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January 4 - January 9, 2018
IF ANYTHING COULD SOOTHE MY SOUL, IT would be an animal. I always feel better in the company of animals; I am drawn to them so strongly it leaves some people alarmed.
FINDING CHRISTOPHER ALIVE THAT MORNING REMINDED ME OF the comforting fact that the worst thing doesn’t always happen.
Certain psychologists explain away the loving relationships between people and animals in terms of thwarted parenthood. These psychologists have identified a group of physical traits, such as the flat face and big eyes of pug dogs, that they call “baby releasers,” and claim the sight of these activate a torrent of misplaced maternal feelings toward animals. This suggests that any friendship between a human and an animal is really just some kind of wiring mistake, a person’s thwarted yearning for a human infant—a simpleminded view that, in my opinion, insults mothers, diminishes animals, and
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Babies would have been far more appealing to me if they had fur, like most normal mammals. Other mammals whose young are this naked wisely tuck their babies into holes, or if they happen to be marsupials such as possums or kangaroos, keep them hidden in a pouch, until they are cute and furry enough for public viewing.
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS WITH PREDATORS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers.
But what is wholeness? How do we come to recognize it, and to realize when it is lost? I know how wholeness feels.
Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together. And for that, I must thank equally the foxes and the weasels, the tigers and the crocodiles. For the peace of the barnyard, I am grateful to the dangers and jaws of the jungle. For the belonging that is home, I can thank, in part, the exile that is travel. Though they seem like opposites, they are more like twins—two halves of a whole.
