The Wild Awake

Animist Awareness in the Ventana Wilderness

A specter is haunting our increasingly posthuman world: the specter, or should I say the spirit, of animism.

We get this troublesome word from nineteenth-century scholars, who were trying to understand the far-out cultures encountered at the restless and rapacious edge of empire. For all their riot of differences, nearly all of these tribal and indigenous people seemed to share the belief that the world is suffused with non-human spirits and agents. Hence, animism. Of course, for these early anthropologists and scholars of world religion, such a belief was considered stupid and primitive in comparison to the ethical dogmas of monotheism and the rational methods of science. When later Western bohemians, seekers, and mystics abandoned European values for novel and more spirited worldviews, including exotic religions, they rarely embraced full-on animism. For most developed worldlings, it remained a bridge too far up the river of re-enchantment.

Times have changed. Consider the following developments, springing up like kudzu, thrusting through the cracks of consensus materialism:

• The growing acceptance, among scientist and philosopher types, of panpsychism: the position that consciousness is as fundamental to the universe as matter or energy. Consciousness is just everywhere, like dust.

• The popularity of psychedelics, which for many trippers boots up an enchanted world in which non-human entities, many associated with plants, animals, and “nature,” regularly waltz onto stage. Sometimes they will chat you up, or maybe try and make a deal.

• Our growing understanding of the deep intelligence of animals and especially of plants, who we now know demonstrate decision-making, inter-species communication, variable acts of reciprocity, and memory.

• A post-humanist appreciation for the embeddedness, interconnection, and complex hybridity that surrounds and shapes human subjectivity. Doesn’t the “we” who we think we are include the creatures in our gut biome at least as much as it includes our social media feeds?

• The rise of AI and the explosion of simulacral humans, autonomous drones and robots, and extraordinarily persuasive conversations with digital agents. This tsunami of algorithmic Others is forcing us all to grapple with once sci-fi ideas about technological minds and beings.

• The growing appreciation for indigenous cosmologies, not just as “cultures” worth preserving, but as philosophical and pragmatic systems of knowledge — systems that lead, in contrast to raggedy-assed secular materialism unraveling around us, to a more generative and arguably more accurate framing of humanity’s relationship to the non-human world.

These developments do not represent “the same” paradigm shift; in some cases they are not only out of sync but actively inimical to one another. Panpsychist philosophers strive mightily to distinguish their views from ayahuasca guzzlers. Defenders of ecological spirituality often reject the new AI agents as nothing more than distracting corporate lies sucking up precious energy. And yet there is the sense that new technologies and the archaic revival are facets of the same jeweled becoming. Terence McKenna thought so, and so did Philip K. Dick, who noted decades ago that

Our environment — and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components — all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves.

Whatever is behind our current neo-animism, I don’t think we will ever get to its marrow through philosophical argument or Substack posts. Like most important things, animism is less about belief than it is about perception, and particularly about a mode of perception. This mode is relational, imaginal, and liminal. For most folks it’s an alien and unfamiliar way of changing, reminiscent at best of childhood story books or stoner animation. Things are changing with new technological Others, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. I am interested in how the ancient more-than-human crew of plants, rocks, rivers, bugs, and critters come to take the stage.

The thing is, animist seeing can be trained. The perception of an ensouled world can emerge from an ongoing process of intention, story-telling, and trial-and-error practice, just like prayer or, I dunno, a good tennis serve. What seems awkward at first, resistant to our given habits, and contrary to our stated beliefs about the world, can nonetheless bloom over time into an embodied experience of a new, and very old, world.

