Jim and Roberta Burklo's donkeys, Sespe and Sisar. (Courtesy Photo)
Special to United Methodist Insight | Oct. 8, 2025
Almost on a schedule, people in this country get excited about reports of UFOs and alien visitations. We’re in one of those periods now, it seems. When things get weird in the human realms of politics or economics or culture, we start looking for weird things from beyond our human sphere. Maybe there’s help for us, coming from other worlds. Or maybe there are threats to us from other worlds, other life-forms, that will give us something different to worry about than the worrisome stuff coming at us.
I am sure there are other sentient life-forms out there in the universe. I am sure that most of them are so advanced beyond us that they would take little interest in us, even if they did have a way to be in contact. The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. Humans have existed and had the ability to engage in space travel and communication for a miniscule fraction of that period. If we can advance our civilization and technology steadily for a million years, we might get to a point where we might be worth contacting by another civilization. Meanwhile, aliens are no more likely to take interest in us than we would take interest in a planet populated only by slime mold.
For these reasons alone, I very much doubt that we’ve had any visitations of sentient life from outer space.
Meanwhile, there are aliens among us already, and we do well to attend to them, take them seriously, and open ourselves to the wisdom they can share with us. They’re called animals. And in the week of the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, we celebrate the blessings they bestow upon us, and return blessing to them.
Roberta and I have two donkeys. Two four-hundred-and-fifty-pound pets. Every morning and evening they get frisky. They chase each other, jump on each other, wrassle with each other, nibble on each other, make noise together, and generally behave pretty much exactly like our four and five year old grandsons do together. In the morning and in the evening, when they’re hungry, the donkeys go into a state which I call “eeyoria”. You’ve heard of Eeyore, the donkey in Winnie the Pooh – well, eeyoria is the funky mood that donkeys go into when they aren’t getting what they want. Kinda the opposite of euphoria.
Roberta very much wants to have a loving, intimate relationship with Sespe and Sisar, our donkeys – but really their connection with both of us appears to me to be transactional. They will let her put her arms around their necks and stroke their coats as long as she is holding a bundle of alfalfa for them to chew. Otherwise, their attitude toward her seems to be “meh”. You do human, we do donkey – that appears to be the state of things between us.
But watching them is indeed fascinating. It’s obvious to me that they think, have feelings, experience the world around them – and humbling to know that their experience is mostly inaccessible to me. Just watching them and realizing that they experience the world in a very, very different way than I experience it – that alone is a meditation, a recognition that the way I see things is just the way I see things, and not necessarily the way things actually are. Sisar and Sespe are not categorizing experience the way I do. Not defining things they encounter in the way I define them. Their ways are not my ways. Staring at our donkeys, observing them, invites me to release my attachment to my assumptions and preconceptions and open myself to a consciousness that is alien to my own.
There’s a mistake in writing called “pathetic fallacy” – the attribution of human feelings and responses to animals and inanimate objects. It is easy to succumb to this fallacy, because we like to project ourselves onto the world around us, so that the unfamiliar can seem familiar, so that we don’t feel lonely in the universe.
But as the prophet Isaiah said:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
I would revise this a bit, to say that our human ways aren’t necessarily “higher” than the ways of our dogs, cats, and donkeys. But indeed, their thoughts aren’t our thoughts, their ways are not our ways, even if there may be some overlaps and similarities. Honoring the distinctiveness of their consciousness is essential to showing respect to animals.
It is great that pets are such wonderful companions for us, that they give and receive love with us. Plenty of reasons right there to appreciate them. But I would suggest there’s another level to which we can aspire, and that is to marvel at their otherness. To consider and appreciate the very different ways they experience the world than our own. To ponder the fact that to us, they might as well be from other planets. Or, to turn it around, we might be to them as aliens dropped to earth by flying saucers.
This is the blessing of the animals – not so much that we stoop so low as to bless them, but that we recognize the ways they bless us. With companionship, but also with their distinctively different ways of relating to the world in comparison with ours. If we’re really paying deep attention to them, they can break us out of our human-centric perspective and open us to other very different experiences of the world.
Roberta and I had a dog named Kai – which means “water” in Hawaiian. Kai was fascinated by water. We lived in Mill Valley in Marin County, on the side of Mt Tamalpais, and a flume ran down next to our steep driveway. In the winter it would rush with water, and riffles would form as the water went over rocks in the flume. Kai would see these long, round tubes of water flowing down the flume and would try to chew on them and pull them out of the flume, apparently convinced that they were like sticks he could grab and take away. He would keep trying to bite and grab the water riffles, over and over, just not able to get it that they were not hard objects he could grab with his teeth. I thought this was wildly entertaining to watch.
But then I woke up to the fact that I do the same thing all the time – trying to grasp things that cannot be grasped. Trying to own things that can’t be owned. Trying to hoard and store treasures that are not to be hoarded and stored. Like magic moments of connection with others, which you don’t want to end, which you want to go on forever. Like sunsets that really can’t be captured on your phone camera – sunsets that fade into the dark. Like euphoria, which you wish would last forever, but fades, maybe all the way into eeyoria. So I silently thanked Kai for the blessing for challenging me to stop grasping at the ineffable. And laughed at myself, as I laughed at Kai....