Animals Among Animals — The Way Back Home

What if we never needed to become more than we are?

There are moments — quiet, unremarkable — when everything we’ve been taught begins to unravel.

Like walking barefoot on damp earth and feeling your own heartbeat mirrored in the soil.

Like watching a hawk ride the wind and realizing you don’t need to know where it’s going to trust your own wings.

Like sitting beside your dog as it leans into you — without explanation, without story, just presence.

And in those moments, something ancient breaks open:

I belong.

Not because you earned it.

Not because you proved yourself civilized, or holy, or evolved.

But because you were born.

Breathing.

Beating.

Animal.

The Myth of Rising Above

We’ve spent centuries trying to become something other than ourselves.

Above nature.

Above emotion.

Above the body.

Above the animal.

We called it progress.

We called it civilization.

We even called it spiritual growth.

But what if all that “rising” has left us severed — not only from the earth, but from each other?

What if the spiritual task isn’t to transcend our animality…

…but to inhabit it more fully?

What if the way forward is not up… but home?

Signs That We’re Already Remembering

You’ve done this before, even if you didn’t name it:

• When you held someone’s hand instead of fixing them.

• When you watched the rain and felt it soften something unnamed.

• When you wept in the presence of a tree.

• When your gut said no — and you listened.

• When you danced barefoot and didn’t care how it looked.

In those moments, you weren’t less human.

You weren’t regressing.

You were remembering.

What Returning Might Look Like

This isn’t about wildness as chaos.

It’s about the wild as coherence — the sacred order of living systems that already knows how to keep us balanced.

So what might it mean to return to our animal nature?

1. Listening to the Body

Animals trust their signals: hunger, play, danger, grief, rest.

We override them — with caffeine, shame, guilt, busy-ness.

Try this: Pause. Breathe. Ask your body: what are you saying right now?

2. Living in Cycles

The moon pulls at the ocean and the womb alike.

Seasons turn. Energy ebbs and flows. Nature doesn’t apologize for hibernating.

Try this: Honour your own wintering. Your own blooming. Your own rhythms — without guilt.

3. Touching the Earth

We are the only species that wears shoes, builds boxes, and forgets the land.

Try this: Go barefoot. Swim. Lay on your belly in the grass. Let dirt under your nails mean something again.

4. Choosing Kinship Over Category

Animals don’t divide by class, race, worth. They relate by energy. By need. By presence.

Try this: Look someone in the eye with nothing to prove, no opinion to win. Just be there.

Mercy Was Always Here

Mercy is not the opposite of instinct — it is instinct, when belonging is intact.

The wolf who doesn’t strike.

The cat who lies beside its dying companion.

The whale who lifts the seal, just for a moment, out of the water.

Mercy is what animals do when they remember they are not alone.

And when we forget we are alone —

when we re-enter the web —

we remember mercy too.

The Great Turning

This series has not been a condemnation.

Not a manifesto.

Not even a set of answers.

It has been a remembering.

That the horrors we’ve created are not proof of our animality…

…but of our disconnection from it.

That “civilized” is not the same as whole.

That domination is not the same as wisdom.

That abstraction without anchoring is dangerous.

And that maybe — just maybe — we were never meant to rise above anything.

Only to return.

To the pack.

To the pulse.

To the belly of the earth.

To the place where breath and fur and bark and bone are all kin.

To become again —

animals among animals.

And from there — from that sacred humility —

we might finally learn how to live.