1/6 “Animacy is an overdetermined word, but so is the idea of the Divine Feminine. The reason I have begun to shy away from the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine is their unfortunate identification with gender and, more importantly, their overidentification with humans and their myopic classifications generally. Animacy is plushier. Springier. More mosslike. It seems a soft spot to rest on while I try to understand and explain how very sentient the world is to me these days.
2/6 …The opposite of anthropocentrism is not any Divine Gender. The opposite of anthropocentrism is Everything. And what a tender beautiful thing it is to walk outside on a bright spring morning. Swathes of clementine light wash the pollen from the bricks of a nearby building. The robin's song is like the key turning in a lock. A handful of doves float down from the red-green cloud of a newly foliated maple tree.
The Everything is us, but it needs something in return. It needs us to melt our ideas of sentience as a purely human property. Or as a purely animal property. Or as a purely individual property. Relationships are sentient. Anima is the inhalation, carrying molecules and spores and pheromones into our bodies from the landscape. And then we exhale, sharing cells that have chung to our deepest cells, slept inside the pith of our blood. With every exhalation we decant ourselves back into the world.
5/6 …Divine Feminine just isn't big enough for all the relationships holding and constituting me these days. She thins my language into a one-to-one relationship. Even if she includes saints and "mother earth" and all women, it's easy to slip into the language of the singular. One mother. One relationship. One sacred gender expression. One temporality. One thinking animal. One species.
6/6 I'm not throwing her out, the Divine Feminine. I'm throwing her in. Melting her down. Mixing her into the messier, polytemporal animacy of everything I touch, change, and become.
The animate earth is a verb. An assemblage of verbs. A mycorrhizal system sewing together a whole forest. A shared breath. A midsummer celebration where everyone is invited.”
@toridas_ she’s fantastic! Her substack is excellent! Lots of podcast interviews too. I haven’t read her historical fiction book yet (The Madonna Secret) but she’s got a few things in the works that are due out next year I think
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