Graceful post.
...recognizing in them and their lives, a fellow-feeling, one that simultaneously blurs the definitions of consciousness, identity, and self, as it expands the universe of “you”s available for relationship.
Might it be possible to open to that possibility while eating meat?
Yes, especially if one already follows through other spiritual pathways a strong impulse to turn toward others in open address. But I think that avoiding meat can disarm certain triggers, such as the I-It objectivity mechanism that you report discovering. Also, I'm thinking it might remove other obstacles, ones that are not necessarily triggers but are more like stumbling blocks, to clearer relation.
I'm happy to report that I've had good success keeping my breakfasts, and some days all meals, meat free for over a week. One "possibility" that has opened to me is that I begin my days with what I can only describe at this point as a "clean start." That is, something about not starting off my day with some amount of meat buoys up my energy. Whatever else happens, I think I'll keep this new way.
Also, I have put into place a rule that if I'm planning on cooking a meal with meat in it for my family, who are not on this track, I will not handle the meat in the mornings. That feels good, too.
Maybe this has something to do with my being a morning person.
The meatless mornings have already opened to me an important insight I might not have gained so sharply. A few days back I passed by my 12-yr-old daughter and her plate, and without thinking I plucked a piece of sausage off her plate and popped it in my mouth. Immediately I realized I'd transgressed my new rule. I said, "Oh, I shouldn't have done that."
"Why?" my daughter asked.
"Because I'm trying to keep my breakfasts vegetarian."
"I hope you're not expecting to foist this off on the rest of the house," she said. "Some of us like our meat."
This is a child who a year ago asked me what it might take to become a vegetarian, so her words surprised me. I wondered: Who does she mean by "we"?
And suddenly I connected the dots between the sudden increase in the amount of meat she eats and her newly rising interest in carnivorous plants. She asked for a sundew for her birthday earlier this month and has been studying carnivorous plants with an intensity that causes me to wonder. Her father ordered her a book called Savage Garden, can't get to it to give the author right now (she's probably got it under her pillow). It's full of dark humor. She studies that book like the fate of the world depends on her understanding it. Well, whether or not we get her Venus flytraps or pitcher plants depends on her understanding it. She's decorated her bedroom wall of color prints of Venus flytraps, pitcherplants, and sundews. Her computer screensaver is a montage of carnivorous plants, which she now easily indentifies following
... following her close study of her book.
I realized in that moment at breakfast that she is somehow aligning herself with carnivorous plants: "Some of us like our meat."
This is an intriguing insight. Plants that eat meat are intriguing. Can't wait to see where this new awareness leads. (Both hers and mine.)
Carnivorous plants are way cool.
But in the end, aren't most plants carnivorous? That is, at some level, almost all plants love to take in already-extracted-from-the-atmosphere nitrogen.
When I was little, I remember reading a book about Squanto that described him introducing to the Pilgrims the idea of planting their corn seeds atop the body of a small fish and covering both with soil. As the fish's body rotted, the corn plant would benefit from the "emulsion."
I took this to heart, and one year when my father and I planted corn in our kitchen garden, I added a little bit of fertilizer to each corn seed I planted without telling him. That year, we had two very distinguishable corn crops -- the rows I planted were about 18" taller than his.
* * *
BTW, it's really fun to think of your daughter identifying with her carnivorous plant clan. You should consider potential tee shirt designs.
But the life-changing part is seeing consciousness-
–seeing god-– through the eyes of a German shepherd in the back of a pickup, in the ear-twitches of a doe and fawn shuffling through leaf litter beneath live oaks in search of acorns, in the jittery reptilian stare of a lizard pausing between zigs and zags on sun-hot rocks.
This seeing god through (rather than "in")the eyes of another, as an expression of your awareness, intrigues me because even before I read anything you wrote speaking this idea I had had moments in your writing--in my field notes at T&S, for instance--before I knew anything at all about how you think--where I flashed on images you detailed as if seeing them through your eyes. A startling effect, one I had never encountered.
The more deeply I explore the nature of language, the more convinced I am that our consciousness is bound up with yet unbounded by its, well, elan vital, of which we (people) represent the furthermost strivings. This is not to say that other creatures don't have language--I know they do, I try to learn animal expressions just to understand what's offered and what's wanted. These concerns lie at the heart of many animal communications. What we bring distinctly to the evolutionary unfolding is our progressive narrative energy, the drive to open to and open up possibilities, which might be a relatively new manifestation of the latest edition of the human brain. Like I've said before, this world is up to something with language, something completely outrageous we haven't even guessed, perhaps because we're still stuck in tracings and impulses of the hunter-gatherer worldview where all forgings are done to secure survival, that grasping/opposable thumbs thing whereby we manipulate language as if it were merely a toolbox.
This very stance toward other that regards it/them merely as food objects, regardless of means of procurement, seems to me to lie at the core of your arguments about vegetarianism, though you've been drawn into the suffering aspect of the equation.
To get back to my main point, in wondering about this two-way seeing thing that you do, I understand better your leanings toward the suffering quotient in food production. Yet I think the suffering matter is one facet on the whole obdurate objectification-of-other crystal.
I like it that you make better sense of me than I do.
You're right that part of my reaction to suffering comes from my cow's-eye view of the world.
That's all you have to say? I'm right?
I hate being right. It doesn't go anywhere. 
The cool part about existence is you can be right in one instant, and in the very next, everything has changed, and you're back to looking curiously at the mystery.
This is such a beautiful post and something I needed to read right now. I don't have much time to write more but thank you for sharing.
Glad to see you here.
very, very interesting. this needs to be published somehow or other. i think many, many people will resonate with it.
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