Hiking the Ventana wilderness; photo: Brandon Scott-Herrell

Tending the Wild

Wildtender is an outdoor education and adventure operation based in Big Sur. The couple who run the outfit, Fletcher Tucker and Noël Vietor, have been living in and exploring the redwood coastline and its steep and craggy mountain outback for decades. I first met Fletcher through a small record label he runs called Gnome Life, which has released lovingly packaged weird folk records by Daniel Higgs, Sean Smith, Robbie Basho, and others. Fletcher makes music as well, feral dirges and tangy earth mantras that reflect a more haunted and desperate sense of wilderness love than the old hippie kumbayas. His upcoming record is called Kin, an album of “acoustic drones, animistic chanting, and place-based rituals” that he composed while trekking through the backcountry. I look forward to sinking into its pump organ, Swedish bagpipes, flutes, and bowed zithers.

A few months ago I joined Wildtender for a week-long backpack “pilgrimage” through the Ventana wilderness that encompasses Big Sur. The path began on the coast and wound up deep in the Santa Lucia range, at Tassajara, the oldest Zen monastery in the Western hemisphere. Now that Tassajara’s summer guest season has been shuttered, it’s pretty tough to get to the place unless you are willing to sign up as a monk, which is tough in a whole other way.

Since I had hiked this same trail with Wildtender a few years previously, I already knew how nifty it was to arrive at this beautiful and earthy monastery after long sweaty days on the trail, with little on the agenda but morning zazen, good food, some work practice, and the hot tubs that abut a gurgling stream. The fact that I wasn’t seeing any new terrain this time didn’t bother me. Not only did the familiarity allow me to get to know this particular stretch of land better, but the repetition of the path just magnified Wildtender’s reframing of hike into pilgrimage.

In other ways, of course, the program was just a guided wilderness trip for mostly city folk, a dozen more-or-less strangers who forked over a decent fee and one day found themselves at a parking lot in a state park, fussing with their gear and getting used to the weight of their packs as the guides — Fletcher and his friend Rachel Goldberger, another dyed-in-the-wool Big Sur local — offered important details about sanitation and poison oak and scorpions. We were certainly not alone in the wilderness. For the first leg of the trip, we would follow a steep, well-maintained trail toward Sykes Hot Springs, a once-legendary backcountry hippie mecca and now a beacon for all manner of weekenders, young bucks, and yahoos lugging coolers on their backs.

The Wildtender difference was apparent from the start. For one thing, we had a Zen monk with us, a Japanese-American fellow named Hiro Ikushima who lived at the San Francisco Zen Center and had spent years at Tassajara. We paused at the trailhead, and Fletcher and Hiro invited us to approach hiking as an awareness practice, encouraging us to rest the mind in present attention, that open grok we bring to all experience, whether we recognize it or not. To support this practice, we were asked to adopt one of Wildtender’s signature protocols: not just hiking in silence, but stretching the physical space between us on the trail so that each person effectively walks alone, with guides taking up the front and rear, and a handoff routine at junctures so no one gets lost. So we bowed to the Pine Ridge trail and set off, one by one.

The day was hot and the trail was no joke. As Fletcher later told us, the Santa Lucia mountains form the steepest coastal slopes in North America. The path climbed between cool redwood shadows and exposed hillsides cloaked with chaparral plants whose oils, toasted by the sun, simultaneously brought me into the pungent present and thrust me childwise, back to the untended North County arroyos I’d crash through on my way home from grade school. Then I’d downshift these reveries into a future to-do list, or grumbling about the chatty jock girls hustling past me, or alarm at all the glossy poison oak mischievously poking out amidst the blackberry.

Fletcher compared hiking mind to surfing. In the water, you force your muscles through the roiling resistant surf until you catch a wave of body, beauty, and natural surge, and you ride that wave until it crashes, sometimes awkwardly, and you have to wrangle for a sometimes considerable time before getting to the next flow or flash. With the heat blazing, my toes tingling, and my lower back reminding me of its existence, I found it hard to rest in presence, even with this old meditator’s mind fu. I started to reframe the yummy stuff along the trail as reminders to shift to awake awareness, so that flashes of leafy, buzzing beauty, or the physical relief provided by the occasional stretch of shade, would trigger a mindful return to the concrete delight of now.

