I have a question for my readers if anyone would like to share their thoughts. I’m assuming that most of my readers are some form of Pagan, Polytheist, witch, etc. Regardless, most of these traditions are animistic. I know that many of the Pagan bloggers I follow live this worldview, approaching the world as filled with many and varied spirits.
So when you know that everything is enspirited, and you have a relationship with the spirit of your house (not simply a household spirit like the Lares or Penates) or with a piece of land, How do you let go when you are forced to move? Do you say goodbye to your old house, or have a ritual to thank and honor it for sheltering and protecting you? It’s not likely that the new residents will do the same, after all (although with Marie Kondo stubly sneaking animism into middle-class American culture, who knows). How do you build a relationship with the next house, knowing that you’ll only be there for a year or two as well, and that eventually you’ll have to abandon that one?
This is one of the things about our culture I hate most: the impermanence. I long for rootedness and permanence and to have a lasting, decades-long relationship with the same plot of land, no matter how small. It hurts me to develop a relationship with the spirits around me and then be forced to leave them. I still remember a particular treespirit I talked to when I was a teenager and how much I missed her presence when my family moved. The lack of a rootedness and a family home is something that a lot of people in this culture, or at least my lower-class bracket of it, suffer from, and I think we are worse off spiritually for it. It does contribute to a sense of drifting and disconnection from the community around us (both flesh-and-blood and spirit community) and it contributes to a sense of isolation and even a lack of spiritual discernment – I cut myself off from connecting to plant spirits for YEARS because it hurt so much when my family moved and I lost my tree friend. Yes, I was a lonely teenager. You can call me crazy if you want, but if more people thought of trees as friends, maybe we would not have wrecked the planet like we have.
I’m sitting in the parking lot in my car (named VAN-nessa, by the way, because yes she is alive and our cars are our modern steeds), and I’m about to go into my “mundane” job, so I probably will not respond to any comments until lunchtime. But this is something that has been weighing on my mind as fall approaches, since I will have to be moving in all likelihood.
Temple of Athena the Savior 
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