“God can be found in feelings. One such feeling is the sense of grace we humans receive from dogs.
“Patty was like the Guadalupe River: beautiful, silent, mysterious, and flowing. Like all living things, she was not simply a body; she was also a soul. Of course, she was not the only soul in the river…. There are so many kinds of soul, so many forms of beauty. Some are strange and scary: like the snakes, the water moccasins, who would swim in the Guadalupe River. But they are souls as well. Patty would bark at them and try to get close to them. I would try to swim away from them. Still, we were all swimming. This is part of what I mean by soul. I mean goal-directed feeling and activity that follows from it.
“Each human being is a node within the larger web of life but not reducible to any other node. And so it is with each animal. Each animal is a subject, endowed with capacities for feeling, intelligence, memory, anticipation, perception, and aims.”
