Page 102 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Nancy Windheart

Saved by Whales

From the time I was a small child, I’ve had a deep curiosity about how other beings perceive

the world. As a girl, I’d spend hours alone in the park or in my bedroom, wondering about

how my dog or the trees experienced the world that I was seeing through my human eyes.

How did the world look to them? What did they feel? How did they sense, smell, hear, touch?

How did they understand their lives, their reality?

As I sat quietly pondering these questions with my dog, the trees, and the birds, I began to

learn to shift my awareness away from the perspective of my own human form and blend it

with the consciousness and awareness of other beings. I began to feel my dog’s experience

of the world from his perspective, rather than my own. I became aware of the enormous

sensitivity of feeling in the giant maple tree in my neighbor’s back yard as her branches

moved in the wind and glistened in the moonlight. I sensed the awareness of the insects and

the birds as they went about their daily lives.

My closest childhood friends were barn cats, the trees, and my dog. My relationship with the

human world was confusing and fractured. The first rift came in the separation from my birth

mother, and next in my adoptive family, where I experienced a confusing mix of love and fear

of my awareness and sensitivity. I saw things, felt things, and understood things that others

didn’t, and that were considered suspect at best, or evil at worst, in the fundamentalist

Christian religion to which my parents had dedicated their lives.

As a child, I spent as much time as I could away from other people, preferring time alone and

with my beloved animals and trees. My grandparents had a small dairy farm, and when I

visited, I’d spend whole days in the barn, singing to the barn cats, standing with the cows as

they ate their grain and hay, and sleeping in the hayloft with a kitten in my arms.

In these times, I discovered deep relationship, family, and kinship with non-human beings of

many species. More than “pets,” these creatures were my family, my connection, and my

primary place of belonging in the world. I trusted them, and I trusted the sensory, emotional,