Tales From the Burning Prairie

There is a dark, primal place in everyone. It is a place where we store our animal instincts, our violent impulses, and our reservoirs of strength. This place remains largely hidden behind social conventions and buried under the bland pleasantries of everyday life. But when we need to tap into that place it is there. And sometimes, when we aren’t prepared for it, that dark space comes roaring to the surface.

I was caught unawares today.

When you live in Oklahoma it’s just smart to keep a weather eye open all the time. And I’m not just talking about being aware of one’s surroundings. No, I mean actually paying attention to the weather. Listen to the radio, check online, watch the news. And that’s just what I was doing, watching the news. But not really paying too much heed until the weather forecast started. Until an unfortunately familiar story caught at the edges of my consciousness.

A tragedy struck, in a tiny town south of here, the day after my birthday. Two young girls, walking a well-traveled and familiar route, were shot and killed with no apparent motive. There is something on the news almost nightly, as no suspect has yet been identified. I paid attention long enough to find that the situation had not changed, then went back to my book or computer or whatever else I was doing. Pumpkin was sitting on the back of the couch, brushing my hair. I was further distracted by the almost rhythmic beat of brush bristles on my scalp.

Today they released the taped 911 call one of the girls’ grandmother made when she found them. Law enforcement is hoping to flush out more leads with this release. It was horrific. I read along with the transcript as I listened, now fully alert. She cried and screamed, the last thing on the tape was, “My babies!” It was a howl of grief and rage torn from that primal space at the very pit of the soul.

Then the strangest thing happened. A second howl rose to match the one on the tape, echoing in the room. I realized that the howl was mine just as great barking sobs were torn from my chest, filling my mouth. The wordless anger and sorrow escaping my mouth in howls, barks, and roars would have been familiar to my earliest ancestresses, the ones barely more than dumb animals, the cave-painters, the gatherers.

At that moment, I was the mother wolf howling, in sympathetic outrage, with her pack; I was the mother bear roaring to protect her cubs. And then I felt one of my own little cubs, still tap-tap-tapping on my head with her brush. I leaned into her and she hugged my head; and I heard my other, bigger cub playing noisily in his room. Through the left-over tears, I told her I loved her and received one big, gooey, suction-y kiss.

I know this, if there is any mother out there shielding this crime, who is not moved to action by that grandmother’s howl, then she is not of my pack.

“Do angels walk among us?” The question never varied in its essence, only in its particulars. This time, the author of the latest bestseller about angels asked the question.

Veronica studied the woman, who went by the highly improbable name of Serendipity Fogg. Ms. Fogg was somewhere between 40 and 50 years old, with just the slightest hint of age showing in the creases around her eyes and the slightly wobbling flesh under her chin. She wore the uniform of too many New Age writers—long Indian-print skirt, loose tank-top style blouse in matching painted silk, chunky indeterminate-ethnic jewelry, and ugly sandals. Serendipity wore her doe-brown hair in a long, shiny curtain to her waist. It seemed to be the woman’s one concession to vanity. Her face was completely bare of make-up; and she had taken no measures to remove the beginnings of a faint moustache.

Ah well, Veronica sighed to herself, this part of her trip was wasted. This woman did not possess any more knowledge or wisdom than had any of the others. Crossing the country, she had met with preachers, dreamers, charlatans, and madmen. All claimed to have seen or been visited by angels. But none of them had. Except, maybe the poor, mad ones. There was no way to tell what secrets truly hid inside those tortured minds.

It had been too long, years maybe, since she had met anyone else like her. Oh, there were plenty of people who talked about angels, or collected angel images, or fantasized about angels. Whole little societies had sprung up around the idea of angels. These angel enthusiasts could be found in catholic bookstores, metaphysics classes, New Age shops, and the big chain bookstores when authors came to sign their newest angel books. Tonight was just such a night; the bookstore was crammed with angel enthusiasts. Veronica thought of them as addicts, there to get their fix of angel lore, enough to tide them over until the next book was published or the next photograph of an angel-shaped light or cloud was passed around.

