​ 
          There were so many jokes about this motto in my youth that I can barely write it with a straight face, but the Boy Scouts still had it right with this one: Be Prepared.  You just never know.
 
          Take yesterday, for instance.  I had slept later than usual, but still followed the same routine: take the dog outside and down the driveway, greet the morning with a long look across the field, now bronzed with mature corn, then trudge back for the necessary caffeine jolt.  I like the routine and have never called for more excitement in it, except maybe for a wish for an apparition of Mary over the western horizon, or, more tenuously, for a UFO sighting.  But sometimes we get more than we ask for.  Be prepared.  This time, I heard the sharp chirp of rubber on road, a thump of some sort, then saw a beater 90’s subcompact limp past our drive with the front right side bashed in.  I consciously tried to memorize more details, as it might have been involved with something illegal pertaining to my neighbor’s property up the road, and then I continued with the routine gaze and walk back for caffeine. 
 
          Since I had woken late, however, I had taken the dog out before the oh-so-necessary brushing of teeth.  That took the place of the first cup of tea back in the house, but half- way through, with my mouth full of suds, the phone rang.  It was said neighbor up the hill.  I knew it had to do with the red beater, so I hastily and grumpily spit the soap out into the kitchen sink by the phone and answered, to hear his voice immediately.  “Fred, someone just hit a deer next to my driveway.  Its back end is busted but it’s still alive.  Would you come over and help me drag it off the road?”
 
          Well, no.  You don’t simply drag live deer anywhere if you want to remain intact.  They have sharp front hooves that can defend against coyotes, and killer back legs that can spring a 100 pound deer over a seven foot fence.  And so I told him.  To which he replied, “Well, then can you kill it?” 
 
            Lovely.  I did not have trustworthy ammo for the old military Mauser, did not have the rifled shotgun barrel even cleaned, let alone affixed to the 12 gauge, and the other armaments about the house were too small to quickly kill a deer.  I said that as well, but in the mix of his plea and my foggy morning mind, I found myself five minutes later standing before a pathetic deer that had crawled off to the side of the road by the neighbor’s mailbox.  I told him not to touch it until it – she – was good and dead.  He then said that he would get another neighbor’s gun for me to use to kill it.  I will not go into why he chose me for the job and not the neighbor with the proper gun, or why he wouldn’t do it himself, but in another seven minutes I found myself holding an old, well-oiled twelve gauge in one hand and slipping a deer slug into the chamber with the other.  The deer looked at me with the unexpected trust that my dog has before I pulled the trigger.  Because I could not get properly at the heart with the first shot, I had to use another round.  This time, I easily found the heart.  The force of the close-range slug made the deer carcass nearly leap hole-body from the ground, and then it lay still, unquestionably dead.  We dragged it over to the corn field on the other side of the road, and that was that, at least for me. 
 
        But it wasn’t, as it never is with deer.  That morning we had an appointment to bring my wife’s car to the mechanic, which explains the uncomfortable rush earlier on.  Arriving barely on time, I told the garage owner about the deer episode (for interest and perhaps to explain my disheveled appearance), and he told me that I had violated the law.  I had, technically, hunted a deer and could get a 500 dollar fine and a suspension of any hunting licenses over the next three years.  “You’re supposed to call the police to shoot it” he said with the frank certainty of one who ‘Knows the Law.’  Oh for God’s sake.  No police had been around, however, and would never be, as shots fired in our rural area are taken for granted, regardless of the season.  Still, I had shot a deer and it made a difference.
 
          I am not talking about legal issues here.  Rather, a deer is a large mammal that shares traits with us along with its size.  It had, after all, looked at me with those trusting, silently suffering eyes.  I had not flinched in killing it, as I had killed many animals for food while doing fieldwork in the Amazon, and as this had been an essential mercy killing.  That was what bothered me, though: I had not flinched whatsoever in shooting the deer.  I had killed a fellow hairy creature, and felt little more than annoyance that this might make me late for an appointment.  This made me think about the other killings we all do, from swatting flies to slapping mosquitoes to mindlessly stepping on ants.  And this made me think about the importance of life.
 
          It was reported that in later life, Mahatma Gandhi had taken up full ahimsa, which is a word for total pacifism that does not allow even the killing of insects.  For the Parsees, this ban on killing is extended to a ban on male masturbation, which, they say, wantonly kills sperm cells by, literally, human hands.  I had long laughed at the overall idea of ahimsa until just a week ago – a week before the deer killing, by coincidence.  At that time the housefly season had led to an infestation in the house, which led me to swatting them with joyful exuberance until it struck me that each fly is a miracle, a clod of matter made animate and at least genetically willful.  I imagined how excited the world would be to find one single fly on the surface or underground or anywhere living on Mars.  That simple truth led me to understand how significant life of any kind might really be. 
 
