Lessons from creatures
And a preorder gift!
In the lead-up to my book release (July 15!), I’ve been making felted paintings of a few animals who I researched for How to Be a Living Thing, and lessons from each.
I wanted to share them here, and also share fun news:
If you’ve pre-ordered How to Be a Living Thing (or plan to before July 14 ;) you get a SUPER SPECIAL GIFT:
I created a half-hour video tutorial on needle felting which is how I made all these creatures, and how I make fuzzy little 3D animals who have been helping me with influencer marketing…
This craft brings me so much serenity and joy and I’ve been wanting to teach it to you for a long time. I’m giving you my FULL instructions on how to make a felt painting and a fuzzy critter (or…whatever), which are both deceptively easy and so peaceful to work on.
Just enter your pre-order receipt info HERE and you’ll unlock the video instantly!
OH, and if you order from Strand Bookstore, you get a signed book AND a specially-designed bookmark. This sounds like a good deal to me personally!
And now, here are a few of my favorite lessons from the beautiful beings I researched for this book that I loved writing…
Orcas
In captivity tanks, whales are under-stimulated to the point of life-threatening stress. They’ve been known to self-mutilate after years of life in a swimming pool; it’s as though their captive existence feels so egregiously wrong that it’s painful, and at times seems not even worth living.
Why would such an easy life cause them to suffer? In the ocean, orcas are met with all kinds of toils and troubles: the hunt for food, problems within the pod, parasites, and predators. You’d think the swimming pool would be like a lifelong spa day in comparison!
Orcas’ intuition, intelligence, and bodies are intricately suited to a complex, ever-changing environment. So, when they live in a display tank with highly artificial circumstances, they don’t feel safe and stress-free; they feel constant anxiety.
Proponents of marine parks will point to the leviathans circling around a pool and argue, “They’re living a life of luxury with daily feedings straight into their mouths!”
Getting a sufficient supply of food with nothing to do but perform repetitive tricks might not be demanding, but the chronic boredom of an “easy life” with little stimulation and no challenges is absolutely stressful.
I wonder how many ways we keep ourselves in a proverbial swimming pool, left to swim in circles questioning why it’s not making us happy.
A captive orca has a life of certainty—something that many of us probably dream about. In my 20s, all l I wanted in life was a husband and a reliable 9-5 job. Instead, I lived in constant flux, spinning a wheel of misfortune and landing on any job or situationship that would have me.
But whenever I tried to fit my uncertainties into a tidy wrapped box, or trace my whims along a straight line tilting upwards, I’d lose myself.
That’s not how I was meant to live; that’s not how humans—or whales—are meant to live.
Bears
Many animals hibernate—marmots, hedgehogs, and bats, to name a few—but bears are the largest and most famous for doing so, perhaps because they look like the type of species that would cozy up for a long winter’s snooze.
Or maybe I’m just too familiar with the Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea illustration of a smiling bear in a gown and sleeping cap dozing off on the family armchair in front of a fire.
After a hearty shake, the animals are rested and ready for action, with healthy, shiny fur coats at that. Bears resume activity, as though lulled awake by the first blooms of daffodils.
Little kids learn about bear hibernation in school with great fascination. It’s a fun fact about a creature world that seems so vastly different than ours. Imagine sleeping for a whole season!
But for however wondrous and exotic the ritual seems, hibernation is a challenging concept when you really get to thinking about it:
What if humans were just as in tune with their bodies? Would it work out for us? What if we followed our bodily cues as attentively as bears and other animals do?
Animals go to the bathroom, reject unwanted affection, gobble food, sleep for hours, and bite their toenails without a moment of hesitation or a shameful glance around to see if anyone’s looking.
The messages between fuzzy body and little brain don’t go through any filtering system. Thought and action are practically one and the same:
Hungry! Eat!
Tired! Rest!
Curious! Explore!
Animals have mastered embodiment, the experience of *being* a body rather than *having* a body. They don’t separate their physical self as an unruly object to control, argue with, be proud of, or disdain.
Chickens
During my research, I spent time with chickens--a creature I had no familiarity with beforehand. I was surprised that they all chattered INCESSANTLY! I was so curious what they must be peeping about!
I couldn’t get their clucks, chirps, and barks off my mind. Why hadn’t I heard about chicken language? I’d been obsessing over animals—especially the ones we eat!—for years now, and not once had I stumbled upon the wide world of chicken lingo.
Later, I looked up “chicken language” online. I got all kinds of bizarre results and very few about actual transmissions between chickens.
Huh, I thought, That’s weird. They are so vocal!
Then I deleted “language” and replaced it for “communication.”
“How do chickens communicate?”
