(i) Use your sympathetic imagination to become one with the animal and try to experience everything as the animal does and then, if you wish, pretend the animal had the gift of speech and "let it speak for itself." Perhaps imagine the animal {a} as truly wild and free, {b} in sanctuary or goshala (like this?), {c} in factory farm situation. Perhaps imagine the animal's aging and death as well as life in each of these three situations?

(ii) Imagine you are a Jain, Buddhist, or Hindu who can sense the soul of the animal. Describe what difference this belief makes in your appreciation and treatment of the animal. Using your imagination, describe the past lives of the soul that is in the animal and the lives to come as that soul takes different forms. Perhaps include your self as one of those forms in the past or in the future. How do these views of reincarnation affect your appreciation and treatment of the animal?

(iii) Imagine that you are one of the few who can sense the presence of the God or the divine in this animal. How does this make your perception and treatment of the animal different from your perceptions and treatmetns in (i) or (ii) above?

[2B] PLACE WRITING OPTIONS

Imagine  yourself the center of a cylinder about thirty feet in diameter radiating out from this spot and extending up into the sky and down into the earth. In that place (not back at the ranch house) write on one or more of the following topics:

[1] use your sympathetic imagination to identify with something within this circle that is not an animal and then give it a voice: what would it say if it could speak?

[2] extend own your sense of place to fill this circle: how does it feel to be here now? How would it feel to have been here for last hundred years, the last hundred million years or so? The next hundred years, the next hundred million years?

[3]imagine yourself above this circle looking down on you within it; how do you relate to the other objects within this circle? Do you belong here? Do you fit in? What is your role here?

[4] Desribe the activity in this cylinder right now? What energy fields are active? What life forces are in motion?

Repeat in different places, revealing in your writing how different they are, as in in the middle of a field, near the cemetery, under certain kinds of trees, near certain animals, etc.

[5] ONLY CONNECT: Try to get a sense of one in the many, unity in variety, the big picture. Perhaps compare the thoughts you have written down to Browning’s in the fields outside Rome a few centuries ago: "Two in the Campagna": " I wonder do you feel to-day /     As I have felt since, hand in hand,/ We sat down on the grass, to stray / In spirit better through the land, / . . . .For me, I touched a thought, I know, / Has tantalized me many times, / (Like turns of thread the spiders throw / Mocking across our path) for rhymes /To catch at and let go.             Help me to hold it! First it left / The yellowing fennel, run to seed / There, branching from the brickwork's cleft, / Some old tomb's ruin: yonder weed /Took up the floating weft,            Where one small orange cup amassed / Five beetles,--blind and green they grope / Among the honey-meal: and last, / Everywhere on the grassy slope / I traced it. Hold it fast!            The champaign with its endless fleece / Of feathery grasses everywhere! /Silence and passion, joy and peace, /  An everlasting wash of air-- /. . .. Such life here, through such lengths of hours, / Such miracles performed in play, / Such primal naked forms of flowers, / Such letting nature have her way /While heaven looks from its towers!

[6] “ONLY CONNECT” TO THE ANIMALS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE US: Try to get a sense of the sweep of time, of millions of years. Look at the white rocks all around you: mostly limestone: “Sedimentary rock composed primarily of carbonates, such as calcite CaCO3. Generally formed from deposits of the skeletons of marine invertebrates.” Write about the trillions of marine invertebrates who lived here when Texas was under the sea and whose skeleton remains you are walking on.

Or write from a more recent Texas perspective: Lonesome Dove: “You’ve been on too many burying parties,” Augustus said. “Old Wilbarger had a sense of humor. He’d laugh right out loud if he knew he had the skull of a buffalo cow for a grave marker. Probably the only man who ever went to Yale College who was buried under a buffalo skull. . . . .It’s all right, though. It’s mostly bones were riding over, anyway. Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains. Buffalo and other critters too. And the Indians have been here forever; their bones are down there in the earth. I’m told that over in the Old Country you can’t dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It’s interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it’s just fellow creatures; it’s nothing to shy from.” It was such a startling thought – that under him, beneath the long grass, were millions of bones – that Newt stopped feeling so strained. He rode beside Mr. Gus, thinking about it, the rest of the night.”    Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p.622.