I was really late to the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up party, I only just read it – well listened to the audio-book. Though I never actually mastered the life-changing tidying-up part, I was fired up by the magic part.
For those of you who haven’t read the book, I will summarise it. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is written by Marie Kondo – a sort of cross between Martha Stewart and a Zen priestess cum self-help guru. It is based on the idea that one has an energetic relationship with all things. So it’s bad magic if you arrive home at the end of the day and do not empty your purse and put every back in its resting place, including the purse.
For animists, this is true. We have an energetic relationship with all things because ‘things’ have consciousness. There are likely as many definitions of animism as there are animists. Here is mine.
Animism, all things have consciousness because consciousness is an inseparable quality on a molecular level. The quality of consciousness may vary, and attention increases consciousness, and ignorance (as in the act of ignoring) depletes it. So a dollar store mug has less consciousness than a mug hand-crafted by an artisan. The Mona-Lisa has more energy than the painting I made myself and directly placed in the storage locker.
How I think this plays out in the real world is that though dollar-store mugs themselves have less animistic power, collectively they have more because more people give energy to ‘cheap’. Hence we are living in a world with more and more homogenised ‘cheap’ and less craftsmanship.
The Life-Changing Magic idea is that when we pay attention to the ‘things’ in our life, and either give them the respect they deserve or let them go to their next story. By doing so, we eventually create for ourselves an environment in which we are living in harmony with the energetic attachments of our ‘stuff’.
When we hoard, have meaningless clutter, or don’t take care of our things we have all kinds of energetic attachments that cause grief, guilt, shame, depression and apathy – the opposite of joy.
My mission is to restore animism to its rightful place – everywhere. This shift begins at home, for all of us who are on the frontlines of restoring passion, love, creativity, equality and kindness and recognizing universal consciousness in all things.
