LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Jane Ratcliffe!

ANIMULES!

Dear Lovelets!

I still have the very first journal I ever kept, from the year 1978, when I was eight years old. My journal entries for that book started on January 1, and ended about a week later, when I discovered that keeping up with a diary was hard work.

This would begin a many-year habit of buying beautiful journals, writing in them for a few days or weeks, and then giving up on them in boredom or overwhelm or distraction, or whatever. (Until, that is, I started writing daily letters to myself from Unconditional Love, which I never get tired of doing!)

ANYWAY!

Back to my third grade diary. 

The very first entry says:

THINGS I LIKE:

Animules

Stuffed Animules

And then I listed the names of about 10 boys in my class.

Let us not focus too much on the names of the boys (other than to say that being a love addict was already clearly a problem for me at age 8!).

Let us focus instead on the first two I LIKE: Animules. Stuffed Animules.

I was literally surrounded by “animules” when I was a child. I was lucky enough to grow up on farm where I saw baby goats being born every spring, and where I learned to milk the goats and take care of them. We had chickens and ducklings. We had beehives. We had an endless parade of cats over the years, and a few good dogs. (And a few bad ones.) Across the street, the neighbors had horses. Down the road, another neighbor had donkeys. Further down the road were cows, pigs, and sheep. I had full access to all these farms, and would routinely climb the fences to play with my diverse group of friends. And in my bed every night, there was an army of stuffed animules that kept me safe from demons of the dark.

I don’t live on a farm anymore. I have narrowed down my livestock holdings to one 8-pound wire-haired terrier mutt. But Pepita is my best friend, my child, my life partner, my confidante, my personal trainer, my meditation coach, and the most compelling reason I can think of to get up every morning. (Also, I really MUST get straight out of bed, or else she will drown me in nostril licks.)

I’m thinking about all this because our special guest this week — the brilliant and big-hearted journalist and writer and Substacker

Jane Ratcliffe

— wrote a letter from Love that turned out to be entirely about ANIMULES! And although the letter turned out to be nothing like what she expected it would be when she sat down to do the assignment (it never is!) what her words inspired in my own imagination was a sense of rhapsodic joy about the fact that we get to share this planet with family members of so many different wild varieties, and that these astonishing creatures shape our lives in so many ways.

And I know lots and lots of you agree, because in the last couple of weeks I’ve seen the adorable evidence in the form of beloved pet photos in the chat!

All of this made me want to write a letter from Love asking about my own relationship with animals.

I can’t wait to read your letters on the same topic, if you so choose. (Though if you just wanna talk about boys you have crushes on, that’s okay, too. It’s not like I’ve changed that much since I was 8.)

Here we go!

Love,

Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know today about my relationship to animals?

Precious pup, first of all, you literally ARE an animal, which I think you often forget. But you do seem to do best in life when you remember this fact — that you are a primate, a member of the family of great apes, and a mammal. Warm-blooded, social, in need of the basics that every mammal needs: food, water, safe shelter, and the warmth and security of your community.

Sometimes, my love, when your head gets full of confusion and too many thoughts, I need to remind you that these basics are actually ALL you need.

“Just be an animal today,” I will tell you, and I guide you to return to nesting, grooming, friendship, water, and food.

But about the other animals — the ones you call animals — they are your joy, your siblings, your fellow creators, your family, and your source of never-ending amazement. They are your constant reminders of God, of miracles, of beauty, of danger, of strangeness and familiarity, and of the magnificent things that you did not create, and that are completely out of your control.

Let’s talk about the bears, specifically.

You have been in Connecticut all week with your family, and there has been a lot of talk of bears. A lot of ALARMED talk of bears. Bears are everywhere in your hometown these days. A bear ripped the side off your father’s barn, and also let himself into your family’s basement to tear apart the beehives while your parents were eating breakfast upstairs. A bear startled your mother in the backyard. A bear threatened the neighbor’s chickens. A bear dined from every bird feeder in town as if the whole neighborhood was a sunflower buffet. Your dad sees bears all the time in the woods. And you saw a bear cross the street right in front of you only yesterday. And for a moment, you thought, “I probably shouldn’t walk alone in the woods anymore, and certainly not with Pepita” — who would be, let’s be honest, an amuse bouche for a bear.

Yet today I called you to walk all alone in these woods with Pepita again, not far from where you saw the bear yesterday. In fact, I called you to RUN through the woods the way you used to do when you were young — for the pine trees were radiant with post-rainshower, resin-scented glory, and the light was electric after the thunderstorm, and the moss was springy and excited beneath your feet and the cedar waxwing was singing to you her faint song, and the hawk was screaming to her mate, and I said to you: “Don’t you dare EVER miss a run through the forest because you are afraid of a bear.”

I said to you, “Don’t you dare be afraid of a bear” in the same way that I told you in Kenya thirty years ago not to be afraid of the giraffe in the middle of the night who almost stepped on you when you were peeing behind a bush; the same way I told you last month not to be afraid of the reef sharks in Fiji; the same way I told you not to be afraid of the coyote you saw on the ridge that time near your home — the coyote that was so beautiful all you could do was raise your arms in the air and shout “I love you!” The same way you shouted “I love you!” to the dolphin who surfaced right in front of you when you were swimming in Miami that time. The same way you shouted “I love you!” to the howler monkeys in Costa Rica, the same way you are always saying “I love you” into the warm hay-scented nostrils of other people’s horses, and the same way you whispered “I love you” to the stray yellow dog at the ashram in India whom you named Taxi, and who was your friend the whole time you were in residence there.

And if a bear ever comes for you (which it will not, because your father taught you long ago that the animals are just going about their business, so you can go about your business in peace) — but if a bear ever comes for you, I want your last words to be “I love you.”

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!

This is your relationship to the animals.

What if I told you they were the love of your life?

What if I told you to be with them, as much as you possibly can in any form?

What if I told you that they are everything?

And what if I told you, reminded you, that you are one of them?

That is all, my little cubbie.

Go back in the woods again tomorrow. And then every day after that, forever. Whatever happens there, happens. But don’t miss a moment of this love story.

I love you!!!

Prompt

If you’d like to reflect this week on the place of animals in your life, whether they be your pets, creatures in the wild, service animals, the neighbors’ cat, the fireflies in your backyard, bears in the woods, the jellyfish at the beach, or anything else, join me in asking this: Dear Love, what do you want me to know about my relationship to animals?