As If We Weren’t Animals Ourselves
It’s a tender, bucolic image, isn’t it?--imaginary though it likely is. The saint, when he was but a man, placing his hand upon the nursing sow, murmuring blessings of earth to her, until she remembers the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
The thing is, the sow probably didn’t need to remember. Even in that imagined moment with fourteen mouths suckling at her teats, I can’t believe she ever forgot her loveliness, her perfection. Or, really, that she was either aware or unaware of her loveliness, or of the perfection of being a sow. I think she simply was lovely. The embodiment of sow perfection. With neither the desire nor the fear of ever being anything else.
My admittedly hasty and shallow investigation this week tells me that many scientists believe nonhuman animals have emotions. Additionally, that research shows some animal species (the great apes) are convincingly self-aware, according to the Mirror Self-Recognition Test. The same test is strongly suggestive that other species are self-aware ( bottlenose dolphins, bonobos, and the cleaner wrasse, a type of fish). Many more species are suspected of self-awareness including orcas, garter snakes, domestic dogs, Asian elephants, three species of ants, western gorillas, pigeons, the rhesus macaque, Indian house crows , and Clark’s nutcracker, a type of bird. I’m sort of excited, wondering what stories and comedy sketches will emerge once the word really gets out that gartner snakes and three species of ants might be self-aware! But that’s beside the point this morning.
What my admittedly hasty and shallow investigation didn’t turn up was any suggestion that a frog might not want to be a frog or that a sow might need reminding of the perfection of being a sow. You know which animal might not want to be what it is, and might need reminding of the perfection and loveliness of being just what it is?
That’s right. Us.
I wasn’t an English major for nothing, so I know that just as the poet says "The bud/stands for all things,/even for those things that don’t flower", so too does the sow in this poem stand for all beings and perhaps especially human beings. And it is we who would (in the secret places of our hearts) stretch languorously to our full length, offer the tenderness of our being up to the attention of our closest intimates, settle more fully into our place in the world at the touch of a loving, respectful hand (literal or figurative) and the murmur of loving, respectful voice reminding us of our loveliness, the perfection of our personhood. We who by such a touch and such a word would be called back to a time before we learned to compare and disparage and doubt our lovely physical and spiritual perfection. Our lovely animal perfection.
In our second reading this morning poet John O'Donohue declares that because they are "Nearer to the earth's heart,/Deeper within its silence", Animals "know this world/In a way we never will". Nevertheless he doesn’t despair that our distance and distraction, our strandedness between "time/Gone and time emerging", are inevitable states in which we will always languish. Instead he invites us to l"earn to return/And rest in the beauty/Of animal being". Not learn from the animals. "Learn to return". Learn to return to what is, I maintain, our ancient and present essential nature–animal.
We’re separated not just from the earth but from each other and ourselves by our locked minds, and our distraction, and the fractures of our thought windows, and our misguided belief that there is a time Gone and a time to come, rather than only now. Learning to return, to lean low, to "slip frequently into/The feel of the wild" is an immense and challenging endeavor.
After all, I may be speaking these words outdoors, standing on grass, feeling the breeze, seeing trees and leaves, but I wrote them in a coffee house with a concrete floor, to the accompaniment of hissing machines, piped music and clattering dishes; and in a house where I often shushed the dog’s efforts to get me to play with her; and in a study in a building built right up next to and between two other buildings, with the sounds of traffic in my ears.
And though I know many of you make a regular, even daily, practice of going into and connecting with places not covered in brick, concrete, steel, and glass, where the scent of the sea is stronger that the stench of car exhaust, where the sounds of wind and birdsong replace the pealing of church bells and the shrieking of sirens, still there is no getting away from the fact that most of the time we live much of our lives at a remove from the sights, sounds, fragrances, and touch of natural world. The explosion in the portability of tech over the past decade and a half has only intensified this separation. We can go to the beach or the mountains or the woods but we often take busyness and the tools of work right along with us.
Yet, I say, there is good news. We don’t have to learn anything new. We only have to relearn what is already our nature. "Feel[ing] the earth/Breathing with us. [E]nter[ing] Into lightness of spirit". Freeing our senses and "walk[ing]/Upon the earth/With … confidence/And clear-eyed stillness". All this lives within us, human animal beings, in the genetic memory of our countless years before we as a species so completely divided ourselves from our animal kin and from our own inherent animal nature. With time and attention, with the help of one another, and perhaps most of all with the model and guidance of these creatures we have brought with us today, we can relearn the ways and the long, perfect loveliness of human animal being. Amen.