What are your favorite animals?
Sunday, 23rd November 2025
The bench caught the sun first – that precise geometry of warmth and wood that makes November mornings bearable – and Tom’s small dog, whose name I’ve never learned despite three years of morning greetings, had claimed it with the satisfied authority of someone who knows exactly where they belong.
Tom and I exchanged our usual three words: “Holding steady, then.” A shared look at the river doing its competent work. The dog, content simply to exist in that sun-warm patch, asked for nothing we couldn’t give.
The Creatures We Trust
The prompt arrived earlier today with deceptive simplicity: What are your favourite animals? But standing there watching that small dog practise the art of being perfectly, unselfconsciously present, I realised the question was asking something else entirely – what kinds of creatures have I trusted enough to let into my carefully ordered life, and what does that say about the kind of care I’m now willing to give and receive?
The harbour has its own bestiary. Gulls perform their operatic grievances like a Greek chorus with opinions about everything – the ferry schedule, the quality of the fishing, whether the tourists have left adequate tribute. I’ve come to appreciate their comic persistence, the way they argue with the tide and each other with equal conviction, wholly untroubled by dignity.
Then there’s the occasional heron – lesson in stillness made visible. It appears without announcement on the pilings near the old shipyard, practising a quality of attention I’ve spent thirty years trying to cultivate professionally. The heron doesn’t hurry. It simply waits, watches, trusts that what it needs will eventually present itself within reach. There’s a rigour to that patience I find oddly reassuring.
And beneath the surface, the anonymous fish and crabs whose lives run parallel to mine – invisible most days, occasionally surfacing during the river clean-ups Kevin coordinates. Their existence asks nothing of me, requires no reciprocity, yet somehow their persistence matters. The harbour wouldn’t be itself without them, any more than a consulting room would be itself without silence between the words.
The Animals Who Prescribe Us
In session after session, I’ve watched patients’ pets perform quiet miracles. Cats who sit vigil during depressions, their weight on a lap translating to you are still here, and that still matters. Dogs who insist their people get out of bed each morning, who impose structure when the mind has abandoned all architecture, who greet failure and success with identical enthusiasm.
I’ve prescribed companionship on four legs more times than I can count – gently suggested that the young man learning to live alone might benefit from something that needs feeding, that the recently bereaved woman might find solace in a creature whose grief is uncomplicated, that the anxious teenager might discover that responsibility, in small doses, can be grounding rather than overwhelming.
Yet I’ve never quite permitted myself the same. My flat above the consulting room remains meticulously animal-free. No fur on the furniture, no unexpected needs disrupting the schedule, no creature waiting at the door who doesn’t care how competent I’ve been that day.
The fern on the sill doesn’t count, though I tend it with perhaps more attention than strictly botanical. It asks so little – light, water, the occasional repotting – and forgives so much. But it doesn’t greet me. It doesn’t insist I plan beyond work. It allows me to remain, if I’m honest, exactly as defended as I’ve always been.
What I’m Almost Ready For
Lately, walking past the animal shelter on Harbour Street after my Tuesday watercolour class, I’ve let myself imagine – not yet enact – the possibility of adopting an older rescue animal. Something with its own history of careful self-protection. Something that would require me to plan beyond the next therapeutic hour, to tolerate being needed in ways that can’t be scheduled away.
An older dog, perhaps, with Tom’s dog’s gift for claiming sun-warm patches. Or a cat with the heron’s capacity for companionable silence. Not a project to be managed or a problem to be solved, but a presence that would insist, gently but persistently, that I show up – not as Dr Bennett, but simply as the person who fills the bowl and opens the door.
The thought terrifies me slightly, which is usually how I know something matters.
Because here’s what I’m learning, what Tom’s dog taught me again this morning without trying: the best creatures don’t require us to be extraordinary. They simply expect us to be present, to notice, to offer what we can – warmth, food, attention – and to receive what they offer in return without making it complicated.
Starting Small
So for now, I’m starting with the fern and Tom’s dog – the former as practice in tending without drama, the latter as reminder that belonging needn’t be complicated to be sustaining.
But I’ve been carrying the shelter’s card in my coat pocket for three weeks now, and this morning I transferred it to my desk drawer. Not hidden, exactly. Just waiting for the day when imagination becomes intention, when the threshold between careful solitude and ordinary companionship feels crossable.
The harbour is darkening now, the Sunday sailors heading in. Tomorrow will bring its sessions, its small revelations. But underneath the familiar routines, something’s shifting – a recognition that perhaps the next real threshold isn’t a watercolour class or a tentative dinner invitation, but letting something depend on me in a way that cannot be rescheduled, cannot be bounded by fifty-minute hours, cannot be kept safely adjacent to actual intimacy.
Tom’s dog chose that bench this morning without consulting anyone. Someday soon, I might be brave enough to choose similarly – to let a creature into my carefully ordered life and discover what becomes possible when care flows both directions, when coming home means being greeted by someone who doesn’t need me to be anything other than reliably, ordinarily present.
For now, the fern leans towards its window. The harbour keeps its counsel. And the shelter’s card waits, patient as a heron, in the drawer where I keep the things I’m almost ready for.
Catherine
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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