For some time now, we’ve been aware of another hiker in the woods where we walk. We’ve seen bear feces, filled with seeds, and sometimes the dogs circle in a kind of crazed, excited way. They don’t pursue the smell too far. We’ve always thought they were smelling a bear.
Our neighbor Tom Wolski set up a video camera to get a photo of the bear, he knew he was around, he named him Fred. He is a big boy, bout 44 inches tall. Fred is known in our neighborhood, aside from his droppings, which we see on the paths and along the road, he is well known for raiding bird feeders and garbage cans around here, he is believed to have entered a chicken roosting pen down the road and eaten some of the chickens.
As we see from the scat, he loves seeds and berries. And he seems to eat a lot of them.
We know there are bears around here, but we have never seen one, they are rarely out walking around in the daylight, they are pretty brazen about knocking over garbage cans and feeders. They are not considered dangerous, they run away from people and dogs, unless you come between a mother and her cubs. They can move very quickly and fight if they need to.
Generally, if you bang a pan or shout at them, they lumber off. But we have never seen him.
This is one animal Maria will not chat with and adopt, I am sure.
From the scat he leaves behind, we know Fred likes the same paths we like. I am confident the border collies would not track or challenge him, that is not the nature of the breed. Red ignores all living things but sheep, and Fate runs when a cat hisses at her. She would not go near a bear. And we would not invade his privacy or bother him in any way. At least, not intentionally.
Tom sent me this photo tonight, I’m impressed. So far, he has left our feeders and garbage cans alone. Our chicken roost is pretty heavy and tight, but I imagine it is just a matter of time before we see Fred or get to know him better. Kind of exciting to have him for a neighbor..
Yesterday, I wrote about my own personal search to understand the phenomena of our politics, not from the raging tirades of the left or the right, but from as far away from them as I could get. When I try to understand something complicated and big, I try to imagine myself out in space, an alien hovering over the earth, looking down in wonder. How would I describe to my fellow aliens back home?
Sometimes you have to step very far back to see it. And I am trying to make sense out of it all, as you are.
It is in the air, I don’t wish to join the argument, I want to understand it for myself. Others can understand it for themselves. I would think people would be pleased not to argue, but in fact, many seem to hate not arguing and resent it. They no longer know any other way to talk.
In my piece yesterday, I wrote that if Jesus were alive in America today, watching the angry politicians and the billionaires and millionaires and lobbyists posturing and plotting, if he came to Washington and watched the the rape of working people and the pillaging of their communities in the name of the new economy, if he saw what corporations have done to the idea of work and security, he would have been lighting torches, calling on his disciples to pick up their swords and head for the Capitol and the architects of their betrayal.
This idea shocked a sometime friend of mine, who wrote on Facebook that there is nothing in scripture that would suggest or bolster the idea that Jesus would be doing any such of a thing as I described. How wrong, I thought, she was.
This brought me back, not only to the scripture, but to my dog-eared biographies of Jesus.
I cannot imagine a more political act than his shocking assault on the wealthy priests in the Temple of Jerusalem, an act of defiance and rebellion that was ultimately to cost him his life. And one that kept bring me back to our own temple, our capital city, a gathering of the new priests. When you think about it, the parallels come together.
“But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?,” asked Jesus. [John 3:17} And who, in our political debates, is asking that?
When he comes, does Jesus send the poor and the refugees away, ban them from safety, condemn them to suffering and death?
Would he blame the poor for being poor, the refugees for being displaced, the dispossessed for wanting a place to live? Would he urge us to hate more, fear more and torture more? What would he think of these new Christians, each one competing to wave his name around like a flag in the wind.
“Then Jesus went all about the cities and villages,” said Matthew, “teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and disease among the people.” [Matthew 9:35].
I imagine him this year on a political debate stage, listening to women being degraded, the poor ignored, the angry inflamed, the talk of carpet bombing, the turning away of refugees, the calls for more torture, more police, more anger and judgment, more war, the violence and hatred cheered on and praised. Wow, my analogy was even more accurate than I imagined it to be. The Romans have returned, not the messiah. We’re just missing the lions.
Out walking in the woods today, in the wind and sun, another epiphany came to me, it was like a vision, and it came to me, the understanding I was waiting for, the thing I was searching for. It was exciting, I rushed home to write it.
