Can't stop, won't stop: thinking about species loneliness

On walking with and without dogs + some stuff I've published lately

A few weeks ago my dog, Roscoe P. Bontron, angel on earth, heart outside of my body, took his last breath. I knew this was coming. I’d spent every day—literally every day—since I met him worrying about how I would one day get by without him. But we were lucky. We had fourteen and a half years together, which is really a best case scenario for a lab cross. By the end I had started to hope that maybe, with one less needy creature to care for at home, life would get just a fraction easier in the days and weeks after he left us. But it didn’t work that way. 

Losing the dog opened up all kinds of grief in me that I couldn’t have predicted. Not just the ache of coming home to find he wasn’t there, waiting for a snack or a belly rub, but also grief for the life we had together before I had kids: lazy mornings reading books on the couch, nights in the tent in the forests of British Columbia, hours spent wandering the neighborhood and clocking the arrival of each new season. That version of my life had been over for awhile but, without him, I could see it clearly. 

the very best boy

That first morning without a dog to walk, I decided to walk to the bank, only to find the bank was closed on Mondays. (Co-ops and their reasonable work hours!) I found myself heading toward the forest instead, my legs burning to move across the land. I walked and walked, wandering the trails with no real sense of direction. But the forest, full as it was with so many running, panting, sniffing dogs, felt empty without him.

Losing the walks, something I thought would be helpful—one less task on the to-do list—was in fact awful. It wasn’t just that walking every day—sometimes three or four times each day—was nice, it was that my body and my brain had become accustomed to that kind of movement. Roscoe offered me a relationship—to him but also to the land, to the seasons, to other species—that I didn’t have before. When we had two newborns at home, walking with the dog was the closest thing I could get to alone time, the closest I felt to sane. By the end, our walks were shorter and significantly slower, but still we saw the sky lighten at dawn, we heard the frogs mating, we watched the magnolias bud and then bloom. 

Without daily dog walks, life felt crowded. There was no space to breathe, to think, to look around. So I’ve been trying to make myself walk again. Walking my kids to daycare, walking to my office, walking for walking’s sake. I take different routes than I did with the dog, but it feels good to put one foot in front of the other. I’m trying to do at least one or two walks a week with no earbuds. I’m calling this my Contemplative Walking Practice, which maybe sounds a little pretentious, but the goal is just to carve out a few non-productive, undistracted moments to be in the world.*

This morning, as I have done several mornings lately, I ended up thinking about my relationship to the land and what it might be like to feel a genuine sense of belonging on or with this land.** And also what it might look like to help my children feel this belonging, too.

I’ve written about walking in the forest with my kids before. Last summer, when fires were raging across the province, seeing my kids’ uncomplicated joy at being set loose among the trees started to break my heart a little. Was it okay to teach them to love something so vulnerable, knowing they would soon be old enough, aware enough, to feel the grief of burning forests? 

I first encountered the idea of species loneliness in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing. When I heard the term, I understood its meaning right away; it felt intuitive to me, this idea that we humans have cut ourselves off from real intimacy with other species. The concept offered a useful way of reframing things: The grief of seeing the forest burn is unavoidable, but the grief of feeling cut off from the natural world, that’s something we have a say over, something I could help my children avoid. 

Kimmerer sees species loneliness as the inevitable result of human exceptionalism, which she defines as the assumption that “a single species, out of the millions who inhabit the planet, [is] somehow more deserving of the richness of the Earth than any other.” I’m trying to let go of the idea that we humans exist at the center of creation, that the natural world exists for us. But it’s hard, learning to see in a new way.

The forest where I walk is a regional park with well-maintained trails and lots of cyclists, runners, dogs, and exhausted parents pushing strollers. Yes, the coyotes and eagles and pileated woodpeckers live here, too. But it is easy to get the feeling that this place is for people—for our species above all. Trails for running, shade for keeping cool, birdsong for pleasant background noise. I recognize that this is an extractive mindset, even if it is not as destructive as, say, coal mining. It still imagines that the forest is something we briefly immerse ourselves in before going back to our separate lives. 

More than anything else, having a dog helped me feel more in sync with the non-human world. Walking the same blocks and streets and trails together, season after season, year after year, taught me to notice things: which flowers bloomed in which order, how the creeks appeared and disappeared with the rains, where the berries ripened first. Now I have to find a way to remember all this—and keep walking through the world without him.

If I had been walking with my earbuds in this morning, I might’ve walked right past the ripe salmonberries I found beside the trail. I definitely would’ve missed the robin in the brush who was snacking on a huckleberry at the exact moment I was. I would not have pulled out my phone to learn the name of the cat's tail moss, which hangs from the baby hemlock branches like an old man’s beard. 

When I was staying at the Environmental Sanitation Institute in Ahmedabad, India several years ago, a few members of our group walked the grounds every morning, saying hello to the trees. At the time it struck me as a little bit silly. Nice but, you know, excessively whimsical. But now it doesn’t seem silly to me at all. Now, I walk and I try to encounter the trees in all their treeness. 

Martin Buber talks about this in his book I and Thou: 

I can look on [the tree] as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

But, he says, “In all this the tree remains my object.” How do you de-objectify a tree? You just have to be willing to be present with it, to let it be present with you: 

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. 

Easier said than done, I know. But I am trying.

When we walk home through the forest after daycare, my children have their eyes tuned to the huckleberry bushes. “There! There! There!” they shout, demanding I stop the stroller and start harvesting immediately. I have never taught them to identify a huckleberry bush. That automatic knowledge of the shape of the branches and the leaves happened all on its own. They know a good snack when they see one and they want to eat every berry on the bush. They don’t mind if they are unripe or sour. In these moments, I think of that extractive mindset and try to imagine a different way of being. 

“Let’s eat a couple and then save some for the crows,” I say. And then I wonder: do crows eat huckleberries? I have no idea.*** 

“Yeah,” one of them shouts, “let’s save some for the crows and the giraffes.” I guess we are learning about the land together. 

As I walk, I am trying to accept my grief for Roscoe—and also to push deeper into that impulse he first activated in me: to see the non-human as my kin.

If you have your own antidotes to species loneliness, I’d love to hear about them.

Yours,

Mandy

*I have been inspired by several things including this newsletter from my friend Bronwen, this lovely TED Talk, and the retreat I attended with the All We Can Save Project last month. 

**We live on land that settlers (European-descended people like me) stole from the Musqueam people and the idea of belonging here is very much complicated by this history.

***They do! Red huckleberries are beloved by birds, coyotes, bears, deer, and, obviously, toddlers. 

Some stuff I’ve published lately:

(by lately, I mean in 2024)

• This essay on a deepwater octopus and my very scary pregnancy

• This piece on the loneliness of the nuclear family for the Guardian

• This conversation with my friend Brittany on Miranda July’s new novel All Fours. This was SO fun. Thanks for inviting me, B!

  We Must Discuss…Miranda July’s All Fours