Oh, how the imagination can swirl around a campfire!
Last week we took our tiny camper up to Point Beach, north of Sheboygan, and set in for a few days of biking and hiking near the edge of Lake Michigan. It was a good time to do so. Off the coast, temperatures were expected to hit record “feels like” highs, but not on the shores of the great lake. It was true that on one day we had 4 hours of heat into the 90’s, but then it disappeared, as if it had been a late-summer days dream.
What followed was an oddly dense mist that coated the leaves of the trees. When night approached, the further cooling of the air caused the condensed mist to drip down around us with each breath of wind, at times falling like scattered rain showers. The temperature dipped into the low 60’s, and with darkness we welcomed the heat of our campfire. We hugged the flames, me with my Solo cup of beer, the two others with their soft drinks. We talked about unimportant things as the fire sucked in each of our intentions. We became fire-hypnotized, something people have experienced for tens of thousands of year. With this comes mystery, and night time is turned from a time of fear to one of wonder.
The cavemen of old did not have iPhone cameras, however, and at one point my wife began to take pictures without my notice of my son and me sitting before the flames. The play of darkness and flickering light usually bring interesting portraits, but one in particular made my wife jump. It was of me and the fire. She had been sitting at an angle to me and was able to capture my profile as well as a full view of the flames. Nothing seemed unusual until the photo revealed something sitting atop those flames.
“Look,” she said, “there seems to be a cat coming out of the fire. I mean, it’s perfect. Here, take a look.”
I sighed as husbands often do at the command of the wife, took my reading glasses out of my pocket, and walked around the fire to pretend to envision a cat. I had expected to see a vague resemblance as we often see in clouds, and at first my eyes were drawn to myself, leaning over with the Solo cup, mesmerized before the flames. Then I looked at the flame itself. No, there was no mere semblance to a cat there; rather it WAS a cat, standing haughtily at the top of the flames, its Siamese-like head turned directly towards me. It was so startling and clear that I had to look again. Moments later I had to look again. It was still there. It was so perfect that it sent shivers through me. Suddenly, it seemed as if the fire was not only NOT keeping out the dark menace of the night, but colluding with it, bringing me a fire cat from hell.
The next day both of us sent the picture to friends and relatives, and all saw the cat clearly. All thought it very spooky. One of my brothers, someone who is not particularly religious or superstitious, wrote, “Yup, that’s a demon. Don’t dwell on it. Let it pass from your mind and not get ahold of you,” this said with unexpected authority. His advice was good, yes, but by that morning it was too late; it had, indeed, gotten ahold on me.
It was strange. It was not the gleaming face that bothered me, but rather the sense it brought of an outside force that was certainly not angelic. Maybe it was not of the evil demonic, but it certainly was of something that was not beneficent to human kind. It hung about me like the mist from the night before. Even after we had gotten back to the normalcy of our home, I felt that presence. It made me feel nervous and annoyed. I could easily have ruined everyone’s day if I had not been careful to push it back from my superficial consciousness. But there it was, and I had little doubt that my brother was right.
Today, nearly a week later, that dark, threatening presence is no longer there. I attribute that to my belief in a much more powerful and loving God. But something else did occur to me with the experience, which had to do with the nature of reality itself. It was the realization that, yes, although we often make boogeymen out of nothing in the dark, it is just as true that we block out the supernatural in the light of day.
The truth of the supernatural, I believe, lies somewhere in between the denseness of night and the airiness of day. On the one hand, our imaginations play havoc with us at night. Unable to see, we conjure all manner of things to replace our retinal interplay with the world. We have been told ghost stories all our lives and have seen horror-show special affects in movies by the bloody bucket load. Many of us – certainly me – are prone to see these scary things at night because we feel threatened by our vulnerability. This is one reason why cavemen sat before a fire, even on warm nights. Ever lurking were the very real predators of the dark who could see them perfectly well while being invisible themselves. Fire somehow deterred and still deters them, at least somewhat. Fire, then, is our friend and weapon against the real natural threats that surrounded us in millennia past.