She liked to come to these things when she wasn’t working, but tonight she had a job to do, her mission was here somewhere. Veronica scanned the angel-loving crowd, looking for just the right kind of face, the correct look in someone’s eye, the glow that says “I have been chosen,” even if that person doesn’t know he or she has been chosen. So many years (decades?) on the job had given Veronica a finely honed intuitive sense for her quarry.

The message this time was short, she shouldn’t have to spend a long time delivering it, but time meant very little to Veronica and she didn’t do anything halfway. A creature of excellence, she would make sure the recipient of the message fully understood and knew just which way to go.

Since time was always on her side, and since her intended hadn’t shown up yet, Veronica decided to have a little, harmless fun. She rose up two inches off the floor and glided over to the line to meet the author. Not one of the dozens of angel fanatics noticed her feet hovering ever so slightly above the floor. Just as she reached Ms. Fogg’s table she spotted her mission. It was a young woman this time, one wearing the nametag of an employee. The young woman was patiently answering a customer’s questions, so Veronica had a few minutes to spare.

Serendipity Fogg greeted her with the same pale pleasantries that everyone else had received. No spark of recognition, not even a glimmer of real interest. For all Ms. Fogg’s New Age pretensions, Veronica knew she stood before a stout non-believer. And she felt offended for all the other people there, the ones who really did believe in angels.

I’ll show her to toy with people’s dearly held beliefs, Veronica said to herself. And as the author reached out to shake just another admirer’s hand, Veronica the Wayfinder decided to show her the way. Dodging the offered hand, she instead touched her finger to Serendipity’s forehead, just at the third eye. “Now you can see,” said the Wayfinder.

Before the author had time to respond, Veronica slipped away. She had spotted her mission, who was alone for the moment, so she cornered the young woman. “Ana, I’ve come to tell you that it is time to go home.”

Confused, the woman looked at her and said, “Uh, no. I’m not scheduled to leave until 9 pm.”

“No, Anasazi, it is time for you to return to where you belong. I have been sent to tell you this. There was one place where you felt truly at home, you need to go back there.” The girl wasn’t answering so Veronica continued, “I was told that you would understand, that you have wanted to go back for years. It is time.”

The young woman shook her head and worked to refocus her eyes. This stranger’s voice had reached deep into her head and made her think of Post, the town she had left a decade before. Ten years had passed in a blur of dead-end jobs, half-hearted friendships, and failed romances. Her heart had ached for years, lonely for a place to call home. But Post?

She had ignored all the people who told her she would come back. That Post would always be her home. But now Ana knew that they were right, had been right from the very beginning. It was time to go home. Home to Post.

Veronica knew all these thoughts, could see them written plainly on Ana’s face. But something still seemed to trouble her.

Touching the nametag on her chest, the one that read simply “Ana”, she asked, “How do you know my full name? Nobody but my mother calls me that, and then it’s only when she’s angry. Nobody knows that name!”

The Wayfinder just smiled and said, “He does.” Then Veronica turned and left, still hovering just above the floor.

From that night forward, Ms. Serendipity Fogg dropped her pen name and started using her birth certificate name again. As a writer, Mildred Fogg was nowhere near as popular as Serendipity had been but as a person, she was happier. Now she could see all the wonderful things that really did exist in the world. And never again did she have to ask if angels walked among us, because she could see them. Sometimes they were angels all the time, sometimes they masqueraded as humans, but most of the time, the angels Mildred saw were real people doing angelic things for others.

As for Ana, she found her way back home.

As a nursing student, I am taking a lot of science classes. Mostly life sciences, to be sure, but science none the less. And one thing, in all my studies, that I have noticed is how all life is intimately tied together in evolution’s intricate dance. Just look at mitochondria. Another thing I’ve noticed is that my science professors either side-step this entirely or refer to it only obliquely. Yes, this is Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt, but still. I wish that at least one professor would come out and say something along the lines of: “Life on this planet, over the course of billions of years, evolved from single-celled organisms to the myriad life forms we see today.”

One of my professors, who happens to be demonstrably conservative, very nearly came close to acknowledging this, but stopped short. He was discussing the harmful effects of artificial fats, like partially hydrogenated fats, on the human body. He told us that naturally occurring animal fats were more easily processed by the human body because…..then he stopped himself here. What he didn’t want to, couldn’t, acknowledge was that humans process animal fats more efficiently than laboratory-created fats because we evolved on this planet eating the other animals that also evolved on this planet!!!!!! But his conditioning could not allow him to admit to this simple truth. (I am in no way advocating the eating of animals or animal by-products to my readers that might have a problem with this, I am simply illustrating a point.)

