Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.
Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
Instead of the animistic, mechanistic, or the mathematical universe, we see the genetic, organic, holistic universe.
Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.
Spanish is a poetic language, in particular the Spanish of Mexico which has a wonderful animistic attitude you might not see in the Spanish of the peninsula. I think it has to do with the indigenous way of looking at nature.