‍We see ourselves as part of the natural world. Everything that moves has a spirit. We are no more important than the wind, sky, grandfather rocks, grandmother earth, plants that grow, water that flows, or any of the winged, two-legged, or four-legged beasts. We are all stardust. There’s no hierarchy. Everything that powers the universe goes in a circle. This is the sacred hoop. We are all relatives. 

 - Ruth Hopkins, member of the Dakota and Lakota Sioux First Nation Tribe.  

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No one, except their predators, pays much attention to the impala but we love them. Look how elegant they are with those supermodel legs, those tippy toe hooves, and perfect ears. And have you seen those eyelashes? And how joyously they spring and bound. Doesn’t your heart leap in response to them? 

What we like too is the peaceful tableau they create grazing under the trees beneath the baboons. The kudu and waterbuck are there, sometimes the elephants. The baboons drop leaves and other edible things from the trees that the hooved ones cannot reach. The elephants shake and break the branches and don’t eat all that falls. In this way, the impala and their friends can pick up extra food. And high in their aerial lookouts, the baboons sound the alarm if a predator approaches. Symbiosis is always good. 

Much as we want the lioness to feed her cubs and the leopard not to go hungry, we worry for the prey animals. Those adorably fluffy baby waterbuck in their nursery by the fishing boats, the injured solitary buffalo, the impala somehow separate from the herd. Yet predator and prey do not break their contract with each other. Here there is no death that is not somebody else’s food, no life that is not somebody else’s death. 

Of course, we are part of that too, but in a more monstrous way; it is we, not the lion or the leopard, that push other animals to extinction. How on this precious earth do we stop doing this? 

Perhaps, as James Hillman says, we need to begin by making the feeling right with the world we’re in. We need to turn to other species with appreciation and wonder and respect. And we need to turn to them as shapeshifters, empathetically and imaginatively. We may not know how it feels to be a baboon turning its chest towards the sunrise, but we know how it feels to greet the dawn and feel the warmth of the sun on our skin. We know when we see an eagle we feel more awe than warmth and when we see a baby elephant sheltering in the tent of its mother’s four legs, we feel love. It’s possible that our emotion is corresponding to the animal, telling us the truth about something significant. It’s possible to read the animals with feeling. This is not anthropomorphism; it’s how our ancestors learned to read the world around them. And our ancestors knew that the animals were divine, not, as we treat them today, less than human. 

Studying animals, knowing zoology, is helpful but it isn’t enough. We need to remember to speak to the animals and not about them. This practice of addressing the animate world around us is, as David Abram says, probably how prayer began. Speaking to a baobab tree, saying goodbye to an elephant, thanking a cool wind is a way of feeling the world as its own source, its own ongoing transcendence. An earth full of reciprocity in which everything – not just animals but grasses and trees and rocks – participates. Speaking or praying in this way is a natural part of being wild again, of dropping into a deeper field of intelligence. 

And this, I think, was our journey, dropping into that sacred field, becoming attuned to it. This is what happens when you keep waking at dawn, walking through rivers, forest bathing, watching the sun set and the moon rise, gazing at the stars, and communing always with the world around us. This is what wild again means: “Tuning into our senses. Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming truly human.”