Nathan M. Hall > Quotes

“Think about how your body is your interface with the universe, how the universe has never experienced itself quite the way it has with your unique signature and assemblage of characteristics.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“If you’re not talking to the plants growing around you or the wild animals seen in your ecosystem, it’s time to begin.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Ancestors are typically thought of as the humans who came before us, our bloodline, or inherited bloodline. But consider that your life is a product of all evolution that led to you being here: the hominids, small furry mammals, reptiles, aquatic creatures, pools of algae, microbes—an uninterrupted line of reproduction and evolution that started with some amino acids in a pool of water and a strike of lightning. Even if you’re an ardent atheist, when you look through the billions of years that have led to you, made of trillions of cells and about 8.5 octillion atoms”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“The field theory of consciousness touches on this a bit and is worth reading more on if you’re interested in getting into some really egg-headed stuff but it states that every particle in the universe contains a spark of what we would call consciousness.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“For the purposes of this book, “art” is anything that allows you to disconnect from the logical world and get into a flow state. Flow states are defined as feeling mental readiness and alertness while being deeply involved in a task that generates either excitement or enjoyment in a person. You’re absorbed in what you’re doing but don’t feel as though you’re exerting any energy. It’s as if you’ve plugged into some universal well of positive creative energy that allows you to keep working on a task without distraction or anxiety, almost as if you’ve escaped from time itself. The term was coined in 1975 by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályia”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Our world is so geared around productivity and maximizing every moment that the simple act of sitting is quite nearly a magickal act of its own. Stop trying to be the person out there killing it, and start reclaiming your humanity.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Göbekli Tepe is one such place where we can see the ancient influence of animism. Located in present day eastern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe was, as best as we can discern, an ancient ceremonial site, indeed one of the oldest ever discovered.2 It’s filled with towering statues of animals and is constructed in alignment with certain stellar markers indicating a culture that in all likelihood was transitioning from hunter/gatherer toward urbanization, bringing the spirits of animals, the land, and the sky with them.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Your brain is simply a part of the overall system; at times, it is a conductor of a symphony but not the composer. There’s plenty of science to indicate that the gastrointestinal tract (called the enteric nervous system) populated with billions of bacteria have just as much an influence on emotions and decision making as our brain. It’s even been referred to as our second brain.15 What’s even stranger to ponder is that those bacteria are part of our biology without being created by our body. They play an essential role in our health, behavior and functioning as an organism and our bodies simply couldn’t live without them.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“There’s much to be said about the speed of information transfer. A generation ago, we would hear about world events via television, before that, radio and prior to that, newsprint on paper. The rapidity and volume of news stories a person can be exposed to in an hour dwarfs what the average newspaper reader could consume in a full sitting and reading the daily press. Our brains aren’t designed to handle or process this much information, something that is fairly obvious when we step back and see that our peers, parents, and even cities and nations are behaving quite a bit more erratically than even a dozen years ago. Time as a concept is becoming compressed as we witness the full spectacle of human tragedy unfold before us in real time.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“When everything is conscious, it really does change your relationship with everything else. This is where we start getting into personhood and subjectivity as the default mode rather than materialist objectivity where the universe is simply filled with objects that can be manipulated. And now we’ve gotten into how time, space and consciousness are all inseparable. Whoops! This is what happens when you ask too many why questions in a witchcraft setting! You start out with some statues and a candle and the next thing you know, field theory!”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“So get out—meet your neighbors and let them know that it’s a worthy cause to stop indiscriminately killing insects, plants, and the wide variety of beings you encounter because they are, in fact, beings.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“The forest is less a dense accumulation of vegetation and more a collection of eyes upon eyes, ears upon ears.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Especially today in the information overload we experience through our phones, it’s easy to come away from our day feeling like it was jam-packed full and that we can never unplug. The reality is that no one does unplug anymore. While we’re all out there hustling to earn money, we’re also gorging our brains on the emptiness of social media, celebrities, and whatever outrage we are personally attuned to. It is costing all of us our lives because we are in a constant state of being plugged in.