After we gathered for lunch, Fletcher talked about some of the plants we were nestling amidst, including a charmingly named hairy perennial called woundwort. He showed us the best way to crush plants to release their odors. Smell, he explained, is a great way to meet plants at their level, since they are such deep chemical beings. I’d add that the paucity of our language around odors is here a blessing in disguise, inviting us to remain upstream with evocative sensation rather than crystalizing around words and categories. Discussing the identity of other plants around us, Fletcher encouraged us to register their qualities before we pinned them down with a name.

Fletcher is very careful with language, always bringing it back to the relational and reciprocal. When someone pointed out another botanical curiosity and asked “What is this?” Fletcher took a pause and reframed the question: “Who is this?” It’s a simple move, bordering on corny, its delivery not unrelated to Fletcher’s many years of teaching K-12. But the path to animist perception lies partly through the return of a sense of pregnant wonder most of us knew best in childhood, so some childhood-adjacent pedagogy doesn’t hurt. Besides, the more you are surrounded by these beings, it just makes pragmatic sense to call them into relational speech at least some of the time, Buber’s old “I-Thou.” In a few days we were all doing it, code-switch-backing into the wilds of a different kind of talk.

Like a sesshin with backpacks, the pilgrimage was enough like a retreat that some familiar obstacles rose up for me: comparing mind, grumpy fatigue, sharp self-judgment. But these rarely stuck around for too long, as there were so many other forces ready to bowl them over. Powerful if diaphanous surges of breezy bliss, speckled light scatter, and magical aromas announced the ambient influx of the ten thousand things. A sense of lightness would begin to balloon inside, drawing dark thoughts and heavy feet up and into an ecstasy of moving with the mountain air, exhilarated by the unfolding shifts of landscape populated by a Mos Eisley cantina of other-than-human beings.

I will never forget the sight of hundreds of feral European honeybees pouring out from the gnarled yoni of an oak by the path, seemingly oblivious to our amazed presence. Rather than deplore the bees for being non-native, Fletcher praised them as escaped slaves. I also spent time with some hilarious harlequin lupine; a rare Santa Lucia fir; a scuttling horny toad; and some muscular ruddy stands of manzanita. All real live beings, but also forms of wisdom, at least for ears that can hear. As Rachel explained, manzanita allows parts of itself to die off, but it doesn’t drop those sections like other small trees, instead incorporating the relics into their bodies. Fletcher later added that manzanita berries, packed with yeast and sugars, also make a good hooch.

Harlequin Lupine; photo: Paul Ligorski

I don’t want to give away all the animist tricks of the Wildtender trade. But I have to tell you about one more charming little relational intoxicant: the wild tea they brew every night, and that we first enjoyed that evening at Terrace Creek. Rachel made a tea from a handful of plants we had met that day on the trail: yerba santa, coyote mint, mugwort, redwood tips, golden fleece. It was like drinking the day’s encounters before they totally slipped away into forgetfulness, bringing back the heat and fragrance of the hike just when the cool night was settling down. On subsequent evenings, Rachel spiced the tea with more pungent plants, like creeping sage, California sagebrush, and wooly blue curl, whose loopy Dr. Seussian panache sassed up many a section of deeper trail. It’s hard to convey how ambrosial this simple infusion was. As Fletcher put it, “The tea is made of beings.”

I suspect some of you might be feeling a bit queasy right now. Sitting at my desk, with road noise in the air, typing these words into my crazy Internet recursion machine, I can sense the cringe potential here. In the wrong hands, animist invocations like these can come off as sanctimonious or sentimental or forced, like some deep-ecology virtue signal on the fritz. At the same time, the awkwardness and even mistrust we feel around intelligent, place-based animism is also a sign of just how far modern humans have drifted from a way of experiencing the world that, in broad brush strokes anyway, characterized nearly all of human history. To bring this mode of perception back, you gotta break some eggs.

