All creatures know love.

Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash

All creatures know love. All creatures.

I’ve thought of this line almost every day for several years. It started while I was preparing to teach an animal writing class on Zoom (held jointly between my students at Shakopee Prison and a group of outside writers from Writing in the Dark). I was reading a lot of books featuring animals, one of which was Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy. It’s a novel about a biologist who studies wolves and reintroduces wolves to their natural habitats. It's also a murder mystery, a family saga, a love story, and a whole bunch of other things. I enjoyed it and learned a lot about wolves.

The line "all creatures know love" is spoken by the main character’s father, who lives off grid in the woods. In the scene where he says this, he’s with the protagonist, who is still a girl at the time, and she’s asking about the sentience of animals. After boiling it all down to this simple observation about love, the father says "...the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart.”

Anyway, I think one of the reasons I think about that line so much— "all creatures know love"—is because it captures something complicated and profound in just a handful of the plainest worker words in the English language. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to sum up an entire life philosophy or roadmap for decency—four extremely simple words: all creatures know love.

Because they know love, they also know grief. Dogs, for instance, grieve their owners’ deaths, and this has been depicted in art for centuries. Wild animals, too, feel love—elephants, monkeys, dolphins, giraffes.

Linda Oatman High, author of One Amazing Elephant, says¹:

Elephants do grieve, and they are one of the few animals who are similar to humans in mourning patterns. Believe it or not, elephants cry. They bury their dead and pay tribute to the bodies and to the bones. Scientists have observed that elephants feel empathy: they toss dust upon the wounds of fellow elephants, they help others climb out of mud and holes, they even have been seen plucking tranquilizing darts from one another with their trunks. Researchers have observed elephants trying to help dying friends, lifting them with tusks and trunks, crying out in distress.

I think of the perfect poem—truly perfect—called “Tour of Grief”² by Melissa Studdard, about the literal tour of grief endured by the orca whale Tahlequah, or J35 as she is known by researchers, when her baby died after birth and she carried it on her back for 17 days, 1000 miles.

We watch through binoculars / As if distance / were real … it’s breathtaking and requires a second reading and a third and fourth after we get to the end of this small, strong fist of a poem.

The words, the line breaks, the magnificent clarity and inevitable surprise of this absolute truth. I actually gasped the first time I read this poem.

We are both the burden and bearer, separate from the wild—including inside ourselves—sitting apart from nature and each other, as if distance were real.

It’s becoming too heavy.

Yet, all creatures know love.

We must carry all we can, including each other, tossing dust, removing darts, lifting tusks and trunks, for as long and far as we can.

Love,

Jeannine

PS If you would like to keep creating through uncertainty, please join us for Writing in the Dark’s The Art of the Scene intensive. We would love to write with you in our safe, light-filled community.

1. https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/harperkids/the-five-animals-that-grieve

2. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/326/article/737957/pdf