The Universe in Their Eyes.

Last week we welcomed to our home a new member of our pack. 

His name is Leon, after Leon Trotsky. He’s a mutt from the shelter, at least 3 years old, and an absolute lover. 

For my partner and I, bringing Leon home is an emotionally intense and important experience. First there is simply the change — finding new routines, working to make sure Leon and Connolly (our other dog) get along, and adjusting to another person you don’t really know yet being present in the house. 

Because a dog is a conscious being. I’ve long found it notable that the best English has to express this is “sentient being,” but that sounds so clinical and distant, and something as likely to be applied to some sophisticated robot in 20 years time as a creature that has been a constant companion of humans for millennia. So, I prefer to refer to dogs and other similar animals as people (as distinct from human), because to me, that’s what they are. As Carl Safina, one the author of one of my favorite books ever, Beyond Words: The Emotional Lives of Animals, put it: the operative question when we explore the realities of non-human creatures should not be what are you, but who are you?

I’ve felt this way my entire life. I’m one of those people who can watch violent-rich entertainment like Game of Thrones easily, but confront me with animal abuse on any register and I simply fall apart. I cannot bear it. It breaks me somewhere inside where I have no armor, where everything is raw and cruelty cuts as deep as it can. 

I don’t know why this is the case. There are a lot of possibilities, of course. Cultural acclimation to human-on-human cruelty, or a proclivity to be judgmental of human beings whereas when it comes to other animals I’ve nothing but compassion. And while I know there are a ton of people out there just like me, I also know not everyone understands it and some are critical. That’s fair. It does seem problematic that I wince more at the abuse of dogs and cats than that of humans, even if intellectually I would never argue that the lives of dogs and cats are worth more. But what I know is that it can’t be helped. This adoration for animals is as much a part of my basic sensory experience as love of the sunshine or the love of good food. It is what it is. 

And I say adoration quite deliberately, and mean it in its full religious sense. The wonder, beauty, and mystery that is the lives of other creatures, and the absolute miracle that is our mutual capacity to form deep relationships with each other is to me the most beautiful fact about the conscious portions of the universe. People love “odd couple” animal stories for more that merely surface-level cuteness; that dogs can love humans and humans can love cats and cats can love even birds and birds can love humans and around we go is the best evidence I can imagine for a world that contains more beauty than darkness. 

And that beauty contains more than just love — it is also deeply mysterious, in that it speaks to us of things we often lack the words to express and can barely even put our finger on, like a memory we just can’t quite recall. I believe — and it’s one of the handful of beliefs I have that I cannot, nor probably will ever be able to, ‘prove’ with anything approaching objective methods — that what we are feeling when we share love with other animals is the mystery we both partake in; the mystery of being conscious beings. And that experience is stored, somewhere, inside our brains and bones, inside the evolutionary paths we have taken, often separate but also overlapping. Consider that dogs have been companions of humans for thousands and thousands of years, and that they’ve literately evolved to be more attuned to our emotions and behaviors as a consequence. The mews of cats, it’s recently been argued, evolved to mimic the cries of human babies, so as to elicit an emotional reaction from their owners. Not only are we all conscious and feeling beings, but we’ve always been sharing the same space, the same earth, and we are made from the same stuff — and whether other animals have related to us as companions, predators or prey, we’ve always been watching each other. 

There is nothing that acknowledges this deep and profound connection to other animals in the monotheistic tradition. It is one of the core reasons I gravitated to paganism, and engaging with material, myths, art and other human beings who express and embrace the same truths is one of the most rewarding things about working from within this religious framework. Of course, ancient peoples had a variety of relationships to other animals, including hunting them to survive and sacrificing them to anthropomorphic gods. But a near universal aspect of the first religions is how they incorporated the full spectrum of the animal kingdom into their realms of the divine — some gods were part cat, part wolf, part bear; sometimes certain people could even temporarily become another animal. The line between us and them was so much more fluid and less rigidly drawn than it has been in modernity. One illustration I ran into recently that illustrates this is the lion-man sculpture found in a cave in the Swabian Alps. It is one of the oldest pieces of art known to humankind — 35,000 - 41,000 years old — and it is a man with the head of a lion. It’s difficult for me to translate how much sense this makes to me or, how spiritually significant I find it. In the beginning, I guess I could say, we recognized that we shared this planet with creatures that were our kin — even if we didn’t always get along. 

So it should not be a surprise that some of my most profound spiritual experiences have come via relationships, or even fleeting contact, with other animals. Hearing howling wolves inspires a reverence in me that a million church choirs couldn’t hope to reproduce. Staring into the eyes of an animal that I love, I feel the exact same sense of boundless wonder and beauty as I do staring into the huge, starlit night. And really, I guess what I’m trying to say, is that to me, they really are the same thing.