living?”

“I’m not just talking about me.”

“Of course, you are. Not the point.”

Her persistent dismissal of everything I said was beginning to irk me. I was, however, thankful to be talking to what appeared as human and not a tyrannosaurus rex.

“Billions of years of evolution did happen, and I do want to keep on living, so yes,” I said. “Maybe in small part that explains my appearance in the universe.”

She smiled kindly for a moment, which I found reassuring.

“Feelings exist throughout life,” she said. They are not the sole possession of humans. For example, let’s get down on the ground and wait. Pick a spot and pay attention to it.

I lay on the ground, picking a spot where the foliage edged along the trail. We both waited. I glanced over at the woman and noticed she was now a shrew. I thought it rather remarkable that I didn’t find this remarkable in the least. Then I noticed I was also a shrew.

“Sh-h-h-h,” she said quietly.

A white grub appeared from beneath a stick. In a flash, I grabbed it with my claws and sank my teeth into it’s white, juicy pulp. The sensation was like nothing I had ever experienced. Excitement, joy, and a feeling of profound revelation as I realized what was happening at a quantum level. The turning of kinetic energy into potential energy and potential energy into kinetic energy, back and forth for billions of years in the past and for billions of years into the future.

“Whoa!” I shot upright, shaking, my eyes bulging. I spat out pieces grub. My animist friend and I were humans again.

“I bet you never felt that before.” The old woman said with a sly grin.

“What was in that grub? Some kind of hallucinogen?”

“Can you see, or at least imagine, how humans don’t have a monopoly on the things that define life?”

“OK. But my part of the life works different from those other parts. I — “

“You’re special?”

“Different,” I said with a touch of defiance. “I don’t think that tree over there, seeing an approaching lumberjack, feels what I felt being stalked by that bear.”

I felt a sudden vibration go through me. And then another. I looked down to see a tiny man striking me with an axe. I tried to kick it away with my leg, but my leg wouldn’t move. Staring at my feet, I soon realized they were roots, and the man, normal sized, only appeared small from hundreds of feet up in the forest canopy. At first, he was only a minor annoyance. What could a little speck like that do to me, a mighty tree? But as he continued without relent, I heard creeks and groans from inside my trunk. My branches and leaves began to shake. A prolonged crescendoing moan followed by a crash left me with a new view of the world. Where I once looked down, I now looked up and saw the gap in the forest canopy where I had stood for generations. But still, I was not afraid. All my branches and leaves looked green and alive, but I could sense water and nutrients were no longer flowing through my xylem and phloem layers. I was dying. But I did not experience the terror I felt with the bear. I was simply waiting for the bugs and rain to soften my wood and for a seed brought by the wind to come and rest in the knurls of my bark and begin life again. ‘This isn’t so bad I thought’.

But none of that happened. Instead, I was stripped of my branches, sawed into sections and loaded on a truck. What followed over the next few weeks was blurry, but I finally came to rest in the form of a magazine. I took inventory of my surroundings. Thanks, I suppose, to my former existence as a human in civilization, I could make out where I was. I seemed to be resting on a table, the remains of one my woodland kin, next to what must have been an infusion of beans — picked, roasted, ground up and boiled in hot water in a coffee pot. Before I knew it, I was being lifted and paged through by a portly old gentleman, dressed in fine business apparel.

“I say, Master Magazine. Quite a journey you’ve had.”

A British aristocrat. I must be in hell, I thought. I wanted to strangle him, or at least inflict a paper cut.

“There, there. None of that nonsense,” he said picking up my thoughts. “I’m here to help you. You must realize by now what a pile all this animist nonsense is. Your tree-hugging friends in the forest did you no favors. Quite lucky, really, that you ended up here.”

Picking up on his hilted speech, I said “I think the nonsense is coming from you.”

“We’ll just see about that. You’ve been a tree and you saw you felt no fear at dying. In fact, you’re quite alive and talking to me, in a sense.”

“Are you an animist too?”

“Well, of a different sort. You see, I’m the anima of civilization. I’m the collective being that civilized people form. I guess in animist terms, you could say I’m the original evil spirit. Allow me to introduce myself. Lord Huffingbutt, at your service. If you need anything, just ask and I’ll have my butler get it for you.”

“You’re killing yourself, and the rest of the planet too,” I said, sidestepping the all pleasantries.

“What can I say. What we’ve made is just too good to not take advantage of while we can. You see, civilization is the only life form that matters now. Long ago we began to “otherize” animals, deciding they were of little consequence in our grand scheme. This was necessary to the growth of civilization. Lord knows it wasn’t easy, everybody putting nature on equal footing with humans. Over the years, more and more non-human life become categorized as Other. Now, only a few are spared this fate. Most noticeably dogs, although why they were chosen is a mystery to me. I rather thought the octopus would have made a much more intelligent companion. But there you have it. Like so many widgets in a factory, everything is now a consumable resource. Why, we even have the high priests of modern society to back us up. No scientist would dare suggest animals or plants have feelings. It would be blasphemy! They’d be the laughing stock of their professions. Their funding would be cut.”

“Quite sure of yourself, aren’t you?” I said.

“All the kingdoms, or should I say, slavedoms of life are mine to make a profit off to the best of my God Given abilities.” He sat back, taking a sip from his coffee, signaling that as far as he was concerned, there was nothing further to be said.

