Friendship is a Mysterious Cosmic Force

I don’t really understand what it is, but I need it.

"Cat & Dog Scared" by linein is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

One of my favorite animal videos (and I watch a lot of these, so I have many favorites) is the trail camera footage that captured a coyote and a badger trotting into a dark culvert together. There’s something almost metaphysical about the culvert itself: it could be a metaphor for so many things. They’re just passing below a road, but it looks like they could be traversing the boundary between life and death together. It is, to me, such an iconic picture of friendship: a pair of fellow travelers, off for a great adventure. Every time I watch it, I long for a friend to invite me to do something wild and unpredictable. I long for an adventure with a friend.

Coyotes and badgers apparently do hunt together with some frequency. While both are fine hunters on their own, they often hunt the same territories and can bring distinct predatory skills to the table. Badgers are great at burrowing, and coyotes are better at the catch. Together they can take their hunt from the underworld to the upperworld. Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from sometimes hunting one another as well. 

Some of you, no doubt, will accuse me of projecting my desire to see friendship at work onto this more than human collaborative relationship. In my desire to see my own values reflected back at me, I’m projecting this human idea of friendship onto the more than human world, in places where it doesn’t really apply. I’m anthropomorphizing. I think there’s something to this critique. And, in the past, I’ve even written about and problematized our human tendency to read interspecies friendship as evidence of some utopian fantasy at work in nature. Often, when I see those cute interspecies friendship videos on Instagram, I’m just trying to decide which ones were created on some sick animal farm where baby creatures are forced to be content creators alongside their predators all day long. 

Despite this, there’s something in me that refuses to surrender the term “friendship” when I look at animals—like this coyote and badger—engaging in some shared enterprise together. I think interspecies friendship is something real—more than just a utopian fantasy. I always bristle when people call me a “dog mom” because I live with a dog, or when people call me the “mommy” of my dog (which is actually uncomfortably common.) I don’t think of myself as a parent to my dog, I think of me and my dog as friends. We are fellow travelers who rely on one another, learn from one another, and sometimes game one another for stuff we need or want as we trot together down that dark portal between life and death. 

When friendship is something we can see at work in the bonds between animals of other species, I think this helps us see something true about friendship itself: it’s a cosmic mystery playing out in the fabric of life. It’s a force of nature. It’s something that we need, and depend upon. But it’s also something that escapes our understanding. Because it’s a force of nature, maybe we can learn as much about friendship from other animals as we can from one another. Why shouldn’t they unlock secrets of friendship for us? Or with us? After all, as that classic kids’ show about animals (ponies, primarily) reminds us: friendship is magic.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s not possible to define friendship. We talk about it endlessly, we’re always looking for it. We seem to know intuitively when we’ve found it, and when it’s been lost. But, nevertheless, it’s a bond that defies simple or direct description. It’s a mystery that escapes us, even as we depend upon it to stay alive. Every friendship is complicated and is, essentially, its own living force.  Some friendships are deep and profound, others are superficial and playful. Every friendship escapes hard rules and formulas. But they are all, somehow, part of this spectrum of friendship that acts like a mysterious force of nature.

I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot because my daughter, who just turned eight, has been wanting to talk about it. It’s summer now. The school year is over, and the kids have entered that liminal zone between one grade and another. They’re filled with little anxieties about who they might become, as they cross into the next paradigm. But for the time being, they wait and exist in that other spacetime: summer vacation. 

This week she left for her first week of summer camp—her first sleepaway camp—and one of the things she was most anxious about was how to navigate the complex rivers of friendship. She’s going to the camp with several friends from school, so she’s not afraid of being lonely. But she’s been scared about what to do when she feels left out, or when she feels like she’s been caught up in a drama that’s playing out between other friends. How can she best avoid taking sides?

When she learned that parents could send care packages for their kids to open up every day of camp, she asked me if I would write her a letter everyday. About friendship. About my real friends, when I was a kid, and how I handled problems with them. One of our little nightly rituals is to talk about friends, while I’m tucking her in at night. We talk about things that went wrong, situations she didn’t know how to handle, or things that simply went well. I think she wanted something like that, even if I couldn’t actually be there. 

I accepted the challenge. But, of course, being who I am I immediately started to overthink the whole thing. Who am I, I thought to myself, to wax eloquent to my child about things I don’t quite understand myself? But I had to try something. I owed her that much.

I planned out five little discourses on friendship. In one letter I told her about all of my earliest friends, and I reflected on the fact that often our friends aren’t necessarily chosen by us but for us (which makes them no less valuable!) In another I talked about neighborhood friends, and how to savor the childhood delights of hanging out. In another I wrote about those high drama friends, and how I learned that they’re often the people who are dealing with the most drama at home. I talked about how to recognize that magical little sparkle you sometimes feel, when you realize that you’re in the presence of a new friend. And about how weird, and counterintuitive, and yet also important, it is to make friends with yourself. I didn’t write her a letter about animal friends, but I realize now that I should have! At least I sent her off with some photos of our dog.

My husband laughed at me a little, when I showed him the letters, and said that I’d basically just written a series of five hyper-personalized Substack newsletters for her to read at camp. This made me worry that she wouldn’t actually have the time or inclination to read them to the end (as is so often the case with these, am I right?) But it did make me wonder: what kinds of sage words about friendship—about that galactic mystery we all need and depend upon and yet never quite understand—would my readers have? If you could tell an eight year old kid one important thing about friendship (understanding it, finding it, keeping or preserving it, changing with it) what would you say? What’s the wisdom you’ve gathered? How should we navigate this wild and wonderful force of nature?