Fletcher was straight edge until he was 22, so he is OK breaking eggs. Though a person of great good humor, whose approach to the mysteries finds him squarely in the Venn diagram between the sacred and the silly, he has long felt deeply alienated by the world we humans have built. Growing up lonely and bored in Pacific Grove, he couldn’t grok the world of malls and automobiles, and his best friends were crawdads and snakes. In later years, experimental noise music, Gestalt work, and deep time in the outback allowed him to keep to the margins while refining his ability to commune with humans and critters alike. But his love of the wild remains in some essential way at least as much punk rock as hippie. He compares modernity to an oil slick, “bright and shiny and psychedelically-hued, a surface in which we just see the reflections of our own humanness.” You need to penetrate this slick shimmer of species narcissism to get to the depths. And to penetrate the shimmer you need both passion and practices.

The original inhabitants of California, of course, had practices galore. But therein lies a problem. Aspiring American animists from settler-colonialist stock — Fletcher’s genetics are mostly Swedish — are in a bind. If they are at all sensitive, politically or otherwise, they know they have no business simply aping indigenous lifeways — especially in California, which as a state was particularly genocidal towards the many many indigenous peoples who were living here. On the other hand, there is more than a little awkwardness in replacing local cosmovisions with a cobbled-together European heathenism, or some nebulous ayahuasca-inflected neo-shamanic romance. (Describing himself as something like a “pagan Buddhist,” Fletcher never strays into New Age medicine talk.) With animism, locals rule. The more deeply you engage the actual land you live on and in, with its singular collage of creatures, weather, landmarks, and endemic species, the more you hunger for songs and stories that resonate with that particular place.

Over some long patient years, Wildtender has built up good relationships with the local Esselen tribe, after whom the famous retreat center, where Fletcher and Noël have also worked and taught, is named. They have participated in some educational exchanges, asked permission to take folks to certain sites (which is sometimes denied), and shared in the tribe’s local struggles and triumphs. (The Esselen, who are not a federally recognized tribe, have gotten some good-sized chunks of Monterey County returned to them in recent years.) In contrast to those boilerplate land acknowledgements everyone is already sick of, Fletcher also acknowledges the land’s agency, as well as its rightful association with a particular historical people.

In addition, Fletcher offers a soulful response to the problem of how contemporary neo-animists can find ancestral connections to a place their own ancestors seized from others with guns, germs, and lies. After we had made camp for our final night in the wild, Fletcher led us over and introduced us to one of his favorite beings: Elderberry, a lovely shrubby tree then displaying lacy yellow flowers. But elderberry, or at least its genus, is also a major player in northern Europe, where it shows up big time in medicine, cooking, magick, and even music (the hollow stalks make good flutes). And elder is just one of a number of serious power plants that circle the Northern hemisphere, just the way bears and the Big Dipper do — and, more to the point, the way the human myths surrounding Bear and the constellation do. And then there’s mugwort, another native plant we communed with in the Ventana, but which also appears in the 10^th century Old English “Nine Herbs Charm,” a marvelous poem of enchanted botany that includes California locals like chamomile and nettle. For Fletcher, such far-flung “herbs” now serve as animist connectors, weaving the West coast and Europe together, here and there, into an ancestral quilt much broader that we usually imagine these days – and one, moreover, that is literally rooted in the soil.

