The Free Radical

“Sundown you’d better take care
If I find you’ve been creeping ’round my back stair!”

(Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot from his 1975 double album Greatest Hits– volume 2 on vinyl.)

The first– and, I daresay, the natural– reaction to discovering that your home has been invaded and you’ve been robbed is to immediately identify and locate the culprit and tear his guts out!

These eviscerations actually belong to a deer, the early morning work of a local hunter. Sitka was pretty sure she’d just won the lottery!

While we were busy documenting the goings on in the forest, someone was busy in my home robbing me. I’ve lived in this small mountain town for about twenty years now. Yesterday was the first time I saw fit to lock my door upon leaving… in response to the shenanigans from the day before. This kind of brazen daytime robbery– while someone was home upstairs— is not typical for my tight-knit community.

There’s a pervasive idea among novices that anyone seriously on the ‘spiritual path’ ceases to have bad events visit their lives. Not true, not at all. ‘Spirituality’ does not confer immunity; it just provides an extra array of tools for dealing with the challenges that inevitably come up.

My primary mission on Earth at this time is one of personal understanding… which then feeds into our collective understanding. I know that my soul won’t demand of me anything beyond my capabilities to handle with dignity and grace. I don’t much like challenges like these, but I genuinely like the way I’ve grown to handle such occurrences. Yeah sure, I went through the typical anger, and even fantasized a few revenge scenarios; I went through the sick feeling of being violated; and I even wallowed a moment in shock and disbelief. “Someone would do this to me?!”

At the Hugging Tree every day I still utter the same request/prayer/intention: “Bring truth to light.” It seems that in every situation that comes up in my personal life, or even on the world stage, all I really want is a deeper understanding. I want to know what’s going on in the psyche of my fellow man… in the psyche of the collective. Bad things keep happening precisely because we don’t really understand each other… and ultimately can’t build a lasting trust. This is the basis for the change that’s occurring… that I choose to participate in. And hey, by publicly taking the high road, I get to look like a saint. Ha! Fooled ya.

Just don’t mess with my loved ones… and I can pretty much let everything else slide. The only real damage done is a little scratch in my pride… and well, that’ll just buff right out.

There are still many, many miscreations littering our world like a minefield. As they’re brought into the light, some of them are really going to stink!

Sitka really is good at finding the darnedest things! This time she emerged from the ditch beside the road heading up the mountain with something in her mouth which at first glance appeared to be a small bone. No big deal. But then suddenly the thing in her mouth made a very loud popping sound– almost like a firecracker! She put it down with growing curiosity. And then I clearly saw that it was an egg.

Let me tell you that finding an egg in the latter part of October is not really a great thing. It had been laid sometime during the spring and had sat in the overgrown ditch through the hot summer months. What was inside the shell– causing the loud popping noise– was an accumulation of gases from the thorough putrefaction of its former tenant. Yikes, what a stench! (Sitka loved it… and probably would’ve eaten it if I hadn’t stopped her.)

I found another unexploded one nearby. That’s a stink bomb for another day. (I’d like to chuck it at the thief who robbed me, so that his ‘foulness’ can’t easily be hidden.)

Anyway, the deer guts were promptly cleaned up by Raven Nation– who appreciated it immensely. A day later, all that remained was the stomach contents. Nobody was in the mood for pre-chewed salad, I guess.

And still life manages to be a ridiculously beautiful adventure!