A Cat, an Ant, and the Question of Consciousness

A few weeks ago, I went to Bioneers with the Great Transition Stories and NewStories teams, and ever since then, I’ve been thinking about consciousness. This seems absurd to me, since even Michael Pollan said that, even after writing a book about consciousness, he has no idea what it is. But my mind has been chewing on this question nonetheless.

Life Turned the Sky Blue

At Bioneers, writer Ferris Jabr spoke about how we tend to think that after Earth formed, Life appeared, and as Earth changes, Life adapts. In his book he says “Life has been a formidable geologic force throughout Earth’s history.” Microbes may have helped form continents. Cyanobacteria oxygenated the atmosphere, turning the sky blue. Life didn’t simply adapt to Earth—Life transformed Earth, and Earth transformed Life in return.

I remember him saying it is not “Life on Earth,” but “Life is Earth animated.” As a former geologist, that stuck with me.

Precious Mae

While all this has gone on in my mind, my cat, Precious Mae, got sick. At first, I thought she was getting better, but then things went downhill quickly.

I awoke one morning, and she would not come out from under the bed. It was dark under there, so I couldn’t quite see her, but knew something was drastically wrong. I took her to the emergency vet who told me she had a stroke and was completely blind.

“But I had shone a flashlight on her, and she blinked.”

“Reacting to light is only a reflex,” the vet replied.

But while I sat with her waiting for my husband to join me before taking the next inevitable step, I sat in front of her face and talked to her. What was wild was that as I spoke, her eyes changed, and I could tell she recognized me. Her pupils had been completely dilated, but as I told her how much I loved her, the yellow edges of her irises would come in and out of view. I could tell she was struggling to focus on me. 

And then she reached her little paw toward me, despite the vet saying she had lost control of her limbs. It broke my heart.

After more than sixteen years with Precious Mae, it was obvious to me that she was a conscious being. She clearly had a mind of her own, and she understood much of what we said to her, for example, when we would ask her if she wanted to come inside before we left the house, you could see her thinking it over. Sometimes (mostly when it was lovely out) she would look around and then turn away from us, and other times she would look around and come running for the door. 

When the time finally came, the vet explained there would be two injections. The first would render her “unconscious,” the same medication used for surgery. The second, an overdose of the same drug, would stop her heart.

But what surprised me was this: it was not obvious to me when she died.

The vet told me she was gone because her heart had stopped. That was the medical definition of death. But it didn’t feel that simple sitting there beside her. I kept looking at her face. Nothing had changed. Then suddenly the eye she had seemed to see me with shifted back to its usual yellow-green color, the pupil narrowing into a slit, and I remember thinking, “Ok, that’s it” and “How weird is that.”

Then her body jerked a couple of times.

The vet calmly explained that muscles still fire signals as the body shuts down, but for a moment, I panicked. What if she wasn’t really gone yet? People get revived after their hearts stop, they even made me choose if I wanted to sign a DNR for her when I brought her in. So I just kept talking to her. Telling her I loved her. Kissing her little feet. Until I felt she was truly gone.

The Line Between

And afterward I found myself wondering: 

“What actually is the line between life and death?” 

“What is life if it can simply leave the body like that?”

“What exactly do we mean by consciousness?”

One of the things I keep circling back to is how blurry these categories suddenly seem once you really start paying attention. Under anesthesia, we say someone is unconscious, but their body still breathes. The heart still pumps. The nervous system still regulates countless invisible processes. There is still some kind of organizing intelligence at work. 

Terry Tempest Williams tells a story in her new book, “The Glorians,” that brought me a new level of understanding of how ants work together as a community. After a storm during the COVID shutdown, she followed an ant carrying a flower many times its size toward the ant colony in the desert beyond her house. She described being mesmerized as pairs of ants appeared several times exactly when help was needed, three ants for a larger obstacle, and then instantly disappeared again, poof (in my way of thinking, this is too random and too coordinated to be “instinct”). When the flower was finally delivered it seemed the entire colony came out to tear the flower to bits and carry it inside, where, she imagined, they were “lining a pathway to the queen.”

And then there’s all the recent research about plant communication, fungal networks, and forms of memory and responsiveness in living systems we once assumed were entirely mechanical.

A Communion of Subjects

The more I look, the harder it becomes to draw a clean line between consciousness and sentience, or between life and non-life. Maybe these things are not binary at all. Maybe they exist along a spectrum—an evolution toward greater complexity, relationship, responsiveness, and awareness.

Thomas Berry wrote that we are not “a collection of objects” but a “communion of subjects.” That phrase has stayed with me too.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether what we call Life, Consciousness, Spirit, Tao, or even Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields may all be different ways of describing aspects of the same underlying mystery.

The Same Process

We usually talk about evolution as something life does. But what if the evolution of life and the evolution of consciousness are actually the same process?

Earth formed from stardust coalescing into a fiery planet. Its surface cooled. Water appeared. Life emerged. And then Life itself began transforming the planet—creating continents, oxygenating the atmosphere, changing climate, chemistry, and possibility. As Life changed Earth, Life itself evolved into greater and greater complexity.

What if all of this is the Universe becoming increasingly conscious of itself? 

Maybe consciousness is not something isolated inside individual brains, but something the universe expresses through relationship, participation, and living systems.

Or maybe grief is simply making me ask bigger questions than usual.

Honestly, probably both.

What I know for certain is much smaller and more personal. A little cat shared her life with me for sixteen years. She loved me. I loved her. And sitting beside her as she crossed whatever threshold separates life from death made the whole universe feel far more mysterious and alive than it did before.