So my guess is that some of you in the room are familiar with this concept of gateway drugs, right? This is the so-called softer drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and if you abuse them, you become interested in the harder, more intense stuff. I'm actually not here to talk about drugs, but I am here to talk about gateway love. You heard me right, gateway love. Because what's been happening for me is that the love that I've been experiencing, as I've had a relationship with my Poodlepal, this is my mini-poodlepal Mac, has completely transformed my life. It has made me fall very deeply in love with all living things at the same time. And it's intense. And it surprised me that anything would change because the thing is I've spent the last 20 plus years of my life doing community organizing, grassroots campaigning on behalf of planet Earth. I was already a nature lover, or so I thought. But I'm realizing now that I respected other life forms. I maybe even loved animals. But we all in this room know the difference between loving somebody and being in love with them, right? You know what I'm talking about? And so the muscles around my heart are just aching, not from heartbreak, but heart ache, like I have isolated the muscle group people, and I am loving, and it is intense. But I will tell you, there are consequences because it is ruined my relationship with bacon. I look at these little guys, I see them on Facebook, and my brain goes like this, oh, look at his eyes. Oh, I love him. Oh, he reminds me of Mac. Oh, I love Mac. Oh, I love the big. And then brunch is just a mess after that, you know? And the winged ones, this bird that comes for help with the porcupine quills in its face are this amazing video, the black bird, surfing snowboarding down the side of this roof on a plastic lid only to go up and fly into it again, just engaged in play. And it's deep what's happening. And I had thought that I already had integrated what Dr. Albert Switzer talked about, this reverence for life, this circle of compassion that we can extend to all living things, but I had intellectualized it. Now what's happening is I am integrating it into my heart and into my psychospiritual consciousness. And it's deep. You know, I know how this sounds. I had friends with pets before Mac came into my life. And it's like a little woo, woo, I know, I hear you. Stay with me because the thing is it makes perfect sense. There's this deep higher cognitive stuff that is going on with these other beings we share the planet with, you know? They nurture their young, they mourn their dead, they have compassion, they have profound memory, they have a consciousness of the past, present, and future. This is fantastic stuff. And so it's really exciting that there's something going on in the courts right now. I don't know if you saw the article in the New York Times this weekend. But there is an effort for us to rethink legally who these beings are, animals not as things, but as persons. Because the legal definition of a person, incidentally, is all that cognitive, higher cognition stuff that I was just talking about. Now corporations as people, I'm not going to go there. That is a totally different talk. However, the possibilities of what this means for me, I'm literally experiencing it in my gut. I feel it in my gut for real. I did a sugar cleanse recently and I started taking probiotics. And I realized that eating right was this animal welfare celebratory event inside my belly. It was communion. It was communication. And so I'm now I have to rethink my experience of what communication means. And I always thought interspecies communication would be like Sherman and Peabody. I'd hear Mac and instead of hearing bark, bark, bark, I would hear, will you take me to in and out or whatever it is that Mac might ask for. And what I started to realize is that the communication organ that I need to hone is not my ear. It's my heart that interspecies communication happens. And there are messages clearly sent and received with the heart. But the communication is happening and it's clear. It's just not about the ears and the voice. And so as I've rethought love and I've rethought compassion and I'm now rethinking communication, you know, the grassroots organizer in me is starting to think about rethinking grassroots organizing because as we've heard tonight and as we all know, the situation on the planet is intense. It is a little bit grim out there. We have social challenges. We have an incredible ecological crisis. And so what would it look like as an organizer for me to say, okay, I'm going to come into partnership and organize with all of these other beings on the planet? I mean, I know sensory at a sensory level, Mac's hearing, his smell, far exceeds mine. What else can Mac do? And if I extend these principles of community organizing that I do with humans and I start to extend them out to these other beings, that might be the formula that I need to actually be able to create a livable future, something that future generations, mine and Mac's might actually enjoy. And in community organizing, we talk a lot about power, power over versus power with or power within. And so I start thinking about, well, what it would actually be like to take leadership, to share power in a political realm, you know, could I break gridlock on Capitol Hill? Could we stop runaway corporate power if we were really taking leadership from and being connection with these other beings? And I really hope humans very soon stop poking and prodding and testing and yes killing all of these creatures to prove what we already know about who they are. And instead, we just start organizing with them because we're running out of time. And I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but all I know for sure is that now that this has been unlocked in me, this love has changed me. There is no looking back. And so I'm here to talk to you other two legids. Mac has sent me and I need to tell you what's happening to me and I'm going to use a paraphrasing of the great community organizer Harvey Milk. And I will say this, my name is Celia Alario and this is my Poodle-Powell Mac and we are here to recruit you to an interspecies community organizing project to build a movement for a just thriving and sustainable planet. Thank you.