But I have to say that I get it. I know why professors are reluctant to state the facts of evolution, a lot of christians get all bent out of shape and scared by the very thought of evolution. For folks that frequently decry “political correctness”, they sure are hypersensitive about this; and they stamp their widdle feet and get all pouty when presented with things that don’t fit into their neat little packages. To me, this speaks of a very childish kind of faith. If a person’s faith is shaken and devastated by learning about The Big Bang and evolutionary fact, well it wasn’t much of a faith to begin with, so he or she isn’t out much.

As a Christian, my faith is in no way threatened by evolution, or the Big Bang, or the true age of the Earth or the Universe, heliocentrism, and that the earth isn’t flat. But I don’t find it necessary to completely segregate faith and science. For most other christians, I would have to say, please separate science and religion, you aren’t any good at mixing them. Setting aside the fact that I do not hold with biblical literalism, the bible is not a scientific text!

So why do people want to use the bible as a science book? That’s easy: fear. Let’s look at the number 2 billion, that’s about how many years multi-cellular organisms have been on earth. 2,000,000,000. Looks harmless enough, right? But that is not an easy number to truly contemplate. Once a person starts really thinking about how many years that is compared to the 80-odd most people get, well, bless their pea-pickin’ little hearts, they just can’t abide it. 80 (one zero) to 2,000,000,000 (nine zeros), not really a fair fight is it? Don’t even ask most people to start thinking about the age of the universe. Which is, according to Cosmology 101, 13.7 billion years old! If we were to state that comparing the age of the universe to that of a human, with 1 year=1 billion years, then the universe is a teenager! And multi-cellular life on earth, at 2 billion, is but a mere toddler. As for homo sapiens (that’s us!), according to The Smithsonian Institution, we’ve been kicking around for only 130,000 years. If I’m figuring right, we haven’t even been conceived yet. This is where the analogy breaks down, I tend to think of humanity as in its toddlerhood. Currently raising toddler number two, I know how destructive, selfish, and unthinking toddlers can be. And yep, that’s pretty much us as a species: given to tearing stuff up and throwing temper tantrums when we don’t get absolutely everything just the way we want it and in a timely manner.

Seems like a lot of people have a real problem with not being the biggest grown-up on the block. How many among us would be comfortable admitting how scary everything can be? This fear of fact, fear of the astronomical, is a form of agoraphobia, some people have it and some people don’t. I can stand under the big, Oklahoma sky and love it, not fear it. My physical position on Earth is much like that of a microbe clinging to the surface of a soccerball, but I never fear that I will loose the bond of gravity and go spinning off into space. While I can’t truly grasp the enormity of 13.7 billion years, I don’t fear it, I don’t have to deny it. I embrace it in whatever dim fashion I can.

As for faith and science, I see the Hand of God in the majesty of the Big Bang. I cannot claim to know the mind of the Almighty, but it seems more probable to me that He is more present in the terrifyingly large number of 13.7 billion than in the mere 6000 or so that young earthers want to grant Him. As if we could box God into a less fearful package for our own comfort! The sheer sacrilege of such a thought is undeniable.

And why should my faith be threatened by the notion that my ancestors were much hairier apes and didn’t just spring from the mud wearing the latest style hat, as it were? Please don’t burden me with the “In His image” line. Here again, people want to limit God, make Him just like us, only older.

And to those who don’t want their children to learn about anything that isn’t in the bible, like dinosaurs (I’m not kidding), well don’t come crying at my door when your precious babies finally learn the facts for themselves and hate you for deceiving them. Didn’t God give us these questioning minds? These searching souls? If so, why would He want us to freeze our knowledge base at that level more suited to a nomadic, desert tribe 5000 years ago, at that time void of education and rife with superstition? The Creation Story is just that, a story, presented to a people with no scientific knowledge, in a manner that was comprehensible to them at the time. Humanity has matured in the intervening years, even if only a little and only in some ways.