On the other hand, there truly IS something there in the dark. We have so subdued the physical predators of the world, and so lighted up the night in our living spaces, that we no longer believe in the immaterial things that might lurk in the night. It is as if we live in sunshine for all 24 hours in a day, and nothing of that spooky nighttime world really exists. It is as if our permanent daylight has blinded us more than the darkness of night. But nighttime has always opened us up to the other realities that coincide with our tiny human world. There is a whole hell of a lot of strange stuff happening all around us, and something inside us knows this; something inside us knows that there are countless inhabitants in the world we label “spiritual” and that they not only bump against us but begin to whisper to us when our confidence in our daytime reality is weakened. That is, when we are left to sit under the stars in the darkness of night.
The real problem for us is that we cannot see these other worlds, or if we do, we see them vaguely. It is then that we fill up the vacuum of information with our imaginations. In that, we are almost always are wrong. What really is Bigfoot? Or the Chupacabra? We don’t know. And really, we don’t want to know. In that world of the dark where other worlds begin to come to us, we are helpless, blinder than blind. In that other world it is better not to mess. Some entities might be like sparrows that are harmless to us, but others might be leopards of the spirit world, waiting to pounce. Yes, better to give only a nod to the other realities when they come, and then move on. Only the pure goodness of the supreme Spiritual being should be invoked.
Still, sometimes we can’t help but become involved. Sometimes the spirit world insists on being heard. That same brother mentioned above wrote later that often, the intrusion of the spirit world is a warning to us, or a murmur of something that might be happening or about to happen in the human world. So it happened with the cat.
A neighbor of ours has a horse barn where cats have taken up residence. They reproduce and wander, looking for new homes. In fact, we adopted one of those cats 15 years ago and it stayed with us until it died last spring. Now with that one gone, two other cats are hanging around, probably looking for a human home before winter comes. We don’t want one, but they don’t care. We put water out for them and the birds, but that’s it: no food, and absolutely no entrance into the house.
No matter. The day after we returned from camping, we noticed a really bad smell in the garage. Looking around, I found cat crap piled up in a corner. How did it get there? Our garage is sealed pretty tightly, with only a few places open enough to sometimes let in very young and small mice. We assumed that the cat had gotten into the garage when we had opened it to drive somewhere and then had left when we returned.
Next day, my wife heard a cat meowing. Checking first outside, she came to believe that the sound was coming from the garage, but when she checked, there was nothing there. The insulation around the garage doors had been torn out, however, as if the cat had tried to get out but couldn’t. She looked harder but still could find nothing in our small garage.
The next day I heard the cat again, just after writing the first part of this essay. I went down to the garage and looked around, again seeing nothing. But I didn’t stop. I got to the only shelf we have in the garage and look behind everything until I came to a small box filled with flotsom. And there I spied it: a few square inches of the back of an orange cat. The garage door was open, and I slid out the box. I saw it fully then, but it would not move. I made several shooing sounds and shuffled my feet, and suddenly it dashed out, covering over one hundred yards into a nearby field in seconds. It must have been in the garage for at least two days. Maybe it had been there since before we went camping.
In any case, it seems more than coincidental that a cat image showed up in the fire, and then a real one was found trapped in our garage, perhaps on a path to death.
The spirit world. Who could have guessed? But it does seem to have touched us with a call and a plea. This is more inconclusive but tantalizing evidence that a world, or many worlds, exist beyond us, but we already know this, just as the ancients have always known this. They intuitively knew, even though they may have - certainly had - interpreted what is there incompletely. But who among us wouldn’t? A cat in a fire leading to one trapped in the garage? Could I have ever guessed that? But I will not go to that world unbidden; I will not step into anything in the spiritual world unless it has proclaimed itself as all good and all loving and has proven it to us again and again and once and for all. The rest, I leave to the cats.
