Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, March 2, 2025
Did you ever wish you could talk to animals when you were a kid?
I did. As a child, I longed to understand them—not just their behaviors, but their thoughts, their emotions, the stories they held in their bones. But like most childhood dreams, I let it fade as I grew older. The world has a way of convincing us that wonder is something to outgrow.
And I might have believed that—until the day I saw a documentary about Anna Breytenbach, a professional animal communicator from South Africa. In the film, she connected with a black leopard named Spirit who had been deeply misunderstood in captivity. But through deep listening, she was able to hear him—to understand the grief and pain that lived in his body.
Something inside me cracked open as I watched Anna transform Spirit’s life through communicating with him and his human caretakers.
For the first time since I was a child, I believed my dream of being able to talk to animals wasn’t just a fantasy—it could be my reality.
A few years after I saw the documentary, Spirit visited me in a dream.
In the dream, I was leading an animal communication retreat, guiding others into silence, when Spirit emerged from the darkness. His black coat gleamed like liquid night. He pressed his forehead against my third eye, sending a ripple of energy through my body.
“You have forgotten how to listen,” Spirit said.
His voice wasn’t human, but it vibrated through me like I’d always known the language.
“Your purpose is to help humans remember—to teach them to speak with us, with all life.”
I woke with a strong sense of being guided by Spirit, but I never could have predicted what would come next.
About a year later, in the summer of 2024, I was invited to attend the World Plenary Gathering of Quakers in South Africa. It was an amazing opportunity, but what sealed my decision to go was an image I saw online while researching places to visit – a photograph of a leopard named Una, a captive female living at a wildlife sanctuary called the Daniell Cheetah Project.
Her golden eyes gazed into my soul, almost like she was calling me, and I knew I had to meet her.
In August, I boarded a plane and flew 18 hours to Johannesburg, where I spent two weeks in deep, deep worship with Quakers from all around the world.
I had a wonderful time at the World Gathering, though I did have a small crisis of faith partway through, which I’m sure some of you can relate to – but that’s a story for another time.
After the gathering, I went to the airport, picked up a rental car and quickly taught myself how to drive on the other side of the road, which was a lot easier in reality than it was in my head, thank goodness!
A few weeks into my trip, I arrived at The Daniell Cheetah Project where I met…
…Una, the leopard from the photo, and Vega, her male companion.
If Una was the sun, Vega was the storm. Most of the time, he was calm, moving through their enclosure with quiet intensity. But at feeding time, the storm would break…
…and he would lash out, snarling and charging the fence, his frustration spilling over.
The keepers dismissed Vega’s aggression, affectionately calling him special while doting on sweet, gentle Una.
But when I looked into Vega’s eyes…
…I saw pain beneath his rage.
One evening, I sat quietly by Vega’s enclosure, reaching out to him with the silent language I was learning to trust.
“What’s hurting you?” I asked.
A flood of images and emotions surged through me—vast, open spaces, the scent of wild grasses, the weight of a world he was meant to belong to and the unbearable ache of knowing he never would.
“I don’t belong here,” he told me, leaning his heavy head against the chain link fence separating him from his freedom.
His grief struck me with the force of a river breaking through a dam as it converged with my own ocean of despair. It was an ancient, aching sorrow that held the weight of generations, of wild instincts caged and freedom taken away. It was betrayal, rage, the agony of knowing his soul was too vast for the bars that held him.
I recognized his grief. I had felt it before—the pain of being trapped in a place that doesn’t fit, the helplessness of having no way out. I had known betrayal, too. I had been hurt by people I trusted, and in some ways, I had caged my own wildness within the confines of fear, expectation, and the silent rules of a world that teaches us to tame ourselves – to trade instinct for obedience, longing for practicality, intuition for logic, and freedom for the illusion of safety.
A world that builds cages not just for animals, but for people – separating families at borders, locking away those deemed ‘other,’ enforcing invisible walls of oppression that tell us who belongs and who doesn’t.
Vega’s captivity was made of steel and chain-link. Mine, like so many others, was built from stories designed to keep us small, afraid, and disconnected from the wildness and freedom that is our birthright.
I could have turned away. But I stayed. I opened myself to him.