I have my Truth, you have your Truth, everybody has their own, individual Truths, but facts are the same for everyone, whether you like it or not. My challenge to other Christians, heck to anyone who needs to grow a little, is this: don’t try to make God, or your Truth, more manageable by trying to shrink Him down to your size. It won’t work. Grow in your own faith, or Truth, until you can accept that others might not share that Truth or faith, but that the difference doesn’t lessen yours at all. And try not to fear the astronomical, it can’t hurt you. The only thing that will weaken your faith is fear-fear of the unknown, fear of the different, fear of feeling insignificant.

But science, science is not to be feared, but embraced. The God of Abraham, the God of Jesus, the God of the Big Bang, the God of evolution, He gave me a scientific mind and I won’t deny His gift.

First, let me just say that I do not believe in ghosts. Surely after someone passes away, he or she has better things to do than hang around in my kitchen. That said, some weird things are going on in my house.

The house was built in 1955, not very old by haunted house standards. Not that I believe in ghosts, mind you. From the day we moved in to this very day, we’ve heard our ghost in the kitchen, but never while we’re in there. We’ll hear the noises when we’re sitting at the dining table or watching TV in the den. At first, we’d run into the kitchen trying to find the source of the noises, but all we could do was rule out from where they might be coming. The noises aren’t coming from the stove, dishwasher, or refrigerator; we’ve never been able to find what is causing them. So, now we just smile and say, “Kitchen ghost!”

My husband and I have also seen some things that are rather odd. No ectoplasm, no floating furniture, nothing “Ghostbusters” or anything, just odd. Like things seen out of the corner of the eye, when you think someone is standing right there and you turn to look and no one is there. More times than I can count, I’ll see movement and think Hubby has poked his head into the room but he will be back in the bedroom and the kids will be sound asleep. He has the same experiences and thinks that I am looking in on him. Not that we believe in ghosts, or anything.

I don’t scare easily and I’m not superstitious; and I’m not going to go all New-Agey and start yelling “Go to the light!” If my ghost wants to stick around it’s ok by me, after all it’s “lived” here longer than we have. But I did have to have a talk with the ghost the other day about some things that have happened recently. Not that I believe in ghosts, however. One night while I was getting new school clothes ready for the laundry, something came into the den. I was standing facing the fireplace when a little white column of vapor floated in front of me. I saw it enter the den through the doorway, float in column form to a stop right in front of me. The base of the column was wispy and hovered above the floor about 6 inches; the top was rounder and “stood” about 4 feet tall. It stayed stationary in front of me, and as I stared in surprise, just vanished gently away. I shrugged and said aloud, “Huh, the ghost is pretty active tonight.” Told you, I don’t scare easily.
The very next day, after my husband left for work, something else happened. Every morning I iron a shirt for him then put the iron on a silicone hot pad on the kitchen counter facing the wall so I don’t accidentally get burned, then I lock the baby gate behind me when I leave. Hubby had already left for work and the kids and I were watching “Yogi Bear” when I heard a noise in the kitchen. Just a small thud, no loud clattering, no crashing. Both kids were with me, so I didn’t worry too much. Later, I walked into the kitchen for a drink and found my iron face-down on the floor. Now, I had set the iron firmly on the counter away from the edge and a drawer was open right under the spot. To fall to the floor, the iron would’ve had to bounce off the open drawer, making a terrible noise all the way down. But that’s not what happened. The iron looked for all the world like it had been set on the floor. While it was still warm, no less. It stuck to the linoleum when I picked it up, luckily the floor wasn’t damaged. I called my husband to confirm that he hadn’t knocked it the floor, he hadn’t.

At that point I decided it was time to have a talk with the ghost, that I don’t believe in by the way. So I talked directly to my ghost. I told him he was welcome to stay (does he or she even have meaning when discussing ghosts?), after all, he had been here longer than we had, I wouldn’t try to make him go to the light, but please, just don’t scare the children.

This is not going to set me off on some mad search to “find” my ghost; I will NOT be having any seances and I don’t own a Ouija board. To me, having a ghost is part of the charm of living in a 50-year old house. Which is totally beside the point, as I don’t believe in ghosts. Oddly enough, I have noticed less activity and fewer noises since my talk with our “ghost”, but I kind of miss him. Especially this close to Halloween.

