He / She / They but not "It"
Animal subjectivity and pronouns
“You can tell a lot about someone by how they treat a bug when no one’s looking.” This is a phrase I uttered recently, though I’d never thought about it quite like that before.
I had just observed my sister’s nanny at a family party. a spider let themselves down beside her and she noticed it with delight.
She held out her hand below them, almost instinctively, as a safety net in case they (the spider) fell. They were still about five feet from the ground.
Then she reach up a few inches above them, to gingerly grasp the near-invisible silken thread above their body, and gently set them into a potted plant on the table.
You can tell a lot about someone by the way they treat a bug when no one’s looking.
Are they objects or subjects? Are they tiny little space holders sharing your space, or invading it? Are they great big screens for us to project our fears, assumptions, own personalities on? Are they unwilling vessels for our neuroses to echo back to us, or soothers of our fray? We don’t have to like animals, or even other humans for that matter, to still see them and love them as subjects.
The first time I really thought differently — subjectively — about animals I was in remote northern India. I was traveling with a Tibetan Buddhist nun teacher, and we arrived at a particularly remote nunnery where she was a visiting teacher. I stayed the night with her in a small stone room, a cozy cell. We slept on mats, mindlessly itching our legs from fleas as they casually bit us. In the middle of the night I heard her start a little bit, but then quiet back down.
In the morning, she told me a mouse had run up her leg in the night. Naturally it startled her, so she jolted. “So then she fell,” she said, with some remorse. She fell. She fell.
Her use of the word “she,” not “it,” cracked something wide open for me. When you allow something you’ve objectified to become a subject, that it already always was, everything changes. I’m sorry to all the pets that I’d owned before that moment, because I admit I loved them and thought they were cute, but they were objects to me.
I thought of the mouse, a she, somebody’s daughter, part of a litter, somewhere in her life cycle, a subject, falling. I thought about the feeling of falling, how overwhelming it can be to all of a sudden be cast into uncertainty: fun, terrifying. Though I have no idea what the feeling of falling is for a mouse, and was for this mouse, the physics of it remain: you’re in one place and then you’re suddenly in the experience of being somewhere else — but not yet there.
It is very difficult as a human not to project assumptions onto other animals, including human animals. Sometimes it’s the best we can do to try and understand or make meaning with the various chasms that exists between us.
Seeing someone - some animals - as a subject doesn’t mean you can’t also be afraid, or that you have to love them. It doesn’t even mean you can’t eventually eat them, if you’re into that kind of thing.
It’s simply mindful space holding between two sentient beings and it’s a magical part of being alive. And maybe, in the space that you choose to hold, something may eventually change in the way you see this other — not too scary, not too cute, not so helpless, whatever.
Maybe if temporary projection onto an other enables the cultivation of empathy and then opening of greater spaciousness, whereby I pull back my projection, then I think it’s OK. But the job is a continual practice of self-reflection and then pulling back, removing from someone what isn’t theirs but is what we placed upon them.
I imagine this is central in parenting. It’s central in friendships and romantic relationships and also being a dog owner, etc. etc. Our ability to project our visions and dreams out into the world, to extrapolate concepts and expectations, makes us wonderful inspiring and catalytic creatures. We all need this to operate, to move forward in life. But this same motor can also steamroll others, gobble up space, fling inaccurate and needless assumption. I am speaking from personal experience.
Speaking of “she” and of subject pronouns, just noting that we don’t know the mouse’s sex, nor that they really had any gender identity or pronoun preference. Even that was an assumption. Sheesh!
It’s a record-breaking year for anti-trans laws in the US and we’re only a few months in. It’s extremely fucked up. There are people in my life whom I love and who are trans. I also love all the trans people who aren’t in my life or I don’t personally know. I love them and want so much for them to feel safe, cared for, free, and full exactly as they are and want to be.
How can we allow space for others to be as they are? Why is that so hard for us? Fear. Righteousness. Deep, deep ignorance. Deep pain. And “allow” isn’t to suggest that it is ours to give or take, but we do have a core and persistent responsibility to manage our own tendencies toward projection, grabbiness, assumption, and harm - that we all have to some degree - so that others can live in peace. It’s irresponsible, messy, lazy when we don’t.
As Lama Rod Owens reminds us, oppression is rigid, stuck, harmful. Or another way to look at it is rigidity, assumption, projection is oppressive and harmful. Liberation is fluid; openness, spaciousness, shifting is liberating.
When I was at my sister’s, I helped bottle feed an orphaned calf named Rufus. He wasn’t literally orphaned, but just after he was born, his mom somehow got confused and mistook another calf, also juuuust born, for hers. Energetically, she left Rufus for good. He’s still a subject for her in the same barnyard, but no longer family. So we fed him twice a day and he’d come running. Just a few weeks old, galloping toward this giant baby bottle which reminded me of the pacifier rave fad in the 90s (anyone?).
I didn’t become his mother, I wasn’t better than him or more powerful, or his boss. I couldn’t fix what happened to him, I couldn’t save him. But meaningfully, mindfully, I was participating in a relationship with him. I was caring for him but not trying to own him. For those six minutes while he drank from the bottle I was holding, pulling back slightly and bucking his head as if drinking from an utter, we existed together in space two subjects as we were. Me and him (or them). That was what made it so magical.
Offerings / Work with Me
I have a new website! I’ll be sharing more about what I’ve been cooking up, but for now, go ahead and snoop around. #softlaunch
To quote Cyndi: I just love love you and love your writing. makes me think.........
of how I objectified the pets we had in our family, how I grew up in a family intolerant or suspicious of animals - and I guess of people who were "other". How Mimi, Machete and Basin have introduced me to dogs as beings, as subjects, not objects. For that, I am grateful. And I love how your writing connects a specific realization to larger bigger things about myself and how I live.