Oh, how the imagination can swirl around a campfire!
Last week we took our tiny camper up to Point Beach, north of Sheboygan, and set in for a few days of biking and hiking near the edge of Lake Michigan. It was a good time to do so. Off the coast, temperatures were expected to hit record “feels like” highs, but not on the shores of the great lake. It was true that on one day we had 4 hours of heat into the 90’s, but then it disappeared, as if it had been a late-summer days dream.
What followed was an oddly dense mist that coated the leaves of the trees. When night approached, the further cooling of the air caused the condensed mist to drip down around us with each breath of wind, at times falling like scattered rain showers. The temperature dipped into the low 60’s, and with darkness we welcomed the heat of our campfire. We hugged the flames, me with my Solo cup of beer, the two others with their soft drinks. We talked about unimportant things as the fire sucked in each of our intentions. We became fire-hypnotized, something people have experienced for tens of thousands of year. With this comes mystery, and night time is turned from a time of fear to one of wonder.
The cavemen of old did not have iPhone cameras, however, and at one point my wife began to take pictures without my notice of my son and me sitting before the flames. The play of darkness and flickering light usually bring interesting portraits, but one in particular made my wife jump. It was of me and the fire. She had been sitting at an angle to me and was able to capture my profile as well as a full view of the flames. Nothing seemed unusual until the photo revealed something sitting atop those flames.
“Look,” she said, “there seems to be a cat coming out of the fire. I mean, it’s perfect. Here, take a look.”
I sighed as husbands often do at the command of the wife, took my reading glasses out of my pocket, and walked around the fire to pretend to envision a cat. I had expected to see a vague resemblance as we often see in clouds, and at first my eyes were drawn to myself, leaning over with the Solo cup, mesmerized before the flames. Then I looked at the flame itself. No, there was no mere semblance to a cat there; rather it WAS a cat, standing haughtily at the top of the flames, its Siamese-like head turned directly towards me. It was so startling and clear that I had to look again. Moments later I had to look again. It was still there. It was so perfect that it sent shivers through me. Suddenly, it seemed as if the fire was not only NOT keeping out the dark menace of the night, but colluding with it, bringing me a fire cat from hell.
The next day both of us sent the picture to friends and relatives, and all saw the cat clearly. All thought it very spooky. One of my brothers, someone who is not particularly religious or superstitious, wrote, “Yup, that’s a demon. Don’t dwell on it. Let it pass from your mind and not get ahold of you,” this said with unexpected authority. His advice was good, yes, but by that morning it was too late; it had, indeed, gotten ahold on me.
It was strange. It was not the gleaming face that bothered me, but rather the sense it brought of an outside force that was certainly not angelic. Maybe it was not of the evil demonic, but it certainly was of something that was not beneficent to human kind. It hung about me like the mist from the night before. Even after we had gotten back to the normalcy of our home, I felt that presence. It made me feel nervous and annoyed. I could easily have ruined everyone’s day if I had not been careful to push it back from my superficial consciousness. But there it was, and I had little doubt that my brother was right.
Today, nearly a week later, that dark, threatening presence is no longer there. I attribute that to my belief in a much more powerful and loving God. But something else did occur to me with the experience, which had to do with the nature of reality itself. It was the realization that, yes, although we often make boogeymen out of nothing in the dark, it is just as true that we block out the supernatural in the light of day.
The truth of the supernatural, I believe, lies somewhere in between the denseness of night and the airiness of day. On the one hand, our imaginations play havoc with us at night. Unable to see, we conjure all manner of things to replace our retinal interplay with the world. We have been told ghost stories all our lives and have seen horror-show special affects in movies by the bloody bucket load. Many of us – certainly me – are prone to see these scary things at night because we feel threatened by our vulnerability. This is one reason why cavemen sat before a fire, even on warm nights. Ever lurking were the very real predators of the dark who could see them perfectly well while being invisible themselves. Fire somehow deterred and still deters them, at least somewhat. Fire, then, is our friend and weapon against the real natural threats that surrounded us in millennia past.