Now, thousands of results.
Ohhhh, I realized. We don’t call animal sounds “language.”
Humans have language, animals have communication. But what, really, is the difference? Language is intricate, yes, but I need months of lessons to get by in Russia within my own species.
Chickens, on the other hand, can welcome in a new member from a foreign flock and make it work.
The chickens have come to feel at home on this oddball, glorious earth—a place whose dominant species doesn’t highly prize the noble chicken—by developing an exuberant symphony.
It’s a rich language that I can only appreciate on a surface level—much like the language of accountants or people who can easily wake up before dawn without buckets of coffee.
While I won't speak fluent Chicken in this lifetime, maybe I’ll learn enough to be able to step in and out of their private world as long as they’ll have me, but I’ll always be a visitor.
If you ever begin feeling dangerously close to thinking you know everything, hang out in a group where you don’t speak the language.
You will be awakened to new forms of intelligence and a grounding sense of humility, even among chickens.
Cats
My cat (my greatest teacher) is so good at being a cat.
Everything about her is perfectly cat-like, and even in her most annoyingly cat-like moments (i.e. jumping up on a shelf and breaking things) are well within her right and within her range of proclivities unique to her species.
I think a lot about this when I remind myself that being good at being a human means being good at making mistakes, at missing the mark, at flailing around not knowing what’s going on or what I’m doing.
"Ah, I’m just human-ing!" I’ll tell myself, the way I tell myself that Sunflower is just cat-ing when she scratches my furniture.
Seeing humans as animals gives me so much compassion for all of us. We are silly, social, egotistical, highly creative creatures who are capable of thousands of emotions and ways to communicate.
To be polished and flawless is to be non-human, and unfortunately I am not that. Oh, to be a cardboard cut-out!
So, I foible my way through the day. I make mistakes I’ve made a hundred times, I have to ask for forgiveness. I get extremely jealous of someone I love. I say something I know I shouldn’t, and then I feel guilty. I forget something really important, I don’t show up when I should, I never got around to reading that one book and I probably never will.
If I were a beloved pet, I can only imagine my loving companion saying, “Oh, she’s just human-ing. Human-ing today, are we?”
And then I do something wonderfully endearingly human, like laugh, or have an idea, or share a drawing.
Pigeons
Pigeons are not quite as humanlike as dogs, but they are bred even better than Labrador puppies to accompany us.
They love us because we’ve trained them to. They’re in our spaces because we wanted them to be.
Now that their résumés are outdated, most people would love to send them to a pigeon nursing home where they could be out of sight, mind, and moral reflection.
But in our plazas they stay, useful only as reminders of our failure to care for the animals we bred to care for us.
Perhaps the problem with those “rats with wings” (and the ones without!) lies with us, not them.
Someday I’m not going to be useful. You’re not either. Even with impeccable health and a job that shines in a capitalistic framework, everyone gets old. Everyone gets sick. Everyone wonders how others—even loved ones—will treat them when they can’t provide what they used to.
People used to prize pigeons so highly that the hoity-toity elite would proudly display their pets in windows of living rooms as a status symbol.
Then, when pigeons became working class, they received the same public praise and even medals that firefighters, teachers, and soldiers are awarded for a generous job well done.
Now most buildings have spikes so pigeons can’t land. They survive on literal garbage that is terrible for their little bodies. When they hover over sidewalk grates for warmth, people stomp them away—or worse.
Every day in New York, I see pigeons with drooping wings; broken beaks; damaged feet; in winter, frostbite; in summer, dehydration; in all seasons, suffering.
But in various parks around NYC, a friend to pigeons is someone who the rest of us may think of as “not mentally there” enough to hold a job.
It’s no surprise that they find companionship with an intelligent, compassionate, physically beautiful species who has been cast aside as a nuisance, and no longer "useful."
Rats
In 2023, the mayor of New York appointed a “rat czar” devoted to the rodents’ eradication and invested $3.5 million to rat mitigation in Harlem alone. Crowds cheered, journalists made jokes. It seemed like it was one political issue that united rather than divided the city.
Lab experiments through the years have proven that rats feel regret, solve puzzles, demonstrate empathy, sacrifice for each other, and enjoy companionship with their fellow street rodents.
My favorite rat fact: They love playing games but they love tickles more; researchers reward rats with tickles when they play hide-and-seek, and they erupt into gleeful fits of high-pitched rat giggles.
I wonder why we hate them.
Maybe on a subconscious level we know how badly we treat them, and how much like us they really are. Maybe it’s the same confronting “yuck” feeling that I get when I see a street full of makeshift forts. I wonder why the people living there are not treated better, and then why I don’t treat them better.
