“What animal would you be today,” I asked.
“I am an animal,” said Edge.
“Animals die easier, in more ways,” Waylon said.
I found these lines from June 2023, jotted down in an effort to remember, to come back to them at some point, and rediscovered the conversation while flipping through pages of the year.
A bird had been flitting between hanging baskets, pink petunias in the afternoon sun, before it swooped out from the porch and up into the air as my son spoke those words: animals die easier, in more ways. And I thought, but did not say to my 9-year-old, of mass shootings and gun deaths. Of how in church that Sunday, the Ministerial Intern, himself a gay man, spoke the statistic that among LGBTQ+ youth, there is a suicide attempt every 45 seconds. I thought about war and politics and lives valued in dollars.
“I want to be free in my animalness,” I said.
Now, here at the start of 2024, this is my word of the year: Animal.
Rooted. Clarity. Reciprocity. These have been my words in past years. I see now how each one led me to animal.
How I want to be free in my animal body. To belong to the place I live, to know it intimately. To stretch when I need to stretch, drink water when I am thirsty, rest when I am tired, walk in the woods every day.
How I want to listen as deeply as my dog, Gracie, does. To see as keenly as Merlin, our cat, does. To know that just as they are mine, I am theirs. To remember that we are all each other’s. To live in a way that reflects this belonging.
How I want to swap profit and loss for seeds and compost. To remember that before there was business there was community, and because humans are social animals, community will always persist.
And if, like Waylon said, animals die in more ways, then perhaps they can teach us to live in more ways, too. To live from a mix of wildness and belonging and love and curiosity and wonder that we, too, are made of.
Do you choose a word of the year? What is yours?
Love this. Yes.