ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature crisis through looking at how one might work towards dynamic coexistence with non-human nature through communicating and bonding with domestic mammals, thereby anchoring ourselves in the world. It explores the negative and positive peace between humans and non-human nature, and introduces 'animate peace' to suggest that peace is a dynamic, complex and challenging, in addition to rewarding, state of affairs. The chapter focuses on the multimodal, holistic character of communication; how it is temporally layered and emerging in a relationship that transforms both parts; and how it marginalises verbal language as a means of communication. It expresses that the communication with animals calls for aesthetic imagination: an imagination that is affected by and partly parallel with actual interactions, and operates with images more than concepts. Aesthetic imagination provides an alternative to the striving for control, with its implications of unilateral power and violence, and a poetic home for animal affections.