I let his grief pour through me, hollowing me out with the unbearable weight of our collective pain as I wept for all the captive souls whose freedom will never be known.
I allowed the dense, excruciating energy to move through me like a current, channeling it down, down, down into the Earth beneath me. I imagined the soil drinking it in, transmuting our pain like rain, holding it in the vastness of something ancient enough, strong enough to transform it.
As the energy moved, something shifted. The storm raging inside Vega softened. His breath slowed. His body relaxed. He leaned against the fence and grumbled his thanks, assuring me that “We can walk together on this path towards healing.”
The following night, I returned to find both Vega and Una waiting for me.
This time, their energy was different—less guarded, more open. They had something to tell me.
I closed my eyes and listened.
What emerged was less like a conversation and more like a marriage counseling session—two leopards, bound together in captivity, struggling to reconcile their reality with the vastness of what they had lost. Vega’s voice, raw and untamed, carried the sharp edges of grief. Una’s, softer, held the weight of quiet endurance.
They told me they were aware that they were expected to breed and posed a heart wrenching question to me:
“How do we raise a child in captivity?”
It wasn’t a question of biology. It was the kind of question that stretches across species, across time—a question whispered in the aching hearts of parents who have been stripped of the ability to give their children the life they deserve.
I heard it in Vega and Una’s voices, but I also heard it echoing through the generations of people who have known forced displacement. Parents cradling their babies in refugee camps, undocumented families fearing the knock of an immigration officer, entire cultures severed from their roots, their traditions, their homelands.
“Will our children ever know what it means to be free?”
I felt the depth of their sorrow, the fear that their children would never belong to the vast, open spaces that still lived inside their blood.
“They will know,” I told them. “Because of your sacrifice.”
I assured them that one day their babies would be released into a protected reserve, free to roam and reclaim the wild that is their true home.
I also reminded them that even in captivity, the wild is never truly lost. It lives in the marrow, in the muscle, in the stories that live in our bones.
And in the same way, the wild within us stirs, moving through us like a quiet rebellion against everything that threatens to confine our spirit.
Two months after I left South Africa, Una and Vega gave birth to their first son, Nico.
Nico’s birth reminded me of a powerful encounter I had with a wild leopard in Kruger National Park.
The leopard was draped across a rocky outcrop, the rising sun painting his coat in hues of fire and shadow. As soon as the vehicle’s engine turned off, he turned his regal head and looked me dead in the eyes as though he’d been waiting for me, like we had a divine appointment scheduled.
In that instant, I felt the invisible thread that stretched between him and Nico, between Vega and Una, between all the caged and the free.
I thought of Spirit, urging me to help humans remember our connection with the wild world.
I thought of Una, calling me across time and space to help her and her mate reconcile their fate.
I thought of Vega, of the grief he carries in his body, and the way it had mingled with my own and our collective grief and poured through me into the Earth.
I thought of Nico…
…born into captivity, but carrying the wild inside him.
And I thought of us—of humanity, of the ways that we, too, have been severed from our wildness.
We have been told that captivity is normal. That we must shrink to fit within borders, within laws, within cages built of fear and control. That the wild parts of us—the instinct, the longing, the untamed knowing—must be buried, forgotten, domesticated.
But I do not believe that.
Because the wild does not die. It waits. It remembers. It calls.
And all we need to do to hear it is listen.
To listen with the ears of our heart.
So, I invite you to transfer authority from your head to your heart and listen to the wild yearning within you as we settle into worship.
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Briana Halliwell is a member of Vassal;boro Friends Meeting. She is a contemplative activist, creative communicator, wandering mystic, and intuitive interspecies communicator who hears a Divine Call to weave the forgotten web of connection back into the places (both personal and collective) where colonizer consciousness has spread the lie that humans are separate from each other and the Earth. Briana is acutely aware of what she calls the “Cosmic Ache” – as an empath and vessel of Divine Source, she can feel in her body the collective wounds of humanity and the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth. She is called to help humanity heal from the deleterious effects of global colonization through helping people to reconnect with their innate belonging to the wider Earth community.
You can find information about Briana Halliwell’s current project here.