          Later that week I was presented with a very large caveat to that, however, when the local Catholic radio station aired a discussion about the wonders of St Joseph of Cupertino.  He is known as the Flying Monk, as he would consistently float in the air while saying his prayers.  This was during the 16th century, when the Catholic Church had been disrupted by the Protestant Reformation, and had struck back with the implementation of the infamous (Spanish) Inquisition.  At that time, the flight of an individual was seen as a sign of witchcraft and as such was NOT a very beneficial miracle to exhibit.  As the Church would make no exceptions, they subjected poor monk Joseph to its rigorous tests, but had found him so profoundly stupid that they could imagine no malice or guile in him.  He, alas, floated when speaking to God, which he did as simply as a child.  Afterwards, his fellow brothers tried to hold him down, as his flight caused people to come and gawk and generally disrupt, but when they attempted to do so, they, too, floated about the Cathedral or wherever they were at.  All this has been written down, as they were want to do then, including the fact that the brothers or anyone else in a certain vicinity were not dragged upward with Joseph, but rather were lifted as if on an invisible platform.  It was also noted with alarm that Joseph would change shapes at times, elongating to ten or twelve or more feet.  There were other miracles that happened around him, but I could not hear over the static of the radio. 
 
          I will buy the critically objective book about this by Michael Grosso, titled, I think, “The Man Who Could Fly,” but for now, something becomes startlingly apparent when considering the abilities of this particular St Joseph.  The facts are these: he regularly upended the accepted laws of physics, and of this there really is no doubt; and two, he did not do any of this by conjuring or “work,” as he was considered too stupid to be punished even by the Inquisition.  By the joining of these two traits, I am led to believe that he existed primarily in another world, with only a shell of his being present in this one.  He was probably not stupid in an existential sense, but only in this world in which he was essentially an alien.  He was much like a person today who is caught in a dream which makes little sense, which often presents the dreamer and other actors defying the normal laws of time and physics, and in which the dreamer can have little effect no matter what he tries to do.    
 
          Which has further led me to make another conclusion: that the marvel of life might not add up to much at all.  For St Joseph, life seems to have been little more than a passing dream.  The only difference between us and him might be that we are somewhat more consciously invested in this particular “dream” than he was or could be.
 
          So what of this dichotomy?  Is life just a dream that we can brush off with the coolness of a swat of a fly?  Or is it something proved more real by the pathos in the eyes of a wounded deer, or the sorrow in the loss of a parent or a friend or a child?  
 
          If we could use any question to prove the paradox of life, it would be this.  The wise have pondered this question forever, arriving either at the conclusion of the Existentialists – that life it essentially a vapor, as St James put it – or a test – as St James went on to claim.  Said St Paul, “We do not fix our gaze on what is seen but on what is unseen.  What is seen is transitory; what is unseen lasts forever.”(2 Cor, 4:18) In simple karmic terms, life might be but a dream, but if we mess with one of these dreams, we might be fall into another which is infinitely worse.  The life of St Cupertino strongly hints that this life is not all there is to our existence.  Who would not believe that he lived with at least one foot in another world? 
 
         His experience, however, does not tell us definitively if our actions here affect our re-location, or simultaneous existence, in that other world or world beyond this life.  Compassion towards the natural world, in general, does not guarantee a positive reaction: try helping a wounded bear cub with its mother nearby, or gently carrying a rattlesnake across the road.  In both cases, one’s compassion will probably not be reciprocated.  Still - compassion towards our fellow man more often than not leads to mutual affection.   By discovering this hidden truth behind natural law, we might better understand what St Paul tells us: that we must loosen our focus on the apparent to gain access to what is beyond.  In freeing us from the competitive laws of survival here, then, we are left free to fly elsewhere.
 
          So we come back to the pathos in the eyes of the dying deer.  I now see that it was not the death or the killing that was so important, but what was generated by the interaction.  My focus should have been on the act of compassion rather than on my schedule.  It very well might be that our focus during such instances in our lives is what determines whether we float from this world into something grander, or remain standing on the ground, annoyed by the flight of others.       
 