Jesus is so much larger than life, everyone can and does see in him what they want to see and wish to hear. We don’t really follow his example, we just use him in every way that we can. If he is the son of God, we will soon regret it. There is no faith that takes a Lord’s name in vain.
Jesus is perhaps the most exploited spiritual figure in the history of the world, invoked constantly by people who seem to know nothing about him or his values.
I am not a Christian, he is not a god to me, but a powerful inspiration, the ideal for humanity. He was on fire to make the world a better place, to give the poor and the oppressed hope, to heal the sick, to drive the moneylenders and lobbyists and glutinous politicians from their mountaintops.
So there is Christ. And then there is the antichrists, more than one.
In some Christian writings, Jesus the Christ (or Christian Messiah) will appear in his Second Coming to Earth to face the antichrist, who will be the greatest false messiah in Christianity. Just as Christ is the savior, protector of the poor and the idea model for humanity, the waiting antichrist will be the false messiah, a single figure of concentrated cruelty and greed. His message is the opposite of Jesus, he preaches hate and suspicion and fury.
In our time, the antichrist has, of course, been politicized, he has become another tool of the “left” and the “right,” the people who choose labels over thought and preaching over listening. If you Google “Anti-Christ,” you will see that the label people have each chosen their own demons, the two most popular antichrists on the Internet: George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Since his very Jesus-like preaching for the poor, Pope Francis has come onto the Google list. Imagine, the rising new antichrist – I guess we need fresh ones – is Francis, the one most faithful to the message of Christ.
How dare he evoke the true Jesus.
That tells us so much about our time, and how much we seem to each need our own demons.
The name “antichrist” is only found in in the Bible once in, John 2:18 and 2 John 7. The Apostle John was the only writer in the Bible to use the term “antichrist.” In these verses, many different antichrists (false teachers) will appear between the time of Christ’s first and Second Coming, but there will be one great antichrist who will rise to power during the end times. He will deny that Jesus is the true Christ. He will be a liar and a deceiver.
When I read this, I think of H.L. Mencken, he wrote of the same man, he called him “Mob Man.” He is, he wrote, an ideal monster, governed by emotions.
“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race…In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true.”
His heroes, added Mencken, are mostly scoundrels.
The antichrist, for me, is not a devil, but a political mindset, feeding off the rage and and disconnection and technological separation of people from one another that marks our time. This idea of the antichrist is not a single presidential candidate but a system, is a state of mind, a state of rage. The new antichrist is he child of lies and betrayals, of lobbyists and power-hungry billionaires, of angry e-mails and blogs.
When I think of Christ sitting and watching our political debates, I imagine him (I admit it, I am thinking of the screenplay) weeping at the blasphemous people who take his name in vain for greed and political power. Listening to the promises of carpet-bombing women and children, rounding up families of enemies, torture, exile and the persecution of the enemies they seem to need so badly. The leaders who are too cowardly to lead, they can only follow.
Is this, he might wonder, his promised Kingdom of God, the revolution he promised the sick and the poor, the refugees and the persecuted?
I think of the centurions marching out in the new America, tearing mothers from their children, sisters from brothers, deporting millions, storming into homes in the night, a great exodus of misery to top the flight of the Jews out of Egypt.
I think of women once again derided and dismissed, shamed for their looks, pitied, like rescue dogs and saved by their men once again.
The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that criminals teach us about the power of evil, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core. In these angry preachings, there is for me the smell of rot. I don’t know if Jesus was a god or a man, but I am certain he was no hypocrite:
“Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” [Matthew 23:28]
So maybe Jesus would turn them all into pillars of fire.
Would Jesus storm the Capitol, turn the debate stages into dust, find there the antichrists the Bible said he would face when he returned? It sort of fits.
I think so. I would be most pleased if he came back now to liberate the spirits of men and women and remind them of who he was and what he believed.
“And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.”
Yes, for sure, I can see him in the Capitol, preaching that this was not a house of merchandise either.
And the lobbyists fled in terror, and the congressmen men and women hid the files of their SuperPacs, and hurriedly deleted the contents of their smart phones, and the billionaires rushed to find their corporate jets, and the poor and the refugees and the defamed and dismissed rushed to the Temple and set it on fire.
