Animism is the worldview that everything is alive, interconnected, and worthy of respect. Walking in nature with this perspective, you may feel the trees breathing with you, the stones holding memory, the stream carrying song, and even the ground beneath your feet pulsing with life. This is the feeling that inspired my latest AI Art Music video, Alive With Being.
When I walk in the forest, I often sense that I am not alone. The air itself seems to shimmer with presence, as if every leaf, bird, and ripple of water is aware of me, and I of it. This is the animist view of the world: that all things—plants, animals, rivers, mountains, even weather and places—carry spirit. It is not a metaphor but a lived experience, a way of perceiving the world as ensouled. In this view, humans are not separate or superior; we are one kind of person among many—animal persons, plant persons, stone persons. To walk with animist awareness is to walk in relationship, to feel the reciprocity of life in every step.
Different cultures have different ways of relating to that sense of aliveness. Cultures across the world have embraced animism as their foundational worldview. Indigenous peoples of Siberia and Mongolia, the Buryat and Turkic traditions, many Native American nations, Aboriginal Australians, and communities throughout Africa and the Amazon basin all hold animistic cosmologies. I don’t have any of those in my heritage, and I don’t want to adopt any ‘ism’ as a self description, but I can feel the aliveness of the forest in which I live, and in the AI art music video below, I express that kind of magical forest experience using a poem I wrote, which I then turned into a song by singing my own tune into #Suno AI music generator.
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LYRICS
I walked into the forest one day
And felt someone say, ‘G’day,’
But when I looked around
No one could be found
I was on my own
No human lurked beneath the trees
No man or woman that I could see
But I felt a gaze upon me there
A gaze that laid my soul quite bare
Yet I was on my own
Where was this being I felt so clear?
A being that simply wasn’t there
Only trees and plants stood all around
No other human shared this ground
yet someone was watching me
Not just one, but many eyes
Fixed on me, I realised
Eyes unseen but clearly felt
My sense of reality began to melt
I was not alone
Each plant, each rock, each fallen leaf
the very ground beneath my feet,
Each tree, majestic or very small
Lived both as one and as all
The world was alive with being
Animate or not, despite our not seeing
The whole of existence is alive with being
This realisation is extraordinarily freeing
Yes, the whole of existence is alive with being
The whole of existence is alive with being
The whole of existence is alive with being
Have you ever felt eyes on you when you walk in the forest?
