The minimalist cleaner upper guru Marie Kondo has encouraged people for years to connect with their clothes, books, furnishings and nick-nacks to make sure you get a charge out of them, and if not, kindly thanking your stuff for its service before giving it away or discarding it. Silly, you might say.
Milana Perepyolkina, author of Gypsy Energy Secrets, calls the world alive. She writes, “We experience that each thing has a soul,” including “plants, trees and even stones,” and she treats her pillow with love and respect because it is her key to sweet dreams.
As a pet owner you probably agree that your dog, cat or horse has a soul. Although not so sure about the goldfish, right? And we can probably agree that trees and plants are alive. After that you may need to stretch your mind, and the rest is up for reflection, philosophy, speculation, cosmology, and individual belief.
Author and founder of the Perelandra Center for Nature Research, Machaelle Small Wright, communicates with flower divas to create her flower essences, and nature and spirit entities for a cocreative healing relationship with nature.
A feng shui consultant told me years ago to connect with my house in a deeper way. With things it’s perhaps less that they are truly ensouled than that they absorb our personal energy, which is why for example they recommend smudging an antique piece of furniture or a second-hand clothing item with sage before bringing it into your life.
Philosophy has all sorts of fancy names for an alive world, like hylozoism, panpsychism, or animism, the Gaia Theory (here a previous post), and more, depending on how far to take aliveness, ensoulment and nature intelligence. Soil, plants, rocks, and crystals all may seem more evidently alive one way or another, while inanimate objects, like your house, your pillow, or your clothes not so much.
Have you thought how far you’d be comfortable taking the idea of an alive world?