Signal Is a Language We Learn Late | Witch in Progress

This morning Luna spoke and I failed the exam.

Not catastrophically. Not morally. Materially.

She gave soft whines. A little agitation. A subtle increase in movement. She was not dramatic. She was not unreasonable. She was communicating. I missed it, or rather I registered it too vaguely and too late, and the result was a pound of poop and what looked like Lake Balaton spread across my foyer. An extremely concrete lesson in interspecies communication.

The claim here is that signal is often clear long before we know how to read it.

This is true with dogs. It is also true with bodies, relationships, houses, children, weather, and one’s own unraveling. By the time something becomes undeniable, it has usually been speaking for a while.

Animal communication is not inferior because it is nonverbal. It is often cleaner. Posture, restlessness, pacing, sound changes, eye movement, withdrawal, approach, tension, release — these are highly specific forms of information if you are paying attention. The issue is not that signal is absent. It is that modern humans are often undertrained in perception. We are overeducated in abstraction and undereducated in noticing.

Interoception research makes a parallel point about the human body. Internal signals are present, but the relationship to them can become degraded when attention is elsewhere or when certain cues are repeatedly overridden (Khalsa et al., 2018; Craig, 2002). That is one reason this morning felt instructive beyond the cleaning supplies. Luna has her language. I have mine. The work of home is learning the threshold where they begin to meet.

What I love, even in the absurdity of the foyer disaster, is that the lesson was honest. She was not “bad.” I was not evil. We were in early translation. She knows my language better than I know hers right now, which is both humbling and probably deserved. But I intend to change that over the next year.

That intention matters to me more than having gotten it right immediately. Because relationship is not mind-reading. It is repeated study. Attention. Pattern recognition. Repair. Learning what agitation sounds like when it is about the body and not about danger. Learning what quiet means when it is restful and when it is watchful. Learning the difference between bark as information and bark as overflow.

Ancient forms of animal knowledge were built this way: not through dominance fantasies but through long observation. Shepherds, farmers, hunters, women in courtyards, children who lived close to animals — they knew tone shifts, gait changes, the meaning of a held stare, a refusal of food, a restless circle, a certain kind of silence. The knowledge was relational and embodied. You learned because life with animals required it.

Modern life often robs people of that literacy. Then we sentimentalize animals instead of studying them. We say we love them while failing to learn their actual communications. Luna is already correcting that in me. Good.

Because there is something morally clarifying about another creature forcing you to become more perceptive.

I missed the signal. Then I cleaned the floor. Then I understood a little more.

Which is often how learning works when you are lucky enough to be taught by reality instead of theory.

✨ Ritual Invitation

For ten minutes today, observe without interrupting. Your dog, your child, your own body, the room. Do not explain what you notice. Just collect signals.

💬 Your Turn

Name one signal in your life you only recognized after the mess was already on the floor.
Finish this sentence: “I am learning that communication is not only words. It is also __________.”

References

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894

Khalsa, S. S., et al. (2018). Interoception and mental health: A roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501–513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004

Payne, E., Bennett, P. C., & McGreevy, P. D. (2015). Current perspectives on attachment and bonding in the dog-human dyad. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 8, 71–79. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S74972