           [Note: this will probably be the last essay until the 20th or so of October.  Fall is the busy time]
 
         
 
  
 
       

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          As I stiffly got out of the Jeep after the long drive back from up north, my wife came to help unload a few things and give me the news of the last four days – personal news, that is, not the type that I often seek that divides people into political factions.  As someone with a big lawn and large garden, the most important news always concerns rainfall: this time, about a quarter of an inch, mixed with hail, but with no noticeable damage.  Good.  But there always seems to be one piece of news after a trip that is a shocker.  One time, I came back to find that a man had killed his sister and brother-in-law at their deceased parent’s house and then burned the house to the ground less than two miles away from us.  A policeman followed up almost immediately, and the killer, hidden behind the flames, had taken a few shots at the cop and then disappeared into the surrounding cornfields.  That was two, or maybe three years ago, and he has not been found since. 
 
          This time was no different, although the surprising part of the news did not involve violence.  Said the wife, “Do you know Michael ------?  He’s been calling you.  He said you knew him back at U Michigan.” 
 
          Yes, I remembered him from 35 years ago.  He had lived in the same Co-ops as I had, and as had Mark ------, a man whom I had known who had gone berserk years later and driven a rental limousine into an 18 wheeler, both he and the limo going up in flames.  I hoped that this call would not hand me the same sort of news.
 
          It didn’t, but when I returned the call I found that Mike had been through some hard times concerning women.  He had divorced twice and married thrice, each time with a woman who eventually developed schizophrenia.  I had known the first at the Co-ops, and did not then consider her any more unusual than the rest of us at that place, a housing complex that definitely attracted its fair share of “unique” people.  After marriage and a child she had run off with Mike’s best friend.  In time, she simply had run off, period, to live out of homeless shelters, joining the army of ghost people who haunt our cities by the thousands. 
 
          The second wife did not last too long, but the third is still with him when she is not in the sanitarium.  They love each other, he told me, but the disease is an awful one, often leaving Mike alone to provide for the family and care for their tween special-needs child.
 
          After pondering these facts, I hesitated, and then had to ask: Why do you think that you attracted so many women with a similar illness?  To which he replied penitently, “Karma.”
 
          Americans and people in Western-culture nations in general have come to understand this word in a certain way: that personal misfortune is due to bad or selfish things that we did in a past life.  We are not always certain that we have had past lives, however, but we are certain that we deserve the misfortune.  It is a term from India that coincides with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, but we have clad it on to our own historical tradition of sin, and the need to be punished for our misdeeds.  In the former days of Christendom, that meant penance in this life and a form of purgation in the afterlife.  Nowadays, punishment for so many simply means irredeemable fate and doom.
 
          This is a shame, although not a punishable one.  Certainly, we often have to pay for our sins in this life – getting caught in adultery, for instance, can end up making us pay a LOT – and, for all I know, we do have past lives that must be rectified.  The latter is not a Christian belief in general, but more importantly, traditional Christianity does not believe in irredeemable karma concerning misfortune in this life.  Instead, a Christian is told to embrace the “suck” as they say in the Army; that is, to look upon misfortune, even that which repeats itself and seems to make no sense, as an opportunity. 
 
       “Follow me and take up my cross,” Jesus exhorted his followers, by which he meant, redemption is often only found through suffering that is offered to God.  This is one of the hardest concepts to believe in, in Christianity, although some parts of it are easier than others.  For instance, if one continues to marry women with considerable mental problems, this might be one’s opportunity to suffer through helping these women and the children who are engendered.  Another part, the biggest part, is a lot tougher and is sort of a karmic boomerang.  In this, we are told to believe that suffering comes not from our personal actions, but from our collective actions – or what we might call the collective unconscious – started, mythically, by Adam and Eve.  To redeem us from this collective sin – our collective karma – Christ came to physically suffer for us; and to redeem ourselves in our own personal way, we are told to suffer for humanity as Christ did.  Thus, if we somehow were to have no suffering, we could not join Christ in saving humanity.  On the other hand, if we have abundant suffering, we have abundant opportunities to save ourselves, often by offering ourselves up in saving others. 
 
          Suffering actually does have something to do with real karma.  According to the Buddha, the only way to relieve ourselves of karmic burden is to deny all attachment to everything.  This, we are told directly, will take away all our suffering, as suffering is caused by attachment.  From both a Christian and Buddhist perspective, the material world is either nothing or, with Christians, “meh” compared with heavenly glory.  It is this assessment of our reality that allows us to either remove all attachment to it, or offer ourselves up in suffering and service.  In both cases, we are rejecting the primacy of the things and pleasures of this world; and it is only in this rejection that we can free ourselves from the pull of gravity and fly at last and for all eternity with the angels. 
 
