The Free Radical

There’s something on the horizon; you can see it written in the sky.

The past week in the Forest has been quiet. It hasn’t been an eery silence at all; rather, it’s been the kind of silence like when you’re watching a movie with the kids and they keep whispering “What’s going on?” and you just raise your finger to your lips… ’cause you know that everything will become clear in a moment. “Just watch.”

For a month or more, daily interactions with the various raptors had become the norm. Hawk, Eagle, Osprey and even Owl were inserting themselves into these Reports, bespeaking a new alliance… and fierce progress.

As I remarked to friends, there was one who was conspicuously absent for quite some time though. And yesterday he showed up.

(Buzzard by Armageddon from their self-titled 1975 album– edited for time constraints and selected for obvious reasons: name of the song as well as of the band)

In yesterday’s Oracle Report, the phrase ‘the road less traveled’ was mentioned a couple of times. And here I have to give the dogs full credit of discovery. At a point nearing the end of our regular walk, there’s a fork in the road where we almost always take the high road. This time, all three dogs were insistent that we take the lower road back down to the river, and rather than call them back, I just followed.

It’s a place where the river lies down below a steep embankment of twenty or thirty feet. As soon as I arrived on the scene trailing the dogs, a massive turkey vulture flew up from beneath the embankment. It was one of several– the largest, whose wingspan was easily greater than mine!

I’ve always looked upon Turkey Vulture as an excellent omen– despite his frightening appearance! He is the most silent, the most impressive and the most graceful flier of all the raptors.

He is well adapted to his task of cleaning up the rotting remains of the dead and dying. His featherless head– looking very much like a chaffed and raw elbow with eyes and nostrils– is perfectly suited to thrusting deep inside even the foulest corpse… in order to claim and recycle the very tastiest bits.

Turkey Vulture is the keeper of the New Vision for the Earth. Last summer he spiralled high in the sky frequently, drawing our imaginations upwards. Then he left for a time so that we could get things in order here at the surface. Well, the buzzard has landed. The cleanup begins in earnest.

The consensus– with which Turkey Vulture concurs– is that the Controllers– those who would rule through fear and mayhem– are in the process of self-destruction. “Just give them enough rope, and they will quietly hang themselves.” Their desperate acts are seen for what they are– pathetic attempts at mass manipulation, but they receive very little traction anymore.

The public is slow to learn, but what has been undeniably demonstrated again and again is that violence solves nothing. Humanity is hungry for new solutions… for the same-old, same-old has proven tedious and well, idiotic.

The despots are still running rampant, but the vultures are circling. By their own actions, their time is coming to a rapid close. Further acts of desperation are still likely, but they will only frighten and confuse the sleepiest of the hypnotized masses. Their clumsy machinations will lie exposed in a heap of unrelenting questions… and then the stinking, rotting corpse will be dismembered… to become just so much buzzard poo.