Directions for Extra Credit Writing at “the Ranch”

Find yourself a place you wish to experience

In that place

(do not come back to write in a more civilized place)

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 three hundred words or so on one or more of the following topics:

[1] use your sympathetic imagination to identify with something within this circle and then give it a voice: what would it say if it could speak?

[2] extend 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] how is this place similar and different from your ideal place? What, if anything, is preventing you from being in heaven, completely happy, right here, right now?

[5] what activity is happening within 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. **

**DO NOT TEASE OR EVEN APPROACH THE LONGHORNS CLOSER THAN TEN FEET

5. ONLY CONNECT: compare your effort 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, / This morn of Rome and May?

              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-- /Rome's ghost since her decease.

            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 THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE:

“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.” How he died hadn’t been funny, Newt thought.

“It’s all right, though,” Augustus said. “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 b ones 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.

The white rocks you see around you here and under this soil are mostly limestone: “Sedimentary rock composed primarily of carbonates, such as calcite CaCO3. Generally formed from deposits of the skeletons of marine invertebrates.”

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