“You’re insane. It doesn’t bother you that two generations from now, humans will be going extinct from your excess?”

“Two generations, a thousand. What difference does it make? We live in the here and now. “The future is the future’s problem. They’ll deal with it or they won’t. Not our place to say.”

“And if they don’t? Humans go extinct.”

“Quite right, ol’ boy.”

“Ol’ boy?” I thought I was a magazine. I looked around and saw my human corporeal self again. I looked up at the aristocrat, but all I saw was forest and the animist’s rock. Seated upon it now was the young woman.

“That was weird,” I said.

“So, does the tree feel fear?” she said.

“Not fear like I know, but it is aware.”

“Why do you think it doesn’t feel fear?”

“It has no nervous system?”

“An aptly named system,” she said with a thoughtful expression. “Nervous systems make us nervous. But they don’t make us sentient.”

“I see,” I said, but wasn’t sure I did.

“Did you sense it wished for life?” she asked.

“I got that impression.”

“And the anima of civilized beings as represented by the British aristocrat?”

“A self-centered existence with little concern for the future.”

“But as a product of civilization yourself, you share many of the same attributes.”

“True,” I conceded. “But at least I have conflict. Lord Huffingbutt had none, no sense of when to stop.”

“As you should. Civilization is sucking the life from our planet to support itself. In the grand scheme of things, it will be a blink of the eye. A mutation that had its day in the sun, then died when it drank all the water in its tidal pool. If humans are to survive much longer on this planet, we must answer the question, how should we live? How are humans supposed to live so this doesn’t happen?”

“I’m happy with my simple hiking lifestyle. Perhaps we should all live as simply as possible.”

“No argument there. But it still leaves many issues unresolved.

“For example?”

“Among the more concerned people of your age, there is debate as to whether it’s OK to kill other sentient beings as food. Is it?” the young woman animist asked me.

“Since, as a sentient being, I would not want to be killed, I guess not.”

“But what will you eat?”

“Plants?” I knew where this was going.

“But your tree-self was aware, therefore sentient. Something has to die for you to live. Things have to die for things to live.”

“Is there no other way?” I asked.

I was once again speaking to the ancient women. After my experience turning into a magazine with her, I was more than a little concerned what my fate might be next.

“There is no other way.” the old woman said. “There was, but that as a long, long time ago.”

“And how do you know that?” I challenged.

“I remember.”

Being in no position to argue, I said “Tell me more.”

“Did you ever wonder when feeding first began? When this whole life eating life business started? For a long time, it was just simple one celled things, living off sunlight or absorbing minerals from sulfur vents. A nifty chemistry experiment and no moral dilemmas. But about 750 million years ago, feeding first appeared on earth. These were protozoa and sponges. Pretty passive critters, actually. They just sat in the ocean, waiting for some other life, living or dead, didn’t matter, to float by and get caught in them.

With feeding, amazing things began to happen. Some 540 million years ago, the start of what’s called the Cambrian era, things really began to take off. The number of species skyrocketed. At the beginning of this was the appearance of sea worms with large jaws to grab and kill prey. Nasty buggers, not big enough to hurt us though. Real tiny. Protoconodonts they call them. You can look it up.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“This wouldn’t be remarkable, except following the appearance of these worms, many more creatures began to show up. Creatures with teeth, horns, claws, and armor. All sorts of things to protect them from these worms. ‘Course, with all this new weaponry, they could do more than protect themselves from worms, they also went on the hunt themselves. The world’s first arms race was on. Turned the Cambrian period into an explosion of life.”

As she spoke I felt the warm Cambrian sea all around me, teeming with bizarre life forms large and small. “So, killing is good?” I asked.

The old woman smiled and looked me in the eye. “In the larger scheme of things, yes. Done the natural way, it actually increases biodiversity.”

“I’ll be dammed,” was my response.

“Probably, but it won’t be all your fault,” she said.

“Let me ask you this. Does life have rights?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What rights?”

“The right to be born, the right to live and the right to die. Actually, those things happen, right or not. But since they do, I think we can call them rights.”

“So, all plant and animal harvesting practiced by Lord Huffingbutt and his ilk is OK?

“No. Animals also have the right not to be born, raised and killed in civilization, or anything approximating it.”

“So, basically, animal husbandry, agriculture — “

“Not good. When nature kills, it results in a vibrant, diverse biosphere. When Civilization does it, the number of species plummets. Life on earth, as we are seeing, withers and dims. Humans have those same rights. It is unfortunate that civilized humans can’t see how their subservience to their civilization makes them domesticated animals for slaughter.”

A small change of light came over the woods. The brilliant highlights and deep shadows stole away and with them the animist also faded. The forest was silent and the temperature dropped. I waited for one of my animist friends to appear on the rock and pick up the thread of the conversation, but I was alone. Questions I wished I’d asked raced through my mind, about the spirits of rocks and places, about humans and fire, life and death. Glancing in the direction of the animist rock, it was gone also. I could have stood there for hours reflecting on my experience but it would be dark soon and I needed to hike ahead for water before making camp.

Passing the spot where the animist rock had been, I saw a question mark written in the dirt. I remembered the small girl from earlier drawing in the dirt with her toe. I pondered the meaning of this, remaining after all that had happened. “OK, animist rock. What is your question for me?”