Rats may be the ultimate “other,” and the questions they potentially raise are uncomfortable ones. If a society can be judged on how it treats the least within it, New York isn’t looking so great.
I’ve started feeling skeptical toward those who hate rats. Do people who hate rats hate something in themselves? Who else do they hate? I think to myself. Are rats somehow so human—too human, in fact—that they can’t stand it? After all, rats scurry and burrow around us, clearly sharing an affinity for our spaces and inventiveness when it comes to what home looks like.
Now, I put on a smile when I see a rat. Not because I think it knows what a smile means (although, who knows!?) but because I’m training myself to erase the invisible line I’ve drawn between worthy creatures and unworthy creatures, beautiful beings and ugly ones, those who delight and those who disgust me.
The first, small step is a smile.
Pigs
I’ve often heard the intelligence of a pig compared to that of a three-year-old human child. But when I asked about this at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, the tour guide paused.
He answered, “That could be true, but I don’t like to compare animal intelligence that way...it doesn’t really make sense, right? Pigs can smell eleven feet underground. They can even communicate through the ground to others far away. Can you compare that to the abilities of humans? Pigs don’t need to learn spelling. They’re intelligent for the things that matter to them, just like us.”
We make judgments on the smartness of animals based on how well they do at human tasks, which is very silly.
If you asked a squirrel to design an intelligence test, they would say, "Hide as many things as you can, and then after 3 months we'll see if you can remember the locations of them.”
That's what squirrels do with their intelligence; they hide thousands of nuts all over the park and find them again a few months later (a very cognitively complex thing to do--an you go a week without losing your keys?!).
If humans took the squirrel test, we’d definitely come out on the bottom. We’re the ones who define intelligence, and define ourselves as the smartest species, but there’s not much evidence that we are.
We don’t have the biggest brains, we’re not the only species with self-awareness, and we aren’t even the most emotional creatures. Orcas have an emotional processing center that is much larger than it is in humans, and it’s overdeveloped proportionally as well.
So, other animals could be having much more intense or more complicated emotions or greater emotional ranges, maybe even feeling emotions that we humans don’t have access to.
We tend to put a higher value on animals who we call “smart,” but only smart in a ridiculously limited definition. Any intelligence that doesn’t serve our needs doesn’t command our respect.
Snow Leopards
Snow leopards are nearly impossible to spot in the wild because they blend into their surroundings, but also because—much like me—they are never in one place for long.
A snow leopard doesn’t migrate, per se, but is constantly on the move around its enormous home range.
Snow leopards are solitary, so, like most humans, they make their decisions to move based on intuition and preference rather than following the herd.
They often travel along ridge lines and choose their bedding sites with palatial views over the surrounding terrain (like us, snow leopards put a high value on a good view).
To be a snow leopard is to be in motion. Unlike migrating animals, they don’t stop and hang out once they’ve reached their destination; they just keep on prowling.
Like humans, they’re natural explorers.
I thought about how being a person, to be alive really, is to be constantly shifting—with seasons, with work, with health, with romance, with the siren song of sunshine or proximity to water.
Those of us who can’t sit still may feel like there’s something wrong with us, but restlessness is how our world erupted in varied languages and cultures and dreams.
Like snow leopards, humans are drifting, traveling, ever-changing creatures who often struggle to master permanency. For some of us, we stop living when we stop moving. Humans evolved impeccably to adapt.
We too wander around land with the range of a snow leopard, and yet we have stronger sentimental attachments to where we’ve come from.
A textbook chart shows that Homo sapiens made their way from central Africa to West Asia, then up to the Arctic Circle. Another group broke off and joined those indigenous to South Asia in Australia.
While these big moves happened over centuries without the help of a moving truck, they still must have involved so much grief.
To be a human is to say goodbye a lot.
I cherished every second of spending time with these confusing, strange, spectacular beings who reflect our finest and floppiest qualities back to us. I really hope you enjoy reading about them! :)
I have two book release events coming up…
July 15: I’ll be storytelling on stage at Sixth and I in Washington DC, but the event will also be streamed virtually so you can watch from anywhere at any time if you register. RSVP HERE!
July 18: I’ll be at Strand Bookstore in New York City. RSVP HERE!
Your writing is beautiful.
The paralels you make between non human animals and human animals are so powerful.
I absolutely love the feeling behind this book and this vision of life.
To me and according to what moves me, it is a book with a vision for a life full of curiosity for the beauty out there, the tree out there, the insect just here.. where we don't need to buy many things or travel far beyond or consume, consume, distract, distract, to feel ALIVE and FULL. Maybe, just maybe, we will slow down to see the beauty right here. And care for it.
I will order your book ! Congratulations !