Pure Love- Loving Our Companion Animals- Part 3

The Blessing of Touch

Touch is another quality that characterizes most of our relationships with the companion animals in our lives.

Read Part 1 and Part 2

We live in a very low-touch society. Touch is generally permitted to us in very few of our relationships under very circumscribed conditions– with small children, with our lovers, and with our animals. The skin is the largest organ of the body and touch is the sense most connected to our emotional center, to our ability to feel emotions. In our relationships to the animals we love our feelings are close to the surface. They have touched us in the deepest and fullest meaning of the word.

Touching Wildness

To cross over species lines and find love and kinship with someone so “other” is a miracle and a blessing. When I behold my dogs I recognize how different our bodies are, how different our packaging. I note how distant are our family trees and how remote our ancestry. We are “other” to each other and yet we find a ground on which to meet. How awesome that we can become family to each other. We meet through our bodies and our senses–where we are both animals. We look into each other’s eyes and our souls meet.

I welcome with delight the chickadees and titmice that feed outside my window. I feel great warmth for them. I honor them for their chipperness. I marvel at their stalwartness and hardiness as they brave the New England winter. I love to watch the squirrels leap through the trees and the raccoons climb up and down a tree near my home. I care about them. I feel good that I can contribute to their flourishing by feeding them.

That is a relationship. But it is an impersonal relationship. I do not and never will know them as individuals. I never get to look into their eyes and see them looking back at me. I do not know them. They do not know me. I have always been awed and deeply moved reading about and seeing on film those magic moments when naturalists have made that soul-to-soul connection with other species whether gorillas or whales. I cannot imagine anything more powerful than for an “alien” being to demonstrate such trust and inclusiveness toward another such as we. I think that if I had such an experience it would last me for a lifetime. I would need nothing else.

But how many of us ever get to have that kind of experience– touching and being touched by wildness? For the rest of us, we have been blessed by the company of dogs and cats and other animal companions. For those of us open to it there can be some of that same feeling of awe, that same feeling of meeting heart to heart, soul to soul, wildness to wildness, joining with the other. I place a high value on this kinship. For many people it is the only contact we have with the world of non-human animals. The only ongoing reminder that we share this planet with others, others who have their rightful place in the natural order. Others who have much to teach us.

Kinship with Nature

I fear in our increasing urbanization that there are more children growing up with no contact at all with animals and nature. They may grow up with no sense of kinship and empathy for them. It is through the contact we have with companion animals that the chasm between us and the natural world can be bridged.

On to Part 4