Not that I believe in ghosts.

Some people believe in reincarnation; some people believe that we only get one shot, one try at getting it right. What if we don’t get it right this time but if given one or two extra tries, we would? Are we out of luck?

The phrase “old soul” has always resonated for me; hearing it applied to some people, I think, Yes, that’s just exactly, precisely it. And there have to be “new souls” to balance; people who bring a sense of wonderment and child-like joy to even the smallest, most mundane things.

Each viewpoint can present its own problems. The once-around, go-for-broke tradition can be rather nihilistic. People don’t care about this world, because they are too busy “laying up treasures in heaven”. Why bother to care for the physical well-being of your fellow man when you are living only to die. To go home, to see Jesus, to receive whatever heavenly rewards you think you deserve. Or this viewpoint can inspire a hedonistic attitude of abandon. This is it, live for today for tomorrow you may die.

From personal experience, I have come to believe that the most destructive of these one-shot belief systems is the modern cult of The Book of Revelations. Think you’ve never heard of this cult? Yes you have, they refer to themselves as Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christians, but since they tend to ignore the words of Christ and focus on doomsday, I would term them Rapturists. And their message can be dangerous. Here’s how: take an impressionable but normal teenager, coursing with hormones and God-given urges, tell them sex is evil except within the tightly controlled bonds of matrimony, then tell them the world is doomed and the rapture is imminent. More than likely, one of two things will happen. (1) Teenager rushes into a sexual relationship before mature enough to handle it, not wanting to miss out on getting lucky before he or she shuffles off this mortal coil or, worse, (2) Teenager (or young twenties) rushes into ill-conceived marriage, thereby ruining two lives with the possibility of ruining more. Then there are all manner of worldly pleasures to be sampled RIGHT NOW before it’s too late. This false sense of urgency doesn’t engender a lot of rational thought but can lead to a lot of heartache.

Concurrent with this is the notion that the Second Coming means never having to be sorry for what you do this planet. And there are as many interpretations of Revelations as there are people reading it. And each person is just as deadly sure that he is right and everyone else is doomed. Oh, yes, not everyone will be saved, and lots of people don’t even deserve to be saved. And since not everyone will be saved, it’s O.K. to hate them. When the focus is on Judgment Day only, condemnation replaces compassion as chief among “virtues”. Dangerous.

Reincarnation poses problems as well. How many times does a person have to go through the process to attain enough enlightenment to go on to whatever is next. I’m treading on pretty shaky ground here, as I don’t know much about Eastern Traditions. But some people I’ve known, some things I’ve experienced, make me wonder if there is not at least a type of truth in this.

I believe in karma, I’ve seen karma in action. Even the Bible talks about karma: cast your bread upon the waters, do unto others, turn the other cheek, love your neighbor. But something confuses me, do we drag our karma from one life to the next? Don’t you think babies should get a totally fresh start, a clean slate? Starting out with a balance of good karma sounds nice, but how terrible to be saddled with bad karma, carried over from the last go-round, from birth onward.

However, that would explain some people I have known. I think that everyone has that one friend, that one lost soul, how was born damaged. Not physically or mentally, nothing chromosomal here, just damaged in the soul or spirit or heart. This person probably was born with every advantage: caring parents with adequate resources, stable home life, loving friends. There might be a gilded path laid out before them, but they eschew the path and take to the woods instead, making their way as difficult and dangerous as possible. It’s hard to understand how a person from a nurturing, supportive environment would turn his back on a civilized life to become the Wild Boy of Avignon. What is the thinking here, “Curses on you, why oh why did you have to be so loving and kind? I shall destroy my life because you wouldn’t do it for me!”?

The only way I can understand such a mindset is if such a person keeps hauling around bad karma from existence to existence, like an over-due library book and the fines just keep piling up. Until one day, they find that they owe $14,ooo for Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.

I have, or had, one such friend and will never get over worrying about him. For what, in some amorphous past life, is he doing penance? Is he doomed for all this life to walk the darkest forest, brambles tearing at his feet and hands, branches whipping his face?

Or are we all born with a portion each of damage and joy, and it is up to us to decide which portion will better serve us, here on Earth and Beyond.