How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

by Sy Montgomery

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Though I’ve been blessed with some splendid classroom teachers—Mr. Clarkson, my high school journalism teacher, foremost among them—most of my teachers have been animals. What have animals taught me about life? How to be a good creature.

Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.

To begin to understand the life of any animal demands not only curiosity, not only skill, and not only intellect. I saw that I would also need to summon the bond I had forged with Molly. I would need to open not only my mind, but also my heart.

“He was a great big Buddha master. He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you. Even when life gives you slops.”

“Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

“Oh, but you do feel them,” he said gently. “What you are feeling when you miss them is not their absence. It’s their presence.”

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.

“The universe,” he’s reported to have said, “is alive, and has fire in it, and is full of gods.” Being friends with an octopus—whatever that friendship meant to her—has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom—and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.