Flo the barn cat appears and re-appears in the house now at will. We rarely see her slip in, it must be when we open the door and are not looking down. Today was cold and windy, and when we came into the house after an afternoon walk, she was curled up in Fate’s bed – cats are nothing if not entitled – finding the one bit of sun coming in through the window. It was a lovely and still image, a reverie.
On nice days, Flo prefers to be outside the house, sunning herself, in the night she loves to hunt in the meadow. Sometimes, she just wants to be still.
We walked a lot in the woods last weekend, it was warm and beautiful there. But the ticks were out as well, and I was bitten at least three times, two of them serious and embedded bites. I had Lyme Disease a couple of years ago, and it was impressive, and when you have open heart surgery the health care people get very nervous about tick bites and infections, and a recurrence of Lyme Disease.
Ticks are a complex issue for me, (no need to flood me with warnings and alarms, I have heard them.) I know ticks well, inside and out, they and I have become close in recent years.
When I had Lyme Disease, which was like the flu on steroids, I was given careful instructions by my wonderful Nurse Practitioner Karen Bruce to call her immediately if I was bitten and go on anti-biotics. And soon, she said, within 48 hours of the bit. I didn’t do it, of course, even though one of the ticks was dug in and the other was burrowing in as well when I discovered them.
I’m just not the vigilant type, and like many men, I just always find reasons not to go to the doctor. It almost killed me when it came to my heart, I listened to a bunch of men tell me I was just getting old. (If you have trouble breathing, tell a woman).
Still, to be fair, and in my own defense, tick bites are a part of life up here, as are ticks, and if you want in the deep woods as often as I do, you will encounter ticks and you will be bitten – count on it. They are amazingly agile little creatures, they seem to drop down out of the sky and crawl around the most unexpected places.
I don’t want to rush to urgent care or the health center every time a tick bites me. And I can’t afford to.
But the aftermath of these bites was impressive, they were deep and embedded as they say, and I’ve been up for much of the last two nights, unable to sleep as a result of the itching and discomfort and headaches. So off to the health center this morning. Karen didn’t even yell at me, which was sweet, but I took a dose of anti-biotics as a preventative against Lyme Disease. Can’t say if the bite is infected or not, it might be, another story. And as of now, I don’t have Lyme Disease.
I think it’s okay, I think I’m out of the woods, so to speak, and I only have to take the anti-biotics for one day as of now. If the Lyme recurs, I’ll be back (none of the tell-tale bulls eyes).
Ticks were not something I had to live with for much of my life, and they are really not avoidable in my current life, not unless you live in a sealed and air-condition room without dogs or other animals. People tell me to check my clothes and legs after I walk, and I do, usually, unless something comes into my head and I write and I forget about it. Or just don’t see it. It is amazing how such microscopic things can do so much damage.
Climate change has dramatically altered the life of the tick, they don’t die off the way I did when I first moved to upstate New York. The winters were cold enough and long enough to kill them off for five or six months, they don’t quite ever die off now, they are almost always around. The odds of getting bit are mushrooming, so is the alarm and hysteria.
We are getting some guinea hens in May, that will help, they are great tick-eaters, but they won’t be in the woods, and I won’t give up my walks in the woods. Neither will I wish to or be able to afford rushing to the doctor every time a tick bites me. Part of the dance, I think. I’ll find a balance, take it one bite at a time, and try not to get too ticked off. And I think I’ll have a good sleep tonight.
In the morning, new rituals. A farm is marked by rituals, chores and traditions. Waiting for us at the gate every morning is Chloe, Maria’s Haflinger-Welsh pony mare. Ponies are different from horses (and donkeys) and mares are different from other ponies. Chloe is affection, alert and always ready to eat. She reminds of a raptor, she watches the gate and has figured out that if the chain isn’t latched, the gate can be opened. I had a donkey – Carol – who did this.
This would never occur to sheep, or to most dogs. These two are happy to see one another, there is always the touching of a nose or two, Maria cleans the mud off of Chloe’s face, Chloe sits patiently while she is greeted. Then we go get hay and Chloe prances and dances with joy on the way to the feeder. A new ritual, a nice ritual.