          So, Mike, the many sufferings that you have somehow been chosen to endure might be obstacles to your happiness now, but are also major opportunities for you to help achieve a far greater happiness later.  Not that I would want them or any other suffering, mind you, but no one can live a full life in this world without eventual suffering.  It might be schadenfreude, but it is still true: the richest and most privileged among us often suffer the deepest forms of suffering, from the Kennedy-type tragedies to the dark sorrow of wealthy families broken apart by greed and resentment. 
 
          Our sufferings, then, must be seen not only as generic karmic consequences of being human, but also as tests offered that, when passed, allow us to further our spiritual careers.  Otherwise they will simply be seen as a punishments - in which case, they might make us sadder or wiser, but not necessarily better.  But we have been shown the better way: for who can argue with the one master who told us that attachments make us miserable, and with the other, that the giving of ourselves to others and to God above and beyond personal pleasure and profit brings us greater love, which brings us closer to God, who is the very definition of love?  In the former we see the negative and in the latter, the positive induced by suffering, but in both there is meaning beyond brut suffering - beyond brut karma. 
 
          Good luck to us all then, and when that fails, may we seize the opportunities, the ones no one wants, that bring us the greatest fortune of all.     
 
 
 
   

​ 
          We raised horses when I was a kid, Appaloosas who preferred the outdoors and went semi-wild every winter, their coats as thick and layered as a Russian Cossack’s.  The bulk of my family’s property was called The Cedars because the second-growth Eastern red cedar had taken over what was once rough pasture land, and on this property towards the bottom were old apple trees once tended by crusty Yankee farmers.  In the fall, the apples would drop and these wild Indian ponies would gobble them down until their multiple-stomach digestive systems fermented the apples.  We would watch in amusement every year as the horses foamed at the mouth, staggered around like human drunks, then plopped down in comfortable dust wallows that they had formed over the years.  I have no idea if they had hangovers, but like many a human, they did not seem to learn from them if they did.  It became something of an annual rite, enjoyed, I presume, by all.
 
          It was probably a terrible thing for the horses.  I don’t know, and, what the heck, those days are long-gone now, so long-gone that I had not thought of those ponies and their apples for ages until I noticed a young tom turkey staggering about in our over-grown garden just last morning.  The weather of late has been humid, and the shortened days are now causing the nights to cool considerably, bringing a light mist to the garden at dawn that made this stumbling tom seem like an emerging zombie turkey, lurching in the gloaming for a taste of unpicked corn or, who knows?, some flesh from living turkeys.  Turkeys being turkeys, it could be, even though the flock to which it belonged was nearby, a large group of sixteen parading around the edge of the road.  No running in terror for them; and, coincidentally, no running to save their former comrade, either. 
 
          My first thought was that the turkey, like the horses, was drunk on too many garden produce.  But no: many feathers were broken and it seemed he always lurched to one side, indicating a definite wound or break in a leg.  My wheels began to slowly turn: by the road + hurt turkey must = car.  So it was hurt and dying, falling among the over-abundant tomato plants as the dog took a definite and not very neutral interest.  I called the dog off first before thinking that perhaps the dog would be doing it a favor by ending its life quickly.  Still, I restrained her.  I felt sorry for a turkey who had been helping to wreck the garden and who I would have gladly shot and eaten a month or two later, in-season of course.  Meanwhile, the flock continued on its way, its brother or uncle or cousin left to the tender mercies of humans or dogs or of nature in general. 
 
          So as I stood barefoot in the cool, wet morning grass, the wheels began to turn more quickly.  How is it that I could feel sorry for a turkey?  And how is it that its nearby flock couldn’t, literally, give a flying flatulence about their very kith and kin? 
 
          It came to me that the foundational questions to ask are: does our empathy make us stand out alone in nature?; and: how did we among all creatures get it? 
 
          Certainly, before we answer these questions, we must hang our heads in shame, all of us, regardless of race, creed, etc.  As if I needed more proof of the evil of our species, I am just finishing a new non-fiction, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, by Matthew Frank, about the history and ongoing horrors along the West South African diamond coast, where DeBeers Enterprises continues to corner the market on the world’s diamond supplies, keeping a fairly abundant commodity outrageously expensive.  The company itself follows the law for the most part, which is still, even in post-Apartheid South Africa, ridiculously loose concerning their near-totalitarian powers over the workforce on this otherwise deserted coast.  They employ child labor, as children are the preferred size for those being lowering hundreds of feet into the ground into tiny drill holes.  They get lung disease before puberty, and die at the average age of 37.  Everyone is searched just about everywhere, small tortures are given to those trying to smuggle, and it is said that many simply disappear forever in the everlasting sands of the vast Namibian desert. 
 
