The Sacred WE and How Caring for Animals Teaches Us Collective Joy

The tide was low along the Southern California coast when I saw them, a woman and a golden retriever walking side by side at the water’s edge. She wasn’t his owner; I’d overheard her earlier mention that she was just “watching him for the week.” Yet as they moved together through the sunset haze, a kind of choreography emerged, a natural rhythm that required no rehearsal, when she stopped to look at the sea, he paused too, tail brushing against her leg as if to say: 

I’m here.

I thought of the way our bodies tune to each other in moments of closeness, a phenomenon psychologists call physiological synchrony. Heartbeats, breathing, and even micro facial expressions align when we share emotional space. In one study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers found that people who sing, row, or even breathe together begin to move in unison at a biological level, a reminder that joy is, quite literally, a shared rhythm of being alive. Scientists sometimes refer to it as “we mode,” a state of collective joy that arises not from words, but from the shared pulse of connection. It happens in stadiums and concerts, in friendship circles and laughter. But here, it was happening between a person and a dog,  two species moving in perfect synchrony, bound by trust, presence, and the minor miracle of mutual care.

The Science of Togetherness

For most of human history, we mode was how we survived. It’s the collective rhythm of rowing crews, tribal dancers, mothers, and infants syncing their breath. In these moments, our nervous systems cease to function in isolation and begin to work in tandem. Researchers have long observed similar patterns between humans and animals. In a study published in Anthrozoös, Swedish scientists found that when owners petted their dogs for just a few minutes, both the owners and their dogs experienced a rise in oxytocin. The same hormone strengthens trust between parents and children, along with lower cortisol levels and steadier heart rates.

We like to imagine that animals exist on the periphery of our social world, but in truth, they draw us more deeply into it. Their gaze lowers our heart rate; their trust teaches us to stay. And in caring for them, even for a few days, we enter that ancient synchrony again. The heart remembers what the mind forgets: that joy is not something we generate alone.

The Surrogate Bond

There’s something uniquely tender about loving an animal that isn’t yours. A pet sitter, foster parent, or friend who walks a neighbor’s dog lives inside a love story with a built-in ending. You give your attention, your affection, your care, and then you return them, leash in hand, to someone else’s world.

But maybe that’s what makes it sacred. It’s love without possession. Joy without ownership. A fleeting connection that asks nothing in return except presence.

As the woman and the retriever turned back toward the cliffs, I could see their pace match again; her hair caught the wind as his ears flapped beside her. The moment was small, but it glowed: two beings holding the same rhythm, briefly aligned in time and spirit.

The Emotional Gift of Animals

Animals don’t just decorate our lives; they regulate them. Even borrowed companions steady our physiology in ways we can measure: slower heart rate, steadier breath, a softening of stress hormones, and a rise in oxytocin, the chemistry of safety and social bond. Decades of research on human-animal interaction suggest that contact with pets can lower subjective stress, promote heart rate variability and resilience, and ease perceptions of loneliness. None of this requires ownership; it requires presence.

They listen with their bodies and answer with their eyes. That wordless exchange is not sentimentality, it’s a social technology. Biologists would call it co-regulation; sociologists, a micro-community. The biologist E. O. Wilson further developed the “biophilia” hypothesis, arguing that humans possess an evolved affinity for other living beings. We feel better, in part, because we’re built to.

For those who live alone, travel often, or are carrying a private grief, animals open a temporary sanctuary where vigilance can rest. A weekend together, an hour on a beach, a nap with a dog’s rib cage rising under your palm, these intervals are small, but they compound. Afterward, people describe being more patient with partners, more available to friends, less depleted by the ordinary frictions of the day. The care we offer an animal returns as a capacity to care elsewhere.

Sociologists have a name for the charge that moves through a crowd when voices rise in unison: collective effervescence, Émile Durkheim’s term for the sacred energy of shared experience. Something like it hums in the space between a human hand and a warm muzzle. Two nervous systems find a standard tempo; attention synchronizes; anxiety yields to rhythm. The moment is fleeting, yes, but real, repeatable, and, for many of us, essential. It reminds us that well-being is not a solo project. It is practiced, again and again, in the company of another creature who asks only that we show up and mean it.

The Sacred We

I sometimes wonder if there’s a place beyond this world for those who care for animals,  the walkers, the sitters, the temporary guardians who give love simply because they can. If there is, I imagine it as an endless shoreline, where every creature we’ve ever held or healed runs free beside us, and the tide never recedes.

Until then, the sacred we is here, in every shared heartbeat, every synchronized breath, every small act of care that reminds us we are never truly alone.

When the drumbeats fade, and the circle dissolves, the air holds a silence thicker than before,  a stillness charged with recognition. People drift back into their separate lives, but something has changed in the way they move. Shoulders lower. Steps lighten. For a while, they carry the afterglow of belonging, that subtle knowledge of having been part of something larger and alive.

Collective effervescence is not a luxury of festivals or faith traditions. It’s a renewable human resource, one that civilization has drawn upon for millennia and that we can still tap into in our fractured modern day. Every time we gather, to sing, to march, to mourn, to plant, to dance, to listen, we’re not merely socializing. We’re repairing the invisible fabric that holds us together.

Durkhei, a French Sociologist,  believed the sacred was not elsewhere but between us, generated in the spark of shared attention. If that’s true, then our task is not to find holiness in higher places, but to make it here, in circles, in neighborhoods, in parks, on city sidewalks, wherever our lives converge for even a moment.

Because when we move together, even briefly, the world makes sense again.