A Christ-Follower and a Mouse

Tags

dumpster-diving, human-animal relationships, intentional community, narrative, sympathy

During my young adult residency at The Mountain Retreat & Learning Center, I boarded with an extraordinary individual who was traveling from one intentional community to another, learning how to live holistically in equality beyond the realm of civilization. She told me that she was inspired to do this from the radical and holistic dissenter that was Jesus of Nazareth.

One night, we were in our house. I sat on my bed reading and my roommate was in the kitchen with another housemate. I heard a yelp and soon after my roommate came running into the bedroom. “The mouse came out,” she said excitedly. “He’s in the kitchen on the floor. You should come and see.” I slowly put down what I was reading and followed her into the kitchen. She and another roommate were lying on the floor feeding stale bread and cheese to a mouse who lived in the house. He was residing in the house before we all moved in and we had since seen him on and off for the last month.

How Animals Talk: A Review

Tags

adaptibility, animal communication, animal consciousness, animal emotions, animal stories, animal telepathy, chumfo, cognitive ethology, instinct, intuition, narrative, natural telepathy, nature writing, phenomenology, sensibility, sensory experience, sensory perception, sensualization, sentimentality, silent communication, super-sense

When I first picked up the book How Animals Talk written by William Long, I felt hesitant from his language, typical of the late 19th century.  He was truly an intellectual figure of the times: male, white, economically privileged.  And he used words like “civilized Man” and “savage” and “beast” and “negro.”  Not to mention, he was a sport hunter (though after reading, I later learned that he was of the sympathetic type, in juxtaposition to President Teddy Roosevelt, an avid trophy hunter and conservationist).  At the time, I couldn’t handle this worldview and had to put the book down for a couple of years until I was mature enough to read it through his lens and maintain open critique to this vastly different worldview from my own.

The foreword and preface, written by two revolutionary and radically different scientists/philosophers (Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Bekoff, respectively), introduce the work as a piece that provides great insight into animal psychic abilities and animal emotions.  However, neither the foreword nor the preface give any indication to the actual theses and details of the book.