          Worse, though, are the illegal operators from many nations, from China to the US to India, who use slave labor, particularly children, for hellish mining operations that often kill them in months or a few hideous years.  All for a hard and shiny rock that supposedly says, as the commercials tell us, “I love you forever.” Could Satan be more fiendishly perverse?  
 
          And yet…what of our local turkeys?  They are still roaming the yard and garden, oblivious to their fallen comrade who is now dead and quickly rotting in the adjacent field.  Peering out the window, I can see that our dog is doing her best to dislodge the feathers now that the corpse is getting soft.  I can clearly see that she has already gotten the head.  I must stop her soon, before she starts on the more dangerous bones.  To do this, I must lift the rotting corpse up into the crotch of a tree and hope that the raccoons take care of it before knocking it to the ground again.  We’ve been here before. 
 
          At this point, I no longer feel sorry for the turkey, but for myself.  If this were a human corpse, this attitude would be seen by most as a sign of depravity or of moral tragedy forced by brutal circumstances.  That, along with our shock and disgust with the treatment of diamond miners, among many other things, is what we might see as our salvation. 
 
          And it is.  Still, we might wonder how we got compassion and how we maintain it.  The new “head” chaplain at Harvard is known as an atheist, someone who is part of the “Good without God” movement.  This is not unusual for our elite groups these days, this pairing of non-sequiturs with moral self-righteousness, but is the philosophy correct?  Certainly, we can be a good person without believing in a god or gods, but can we be a good people for several generations?  Without a North Star, where might the moral compass point?  Consider: if we reverted to nature, we would become overridingly selfish and unconcerned about the well-being of anyone other than ourselves and our dependent children.  We would also most likely become much worse with time: unlike the turkey and other beings of nature, our ability for abstract thinking enables us to vault above the casual cruelties and momentary greed of nature- in- the- raw.  Isn’t that how it happens in real life?  Isn’t every society constantly pulled towards the elevation of those in power at the expense of the rest?  Without a transcendent good, then, wouldn’t morality be used to drag any society toward the tyranny of one small group over all others?  
 
          In fact, Karl Marx had it right when he saw religion as the “opiate of the masses,” as it was often construed and abused by the ruling classes.  However, he ultimately had it wrong, for even as religion was being used, it was still curtailing the worst impulses of the greater society.  In the Christendom of the West, it was not religion that was abusing people, but rather the distortion of religion.  Even so, against every desire in a tyrant’s twisted psyche, he and everyone else were always eventually called to bow before the greater moral principles of love, charity and forgiveness, or be despised and, often enough, eventually deposed.  So it was, and is, that the moral compass provided by religion (if it has not become too corrupted) ultimately holds against the selfish compulsion of nature.
         
          The other question, however, has not been answered: where did the universal impulse towards spiritual authority come from in the first place? 
 
          We might say that it is God or the gods or a genetic predisposition for social order, but I think the answer can be distilled into a more universally accepted word: beauty.  A dying thing is wrong, is off, is distorted, is ugly, and we want to make it right again.  Right is what beauty is;  a diamond is beautiful but ugly when mined and treated with greed.   We want to set that moral failing right again, so that the shine of the gem might be made beautiful again; a beaten and wounded Samaritan is wrong, is malformed and malfunctioning.  We want to set him right again.  Even drunk horses are wrong, and still I worry, just a little, that we did not do the right thing. Things and beings that look and work the way they are supposed are what make beauty and happiness.  We rejoice in our world when things work well and all is as it should be, frozen in time and space in perfection. 
 
          We have a sense of perfection, then, that thrills us as beauty.  We were given this, of course.  It is a gift, not a side-order of social evolution.  We must be shepherded towards this set again and again or else become lost in nature as it is moves us through time, but we know what is ultimately the most beautiful and in that, the most perfect and the most good.  That is where we find God; or, in other words, that is where we find the Good.  It is inside us, as the atheist minister thinks, but it cannot exist without a separate creator, and it cannot continue without guidance through the collective efforts of Man as directed by this creator. 
 
           Which makes me wonder: did our Harvard minister ever wonder why he might feel sorry for a dying turkey?  Who, if not this transcendent good, put that in him?  Was it a sense of goodness passed on from his ancestors that somehow appeared out of nowhere?  Or was it, rather, the spirit of too much fermented fruit that made him fall into the sand and, blinking into the dust, think that we who are filled so often with froth and foam determine all things bright and beautiful?