Wild Geese and Other Teachers: Learning from Animal Encounters

The first time I saw a flock of wild geese lift off from a frozen lake, I was in the middle of a difficult winter. I had been struggling with a writing project for months, circling the same ideas without making progress. One morning, tired of staring at my screen, I drove to a nearby wildlife refuge and parked near the water. The lake was half-frozen, the sky the color of old pewter, and then, without warning, hundreds of geese rose into the air at once. The sound was immense, a chorus of honking and the thunder of wings. I stood there, breathless, and something in me shifted.

I have had a handful of encounters like this over the years, moments when an animal appears and, for reasons I cannot fully explain, changes the way I see things. A fox crossing a snowy field at dusk. A heron standing motionless in a shallow stream. A swarm of monarch butterflies resting on a single tree, their wings folded like tiny stained-glass windows. These encounters never last long, but they leave a mark.

The Unexpected Gift of Animal Presence

What is it about animals that moves us so deeply? Part of it, I think, is their otherness. They do not care about our deadlines or our anxieties. They are not impressed by our accomplishments. They simply are, fully and completely, in the moment. When we encounter them, we are invited to step outside of ourselves, to remember that the world is larger and stranger than our daily routines suggest.

For a writer, these encounters can be generative in ways that are hard to predict. I have written poems that began with the memory of a single deer, essays that started with a line about a crow's call. But more often, the animals show up in my writing indirectly, as a kind of background music, a reminder of the wildness that persists even in the most ordinary places. They teach me to pay attention to what is not human, to listen for voices that are not my own.

Writing the Encounter Without Taming It

There is a temptation, when writing about animals, to make them mean something. To turn the fox into a symbol of cunning, the heron into a figure of patience. But the best writing about animals resists this impulse. It lets them be what they are: mysterious, autonomous, indifferent to our need for meaning. When I write about the geese, I try to capture the sound of their wings, the cold air, the way the ice cracked under their weight. I try to stay close to the experience itself, rather than rushing to interpret it.

This is harder than it sounds. We are meaning-making creatures, and we want our stories to add up. But sometimes the most honest thing we can do is simply bear witness. The geese rose. The sky was gray. I stood there, and for a moment, I forgot to be afraid. That is enough. That is more than enough.