Chapter Twelve:
Ruminations
[Page 3]
I imagined the story continuing; maybe I would write a trilogy.
How were the mother and son received by their family, and by others
in the llama community? Some ridiculed them, others thought they
were dangerous or evil for turning to a spiritual tradition other
than Christian, and still others wanted to blindly follow them.
But there were also those people who thoughtfully evaluated their
message on its own merits. The vision spread beyond the llama community.
I saw the mother and son on "Good Morning America.'' I saw
them taking a pure white llama to an informal dinner at the White
House.
When Kelly and I ate dinner that evening, I told him the story;
my mind was racing on it.
"It's exciting!'' I exclaimed.
"As a story or as something real?''
"Both! A fictional form to discuss real ideas. Maybe communicating
with the llamas is part of what we need to survive.''
"Do you want to write it?''
"Maybe. But you know I've always shied away from fiction.
For one thing, I don't know if I could write in that form. It's
not anything I'm going to do right away. I'll let it percolate.''
Kelly's questions brought up a central issue for me. Always my
thinking brought me back to a tension, an interplay between what
I could observe and what I could imagine.
Writing fiction was one way of dealing with that tension between
observation and imagination. In fiction, and especially in science
fiction, you could assume all kinds of things that weren't accepted
normally, and the fun came in playing out the situations that then
developed.
I had seen my father doing just that. When I was in my teens, he
began publishing science fiction stories, under the pen name of
Cordwainer Smith. Actually, part of my fascination with animal consciousness
came from him. In some of his stories, he wrote about beings who
were part human, part animal. Their names showed their origins:
C'Mel was a cat/woman, D'Joan a dog/child.
But for whatever reasons, I wanted to explore what was real. I
once read a book called Kinship with All Life in which the
author, J. Allen Boone, had an extraordinary relationship with a
German Shepherd. I read the book with the same suspension of the
rules of ordinary reality that I would read my father's stories.
But Boone said his experiences did happen. I had to say I didn't
know. Then when Cider, our Rhodesian Ridgeback, was a puppy, she
pulled Kinship with All Life out of the bookshelf--and it
was a smallish book, not jutting out in any way--and chewed the
cover. This was the only book she ever chewed. Telling me something,
are you, Cider?
I wanted to relate to the animals I lived with as fully as I could,
and I wanted them to do the same with me. If we could communicate
telepathically, I wanted to.
People who discussed complex emotions and motivations in their
animal friends were sometimes accused of being anthropomorphic,
that is of attributing human experiences to animals. I would rather
risk that label than risk missing wonderful connections with these
wise animals. But I hungered to know when something was imagined
and when it was based in reality. What is reality? Kelly and I had
long talks about that question too.
I did imagine conversations with my llamas. I asked Lil why she
hadn't gotten pregnant. "I'm happy just the way I am,'' she
told me. It wasn't that she thought in words, but my left brain
did a translation.
"Lil, I really wish you'd get pregnant. I would just love
you to have babies. What would they look like? Imagine sitting here
in the field, surrounded by your own daughters and granddaughters.''
Lil seemed to relish this picture. "I do like babies,'' she
said.
One afternoon when I was pulling weeds in the garden, Tumbleweed
was watching me. His body language and the intensity of his gaze
conveyed such clear desire that right away I took him an armload
of the weeds. Then I realized that when I first thought of doing
that, I'd been sitting where I couldn't see him.
The love between humans and animals, the companionship, the playfulness,
the enjoyment of each other's company--all these seemed like a good
starting point. I guessed that any telepathic experiences I might
have with my llamas would be rooted in the sense of connection that
came from these emotions.
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