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

by Sy Montgomery

Each individual is a marvel and perfect in his or her own way.

I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail.

“Elle est belle, le monstre.” She is beautiful, the monster.

But it was the moss that most enchanted me. The world seemed cloaked in its velvet, as if the clouds in these tall mountains had congealed into green and come alive. John Ruskin, a nineteenth-century British art critic, called moss—humble, soft, and ancient—“the first mercy of the Earth.” Mercy, then, was everywhere around me: it covered tree trunks, vines, the ground, forgiving every clumsy step and cushioning every fall.

These two animals carried within them the wild heart that beats inside all creatures—the wildness we honor in our breath and our blood, that wildness that keeps us on this spinning planet. Here in the cloud forest, I found again the wildness that keeps us sane and whole, the wild, delicious hunger for life.

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.

Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy.

But love never dies, and love always matters.

You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.