This time last year, we were preparing this issue of The Witness on "Recovering our kinship with animals" for publication in December. Then came Sept. 11 and, with the rest of the country, we were jolted out of our routine and into an urgent focus on the attacks and their aftermath. We set aside the topic of animals and started thinking about religious fundamentalism and pluralism, about mass detentions and a culture of punishment, about faith and patriotism.

Yet curiously, as I think back to the days following the attacks, one of the things that stands out most clearly in my memory is an experience with an animal. For some weeks, I had been helping to care for Lucy, my friend Susan’s cat. Lucy had cancer. While Susan and her family were on vacation, I took turns with other neighbors going to visit Lucy, feeding and stroking her, and changing the pain patches that kept her comfortable. It was a kind of hospice care, not unlike my caregiving responsibilities for my 100-year-old great aunt, who lives with me.

Lucy died on Sept. 14, and her backyard funeral was one of two neighborhood gatherings I took part in that week – the other being a hastily assembled meeting for prayer and reflection on the attacks, culminating in a candlelight walk and vigil on a nearby freeway bridge.

The second gathering offered to friends and neighbors the chance to share our grief over the suffering of the victims, and to support one another in our lonelier grief over the paths our nation chooses that lead so inevitably to war. The first offered the chance to honor a very particular grief over the loss of a much-loved companion.

Like many people, I experienced after the attacks a heightened awareness of what mattered in my life. Both of these gatherings felt important. Both, I’d argue, could be seen as expressions of resistance to the logic of Sept. 11, in which the lives of individuals – human and non-human – are of little consequence.

In late September of last year, The Christian Science Monitor ran a story reporting that "since the attacks on the World Trade Center, record numbers of New Yorkers have volunteered to adopt homeless cats and dogs." Although part of the response arose from concern for animals who had lost their human companions, "the desire to connect with an animal in need ended up transcending the immediate impact of the events of Sept. 11," the Monitor reported, quoting a shelter worker who said that people were "just suddenly interested in any animals we have."

"I’ve been going up to strangers on the street and asking if I can pet their dogs," a woman who came to adopt a dog was quoted as saying. Another woman, who went home with two kittens, said, "I thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be some way of making a blessing come from this.’ These kittens are going to be that blessing."

Could it be that this desire to connect with animals was an intuitive movement toward the sources of healing we most desperately need at a time when the world system we have constructed – a system utterly dependent on the exploitation of other humans, as well as animals and the living earth – threatens to destroy us?

Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan [see interview, p. 14 ] tells of the traditional native stories and healing ceremonies that restore people to their proper place in the world. They are "stories of a world of unending relationship" in which bonds with animals are central, she says ("First People," from Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, ed. Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, Brenda Peterson, Ballantine, 1998).

"The stories that are songs of agreement and safekeeping, and the ceremonies that are their intimate companions, tell us not only how to keep the world alive, they tell us how to put ourselves back together again. In the language of ceremony, a person is placed – bodily, socially, geographically, spiritually and cosmologically – in the natural world extending all the way out into the universe. This placing includes the calling in of the animal presence from all directions."

Today "we stand between destruction and creation, between life and death, for other species and ultimately for ourselves," Hogan writes. The events of last September – and the war that followed – were a tragic reminder of that. Perhaps, if we are to find healing and restoration to our human place, we cannot do it on our own. The stories of our own tradition also teach that we share the garden with other earth-creatures formed from the same clay.

If we lose our relationship with the animals, Hogan says, "some part of our inner selves knows that we are losing what brings us to love and human fullness. Our connection with them has been perhaps the closest thing we have had to a sort of grace."

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness.