I watch the rabbit, and it watches me. He or she is a small bunny sitting motionless about 10 feet away. It just stares while not moving a hair. But I’m only in a small fraction of its vision with that one dark black eye on the right side of its head pointing at me. What does it see with the eye I cannot see? What does it think while it watches the potential threat that wasn’t so threatening that, on my approach it held its ground?

I’ve seen this rabbit before, or at least I think it is the same one. It’s likely seen me more times than that as it maintains its stealthy position low to the ground and often behind bushes. Initially, I thought the rabbit somehow missed seeing me walk up to it and that I’d startle it to run away in just a second, but instead, it seemed to track me with that one dark eye. Maybe it knows I’m a predator as it sees this creature with two eyes trained on it while it has an eye on the other side of its head to maintain maximum coverage of everything around it. If I’m a predator and it runs, maybe I’ll give chase? Strange how it’s almost blind to what’s in front of it, but what need is there to see your food when staring at it might make you food for someone else. So there we are two creatures on two different planes of consciousness, just looking at each other.

I’m out on my walk and have nothing better to do than stand here and stare. Apparently, the rabbit is feeling likewise. It’s obviously not only looking out for food or a mate, as it has time for this encounter. Then I start wondering, how is this other creature seeing me? What is going through its mind? I know I’m supposed to believe that the rabbit is only operating on an instinctual machine-like mechanism and any other desire of me to imbue it with anything else risks anthropomorphizing it. But how can I be certain that there isn’t a kind of joy when the rabbit plays with another rabbit, or maybe it enjoys a type of weather more than another? Is there any gratification when finding a favorite food?

I wonder if, as we as a species become more proficient at electronically reading our own minds. we’ll be able to turn that technology on animals at some point and see what they are thinking? Could we handle their thoughts? What if thoughts and feelings among the various species were as complex as our own, but we’d discounted their potential intelligence due to the lack of having an opposable thumb? Would we enjoy knowing their fear of us? Are we their COVID-19? Are we the apex virus? What exactly is our intention of taking our species to other planets, and how will the DNA we carry alter those places and species that might be encountered? Do we ever begin to understand the larger arc of group-think driving humanity and what our ultimate intentions really are? Maybe our ideas of benevolence are a self-deception that only other species can really see.

Later, on my afternoon walk under the sweltering sun that boils the air to a languid 108 degrees of Fahrenheit hell, the rabbits are nowhere to be seen. Few birds are out and about; even the lizards are taking a siesta. They seem to be taking shelter from the heat; only the two-legged super predator is stalking the environment, in the form of myself. Maybe they want to venture out, but we’ve controlled their landscape and rationed resources, so with concrete, asphalt, and limited plant cover, they must rest from the struggle to move within our maze.

On the other hand, maybe they are just chilling out. Just as we move indoors to find comfort from the scorching sun, could they be in their burrows and nests, snuggling with their family and celebrating that the morning’s search for food was successful? We can’t know their life as we barely know our own. We go about much of what we do as a response to conditioning and the need to satisfy a whim, often induced by clever marketing that convinces us to head out for that drive-thru to collect a coffee or a Big Mac. How many things do we do over the course of the day as a kind of automatic routine that could be seen as being from a dumb instinctual animal?

When we are thinking about nothing in particular and our thoughts are wandering over a landscape with an uncritical eye, are we experiencing the mind of the rabbit? I’d like to say this phenomenon of the quiet brain is a new artifact of this older person carrying it around, as I do have distinct memories of a racket of thought that seemingly never shut off when I was younger. Strangely enough, this former version of John who certainly lends his observations and experiences to the current John, is nonetheless a wholly different person I can no longer reconnect with. It’s almost as though I see myself from the past with a single dark eye from one side of my head, and I’m only in the peripheral vision while the majority of my attention is taken up by the other 98% of what I currently see. Maybe we are not so different from the rabbit.