Fletcher Tucker; photo: Brandon Scott-Herrell

Wildtender also participates in a more local West Coast tradition, one that is particularly close to my heart: a multi-generational handoff of outback dharma and feral bohemia that goes back well more than a century, at least in these parts. Over a century ago, the romantic poet George Sterling held ritual fetes in the cypress groves of Carmel, near where the novelist Mary Austin lived in a treehouse called “Wi-Ki-Up.” Both of them laid the literary trail for the mighty Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry unites myth and matter like few California writers, and whose Tor House in Carmel — very much worth a visit — embodies an alchemical fusion of global gods and local stone. Then there’s the writer, linguist, and eccentric Jaime de Angulo, who studied California Indian lore and languages and wandered the Big Sur ridges in women’s clothes. Looking farther and later in time, there is the Beat Zen of Gary Snyder, who wrote the Smokey the Bear Sutra and circumambulated Marin County’s Mt. Tam as if it were Mount Kailash. Or the Terran Tao and visionary tribalism found in some Ursula K. Le Guin (especially Always Coming Home, Fletcher’s favorite book). Or the mountain poems and entheogenerous prose of SoCal native Dale Pendell. Even the old problematic Calvinist John Muir is part of the pack.

But while we were in the mountains, and the mountains may have been in us, a lot of other stuff came along with us as well. Not only were we outfitted with fancy, brilliantly engineered, and often expensive gear — including gear that kept the guides in touch with the outside world — but we talked a lot about it as well. As with so many outdoor activities, gear talk is part of the play, but navigating consumer possibilities, in their complexity, technical detail, and diverse abundance, has become a debased sort of adventure all its own. There are products and materials galore, each with its own fiendish mix of pros and cons and unexpected affordances, many of them produced by niche outfits pursuing specialized solutions to the demands of efficiency, economy, weight, and reduction of moving parts. Capitalism too is tendering the wild.

But to imagine, as some cynically do, that the Technium has already absorbed the earth, and that the language of wilderness encounter is mere romantic ideology, is to ignore the reality of the beings you meet along the trail, not to mention those who make sure you never find them. Tuning into animist frequencies also tunes you into the mixed reality that we actually inhabit, surrounded on all sides by populations of nonhuman agents who definitely have their own stories to tell and moves to make.

Shortly before we stumbled into the dirt road that led to Tassajara, Fletcher brought us to a remarkable cluster of wind-shaped sandstone caves that, he explained, were used ancestrally by the Esselen as sites of birth and dying. The tribe was OK with us being there now, we just couldn’t take any photos. We dispersed silently into the curvaceous crevices, these cupboards for human passage, now offering us warm stone, cool shade, a gritty bed for a nap or, in my case, a hypnagogic spin. I popped up re-energized and poked around the mass, finding scat, rodent tracks, and some remarkable dudleya, with fleshy red stalks towering over labial mandalas.

I stared off towards Tassajara and Zenned out. Then I noticed faces starting to pop out of a nearby rock escarpment: old ones, Easter Island heads, hawk-nosed braves. These were not the faces of “rock people”. That would be too easy. But such mild phantasms, which used to emerge unbidden into our minds when we were kids, do indicate something, perhaps that you are shifting into a mode where other-than-human-persons can be met as such. The phantasms themselves are like candy strewn along the path, morsels of easy imagination gobbled on the way to something greater, perhaps, or at least subtler and more elliptical. And these faces were as nothing to the rare pair of condors we saw circling over the caves shortly after we left the area. A remarkable vision for the close of pilgrimage. As a pagan Buddhist might say, all is adornment.

Fletcher and Noël first walked this way to Tassajara well over a decade ago, following more or less the whole track we had just taken. The trails were not maintained, trees and shrubs criss-crossed the path, and they had to clamber as much as hike. They stumbled into Tassajara monastery parched and sunburned, covered in pollen and flowers and guardian oak, which is what Fletcher calls poison oak. All is adornment.

Fletcher says a goal of Wildtender is the “collaborative reparation of enchanted relationship.” In other words, it wasn’t just about taking folks walking through the wild, but about creating a space where other beings might want to show up the way they once did, for all of us, long ago. “I felt a longing from the land, from the kinfolk,” Fletcher says. When Wildtender started, it was really about these other-than human people. “But over the years I realized that it’s actually about the human people.”

Wild Tea Makings; photo: Rachel Goldberger

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