On the other hand, there truly IS something there in the dark. We have so subdued the physical predators of the world, and so lighted up the night in our living spaces, that we no longer believe in the immaterial things that might lurk in the night. It is as if we live in sunshine for all 24 hours in a day, and nothing of that spooky nighttime world really exists. It is as if our permanent daylight has blinded us more than the darkness of night. But nighttime has always opened us up to the other realities that coincide with our tiny human world. There is a whole hell of a lot of strange stuff happening all around us, and something inside us knows this; something inside us knows that there are countless inhabitants in the world we label “spiritual” and that they not only bump against us but begin to whisper to us when our confidence in our daytime reality is weakened. That is, when we are left to sit under the stars in the darkness of night.
The real problem for us is that we cannot see these other worlds, or if we do, we see them vaguely. It is then that we fill up the vacuum of information with our imaginations. In that, we are almost always are wrong. What really is Bigfoot? Or the Chupacabra? We don’t know. And really, we don’t want to know. In that world of the dark where other worlds begin to come to us, we are helpless, blinder than blind. In that other world it is better not to mess. Some entities might be like sparrows that are harmless to us, but others might be leopards of the spirit world, waiting to pounce. Yes, better to give only a nod to the other realities when they come, and then move on. Only the pure goodness of the supreme Spiritual being should be invoked.
Still, sometimes we can’t help but become involved. Sometimes the spirit world insists on being heard. That same brother mentioned above wrote later that often, the intrusion of the spirit world is a warning to us, or a murmur of something that might be happening or about to happen in the human world. So it happened with the cat.
A neighbor of ours has a horse barn where cats have taken up residence. They reproduce and wander, looking for new homes. In fact, we adopted one of those cats 15 years ago and it stayed with us until it died last spring. Now with that one gone, two other cats are hanging around, probably looking for a human home before winter comes. We don’t want one, but they don’t care. We put water out for them and the birds, but that’s it: no food, and absolutely no entrance into the house.
No matter. The day after we returned from camping, we noticed a really bad smell in the garage. Looking around, I found cat crap piled up in a corner. How did it get there? Our garage is sealed pretty tightly, with only a few places open enough to sometimes let in very young and small mice. We assumed that the cat had gotten into the garage when we had opened it to drive somewhere and then had left when we returned.
Next day, my wife heard a cat meowing. Checking first outside, she came to believe that the sound was coming from the garage, but when she checked, there was nothing there. The insulation around the garage doors had been torn out, however, as if the cat had tried to get out but couldn’t. She looked harder but still could find nothing in our small garage.
The next day I heard the cat again, just after writing the first part of this essay. I went down to the garage and looked around, again seeing nothing. But I didn’t stop. I got to the only shelf we have in the garage and look behind everything until I came to a small box filled with flotsom. And there I spied it: a few square inches of the back of an orange cat. The garage door was open, and I slid out the box. I saw it fully then, but it would not move. I made several shooing sounds and shuffled my feet, and suddenly it dashed out, covering over one hundred yards into a nearby field in seconds. It must have been in the garage for at least two days. Maybe it had been there since before we went camping.
In any case, it seems more than coincidental that a cat image showed up in the fire, and then a real one was found trapped in our garage, perhaps on a path to death.
The spirit world. Who could have guessed? But it does seem to have touched us with a call and a plea. This is more inconclusive but tantalizing evidence that a world, or many worlds, exist beyond us, but we already know this, just as the ancients have always known this. They intuitively knew, even though they may have - certainly had - interpreted what is there incompletely. But who among us wouldn’t? A cat in a fire leading to one trapped in the garage? Could I have ever guessed that? But I will not go to that world unbidden; I will not step into anything in the spiritual world unless it has proclaimed itself as all good and all loving and has proven it to us again and again and once and for all. The rest, I leave to the cats.
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