Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.
Instead of the animistic, mechanistic, or the mathematical universe, we see the genetic, organic, holistic universe.
Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.
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.
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.