"Once, we were born in kinship with the ones we hunted or worshipped and the one who hunted and watched us; the wolves who came closer and eventually became our friends and workmates; the cattle and sheep and pigs that, for a time, shared our houses. Within our collective lifetime, in most of the world, the ancient patterns fell away. We struggle to fill that emptiness. Sometimes we succeed.

"Like E. O. Wilson, Paul Shepard has had a profound impact on the study of the human relationship with nature. His most famous contribution is the 'Pleistocene paradigm,' a critique of modern, sedentary civilization. 'In such a world there is no wildness, as there is no tameness,' he writes. Our alienation from the rest of nature traps us in an infantile or adolescent psychological state. Our healing as a species, according to Shepard, requires us to become closer to our roots in the Pleistocene. Shepard, who died in 1996, offered little practical advice about how to get to that state of grace — not back to nature, because one cannot return to what is already inside us and always has been. Rather, we should recognize the psychological and spiritual space that we share with other animals, learn to enter it at will, and then go forward to nature. In that world, Shepard writes, the 'otherness of nature becomes accessible to humans in fabulous forms of incorporation, influence, conciliation, and compromise.'

"People are not going to start chipping obsidian arrowheads anytime soon, at least not in large numbers, but perhaps we can advance toward the Symbiocene, the age of connectedness — encompassing reciprocity and redistribution — where wildness survives, albeit in new forms and in unexpected places, where we live in balance with other life. Many of us can at least feel the possibility of that newer world. Especially during those times when our hubris recedes momentarily, when, like polar explorer Ann Bancroft, we find ourselves suspended between life and death, in a place where a still-wild god walks on four legs just beyond the horizon.

"Thomas Berry reminded us that 'the Earth functions at a depth beyond our capacity for active thought,' and that as humans are forced to experience their damage to the Earth as damage to themselves, they may yet change course: 'We probably have not had such participation in the dream of the Earth since earlier shamanic times, but therein lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire Earth community.'

"Our times call for the adoption of a basic principle that embraces both survival and joy. We might call this the reciprocity principle: For every moment of healing that humans receive from another creature, humans will provide an equal moment of healing for that animal and its kin. For every acre of wild habitat we take, we will preserve or create at least another acre for wildness. For every dollar we spend on classroom technology, we will spend at least another dollar creating chances for children to connect deeply with another animal, plant, or person. For every day of loneliness we endure, we'll spend a day in communion with the life around us until the loneliness passes away.

"Poems are constructed not only with words but also from the spaces between the words. This is true for our relationships with other people, and it is also true for our connection to other animals. Our lives are poems. As are theirs. We write them together. In the habitat of the heart — in that whisper of recognition between two beings when time seems to stop, when space assumes a different shape — in that moment, we sense a shared soul. That is what connects the woman and the bear, the diver and the octopus, the dog and the child, the boy and the jaguar, the fisherman and the golden eagles on the shore.

"Through the eyes of the people who have shared their stories, I have come to see the world differently. In their voices, I hear a refrain. Expectation still arrives with the spring, as do beautiful acts."