A Curious Kind of Magic
First, I want to share some quick news about a different type of magic—This Animal Body won the Nautilus Book Awards in the Fiction (Large Publisher/Large Hybrid) category.
This was the award I felt most unlikely to win because my book competed against all types of fiction (except Science Fiction), including any novels from large, traditional publishers that entered the contest. Past winners have included Barbara Kingsolver, Brene Brown, and even Thich Naht Hanh, so I was a little intimidated, but it just goes to show that everyone's voice is needed, especially these days, and you truly never know what can happen because, you guessed it—
Magic.
Which brings me to today’s topic: a curious kind of magic.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt in my bones that things should be different between humans and animals. Animals shouldn’t run away from me. We should be friends. And like all good friends, we should enthusiastically greet one another, meet up for regular play dates, and have meaningful conversations.
One day when I was maybe around eight years old, I was lying in our hallway crying about something-I-can’t-now-recall when our gray tabby cat with big, beautiful green eyes walked straight up to me and meowed loudly in agitation. I stopped crying long enough to sanctimoniously announce, “I’m upset, and you’re making it worse. Now please turn around and try again.”
I didn’t expect her to understand, but the cat immediately walked a couple steps away from me, then turned around and approached anew, this time quietly and calmly.
I was floored. My dream had just come true! I’d spoken to an animal and she’d fully understood and responded.
Of course, I knew it might have been coincidence, but I held onto my belief that for one moment I’d related to animals in the magical way I was meant to, and I didn’t let go even as I got older and more practical. I gripped that slippery belief as tightly as I could even when faced with facts that claimed to prove its impossibility. Every time someone laughed at the idea of people talking to animals in real life, I squeezed so hard I nearly strangled it.
I nurtured my hidden, unsubstantiated, incredibly unlikely belief for decades, eventually landing on an “improbable but possible” designation that allowed me to keep hope alive without appearing to have totally lost touch with reality.
Until last Valentine’s Day, when I discovered something that brought my belief back to ripping, roaring life.
The Fire That Never Goes Out
I was on my usual wander through the woods when an unusually strong spark of curiosity lit me up.
I’d wanted to know more about the deer I often see in my wanders for a while, including where they sleep and what they like to eat. For some reason, on this day, it occurred to me for the first time that I could find clues even if the deer weren’t around. I roamed the hillsides looking for the twin, kidney-bean-shaped impressions on fallen leaves that indicate deer beds and inspected vegetation for branch tips that appeared both smashed and ripped—likely signs that blunt deer teeth had been at work on them.
The more evidence I found, the bigger the flames of my curiosity grew. Eventually, I made my way down from the forested ridge to the floodplain below that runs between a small lake and the neighboring creek.
The creek had recently flooded, and a thin layer of mud covered the entire trail and everything around it. As I approached the point where creek and lake drew closest, a track on the trail jumped out at me. It wasn’t the usual racoon or squirrel pawprints I see everywhere. In fact, it looked suspiciously like the otter tracks I’d studied in my book because I wanted to find otter sign so badly.
Even more on fire, I spent the next hour taking pictures of the tracks and following them from creek to lake. Along the way, I saw and photographed other tracks that I now believe belonged to a mink.
I was so excited, the next opportunity I had I “journaled” the otter tracks—a four-hour process that’s part of a program I’m doing to learn how to track animals that involves drawing maps to scale (including elevation lines!), answering tons of questions about the weather and moonphase, sketching the tracks, and explaining which animals they might belong to and why. I then met with my mentor (Sarah Fontaine, a student of Tom Brown, Jr.) and went over my findings in detail, confirming that these tracks did, indeed, belong to an otter.
Sarah encouraged more curiosity, so I researched otters, their habits and behaviors, and wandered in some new areas looking for scat, runs, and burrows. Of course, no matter how much I learned, there were still mysteries that remained—about where this otter lives, and what he was doing that day, and how many are in the area, and how often they’re around but I never realize it because there isn’t mud to capture their tracks. The fire of my curiosity burned ever brighter, feeding off each new mystery.
It was awesome. But the best was yet to come.
Curiosity Brought the Cat Closer
Less than a week after going over my otter journal with my mentor and looking for burrows and runs, I noticed some new footprints in the sand by the creek in our backyard. I immediately recognized them as otter tracks.
I’d been hoping to see evidence of otters in our yard ever since we moved in, but after almost six years, I hadn’t seen a single one. Until this day. Until I’d gotten curious about otters, learned about them, and searched for sign of them.
And now here was proof that they’d been in our yard. It was thrilling, not just because they’d visited, but because it was like they knew I was tracking them. Like I’d somehow called them in.
Like they were tracking me too.
Curiosity —> Connection —> Communication
Here’s the thing I was hesitant to say earlier:
The reason I decided to work with Sarah on tracking was, in large part, because she communicates with animals. When my hen, Mama—a very special chicken who had been with me for ten years— stopped eating last spring, I reached out to Sarah because I knew she loved animals as much as I did and offered to communicate with them.
Do I really believe Sarah could have a conversation with Mama? The short answer is yes.
I’ve read a lot about animal communication, and while I don’t claim to understand it or know how it works, I’ve heard enough stories of people (total strangers) learning verifiable facts about someone’s pet (such as favorite foods, activities, and people, or events from their past) that any explanation as to how they could know these things without communicating with the animal would be even more implausible and hard to believe.
I'm sure some people will think I'm fooling myself. That's okay. In situations like this where it's impossible to know for sure exactly what's going on, I like to focus on the consequences. Does believing in something lead to greater happiness or well-being? Does it cause any harm? What about not believing?
In terms of animal-human communication, believing has many benefits and no drawbacks. In this case, Sarah helped me understand what might be going on with Mama and how I could best support her. Even better, she helped me find peace with the process of saying goodbye.
When I asked Sarah if she could teach me how to communicate with animals, she told me that connection and communication are on a continuum. Connect deeply enough with a being, and you begin to understand them. She also told me that the best way she knows to connect deeply with the animals around us is to track them.
After finding the otter tracks in our yard, I realized that if connection leads to communication, then curiosity leads to connection.
It’s like my curiosity about the otters created an energetic cord linking me to them. Every time I asked another question or sought an answer, I was tugging on that string.**
But the coolest thing?
It’s a two-way connection, and the otters tugged back.
That’s a conversation in my book, and a magical one at that.
More Cords of Connection
In reflecting on this phenomenon, I realized that curiosity can connect us to more than wild animals.
In my experience, being curious about our fellow human beings tends to create those same invisible links. Trying to understand and know the truth of someone, no matter how different they are from us, can be a revolutionary act these days, a gesture of compassion, and an expression of love.
I’ve noticed that it also works for elusive answers, our life’s calling, and our deepest desires. We think we have to figure these things out or know how to find them.
We don’t.
We just need to ask the questions and get curious, because the curiosity creates a cord of connection between us and the heart of what we want directly.
And if we follow that curiosity wherever it leads, we can trust that whatever we’re seeking will tug on us as much as we tug on it.
**Thanks to master naturalist, tracker, and author Jon Young for this idea, a teaching he learned from a group of San Bushmen in Botswana—that we are tied to the beings of the natural world around us with invisible strings of connection. When we act to deepen these relationships, the strings strengthen and become ropes. Thanks also to Sarah (again) for the idea that the ropes are a two-way connection.
Wow congrats on the award! I love your writing so much. Thank you for sharing your tender heart with the world. We really are Disney princesses!