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Animism is the act of creating relationships with beings who aren’t human. You are not a machine interacting with dumb objects in a lifeless world—you are a spark of divinity experiencing itself, and at the end of your life you will have all the materials that make up your self-move and manifest in new ways.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Generally, in suburban areas, you’re likely to find the ubiquitous little brown mushrooms, puffballs, shelf mushrooms (which look like shelves on tree trunks,) slime molds, or some variety of what is largely called a toadstool”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Say you have a passion, any passion in the world that you do purely for the love of it—painting or drag racing or cheese making. How many times have you heard from someone, “oh, you could make money doing that? Why don’t you sell it?” How many times have you yourself followed that same line of thinking? The moment you start to take a little bit of joy in anything, you think, “How can I turn this into a job?” This line of questioning is the inescapable sickness we’re all party to, and one of the best things you can do is try to put a wall around it and protect the sanctity of your own joy with your life. To do things just for the simple pleasure of it is courageous, challenging, and a thumb in the eye of the rapacious system we live in.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“For this reason, it’s so imperative to at least meet the beings who have been your neighbors all along. Try to make those friendships while you can—it could very well be the difference between saving a species, its individuals, and its oversoul.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“To our modern minds, we hear “cave art” and think cavemen, who, thanks to some early bad science and pop culture, became the epitome of the crude, unthinking dullard smashing rocks together and senselessly assaulting their compatriots. What needs to be remembered about these people—if there are any assumptions we can make about a people who lived so incredibly long ago—is the bravery and spark of divinity in creating paints that have lasted scores of millennia and the attempt to use figurative expression to capture what their world was like and what it meant to them.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“I used to loathe spiders, something I learned from my mother’s arachnophobia. I was never scared of them as she is; I just found them creepy and gross. Then I took the time to observe them in their webs, watch their precision and their baffling ability to plan and weave such perfectly symmetrical patterns. I had never seen them for who they were and never bothered to understand them as beings in this universe who are just as important and deserving of a spot in the sunlight as me. I had a moment of feeling love as I watched the banana spiders living their lives, a feeling that you’ll know when you step outside your prejudices about the world and engage it with the wonder of a child.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“I won’t rehash the entire argument, but it’s from this characteristic of matter that beingness arises. If everything you encounter has its own consciousness, even if it presents itself in an incomprehensible way to your senses, it still is a being and something with which you are capable of making real connections.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“For your mind to get into a state that allows for creative thought, you must feed it with … nothing. Your brain appreciates the challenge of lacking stimulus and begins inventing its own things to occupy itself.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Your atoms have been shared with other people, magma, kangaroos, bacteria and probably a couple popes which all resulted from an exploding star.25 How anyone manages not to have their brains explode when thinking about it is probably a survival mechanism that evolved when early hominids came down from the trees, looked around at everything, and uttered those first, famous words: “holy fuuu—” before they fell over dead.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the overall organism of fungi, which have an entire underground web of mycelium which can sometimes stretch for miles and interact and communicate with plant and animal life across the expanse of their bodies.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“To quote Discworld Almanak by Terry Pratchett: “We can assure our readers, whom we wish to preserve, that there are only two facts to bear in mind when selecting fungi: ALL FUNGI ARE EDIBLE. SOME FUNGI ARE NOT EDIBLE MORE THAN ONCE.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“From sea to mountain to prairie and desert, we spread our mycelial threads of connection. We send energy and connection and receive it in return. We become wild things that walk with poise and purpose. We grow and are nourished by our partnerships with the living land and reverberate change where we are to shift the story of humanity because we are the storytellers and the thread of the story is ours to control now.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Gods aren’t archetypes but they’re also not not archetypes. When we begin to escape dualism, previously contradictory things begin to take form simultaneously.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft

“Every time you light a candle, you call back to those earliest days—perhaps this is why we are still transfixed by a fire when we’re near one. Staring into the embers and watching the flames flit about, we’re transported to those earliest days of comfort, food, and community sustained by fire. We cross the hedge into an early version of who we are as a species and discover that we’re not all that different, in spite of the passage of millennia.”
― Nathan M. Hall, Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft