Fawns in a Storm

Life is incredibly fragile, and it is true that every day is a gift. To live, even for one moment among such dazzling miracles as trees, and grass and stars, is a blessing you will not comprehend until it is nearly gone. Even then you will not grasp it. You may glimpse, briefly,  the preciousness of this gift, this life, you may have moments when it crystallizes for you and you realize that your very existence is a priceless treasure. But you won't hold onto it. It'll slip away and you'll go back to being a father, or a mother, or a farm-worker or some dotcommer, saving your fleeting epiphanies for sunsets and funerals.

Death is a given. It is the only thing we can be absolutely sure of. All the problems of the world, all the fear and all the strife, all the misunderstandings and injustice derives from our desire to stave it off; which is really about a single question about our deaths - When?

You can be walking along, enjoying a beautiful day, lost in your very important problems and enjoying the sunlight filtered through the Bay trees and the Manzanitas (like I was Sunday) when suddenly death jumps out and slaps you with an open hand across the mouth. Hello, death says. Remember me? And the voice of death is like a whisper at the bottom of a well when you peer down inside and see your own face looking back at you all black and distorted. I'm here, it says. Don't you forget. I can take you in a heartbeat. I can take your children, I can take your dog, I can take any one you love or I can take them all, and the whole dream will be over, and all that you thought mattered - your iPhone, your electric bill, your waistline, your hair, your nails, the whiteness of your teeth - will cease to be burden because then you will understand that you really only have seconds to live. Then you will pay attention.

We turn away from the roadkill we pass but do you ever stop and think about those mangled animal corpses you see by the side of the road? Those deer and skunks and dogs? I do. I think about them all the time. I think about every single one of them. Maybe it's because I understand them. I was once hit by a speeding car. I was flung into the air and sent flying 40 feet, sprawled across the asphalt, so I have an inkling of what it's like to be living a carefree life one second and seeing it all flash before your eyes the next. I relate to roadkill.

But this is not road kill. This is a victim of a storm. This sweet little fawn,  only a few weeks old, was killed during the night in the midst of a passing storm. I happened by early the following morning to find it lying in my path, still wet from the rain. And I wept. All alone, by the side of the trail, I wept, and I prayed. For what I do not know. Maybe because I am a father, and this child was lost so early in its life. Maybe I saw my own children in this frail little body. Maybe I saw the frailty of us all. We tend to believe we are a lot mightier than our flesh and our bones, but we are vain and arrogant and stupid and blind because we fail to remember how many of us are crushed in cars, or by trees, or in the rubble of earthquakes, or the wreckage of planes. We fail to remember that microscopic organisms kill us by the millions, or that tiny cones of hot lead no larger than our thumbnails can stop our hearts or puncture our lungs when they are fired through our permeable flesh.

We go about our daily lives as if we were Gods, rather than human beings. We believe we are great and invulnerable. We use and consume and discard and destroy - each other, our resources, the animals, the water, the air, the list goes on. And we forget we are fragile. We forget we are thin-skinned and brittle-boned. We forget that we are, in the grand scheme of things, tiny and helpless and weak. Each of us is a skinny little fawn wandering alone in the woods in a storm. And that is why I am showing this to you, so that you will not forget this image, nor our fragility. So that maybe we'll stop for a moment and think about the moment and how valuable a moment is, all of them. In those moments we should be vigilant, and watch each other, love each other. We need to love one another - all of us. Not just our families and friends, we need to love strangers and those people we are prone to judge and hate. We need to love and protect the fawns. I see fawns everywhere. I see them in my car when I am driving and on the sidewalk as I'm walking downtown. And they all have such pretty fur and big round eyes and such frail, wobbly legs. In the movies Bambi lost his momma but we know that's not how it really goes, don't we? We lose the fawns. And that's what I needed to understand. Don't waste a moment. Love every moment. Love every being who occupies each of your moments. Now I understand. We're the fawns, Yes. We are fawns in a storm.

o O o

The Red Orb

Soon they began coming in greater numbers; despite the warnings and those few who took ill, they came to seek counsel and for healing. For some it was peace. You would always leave with a sense of calm relief, like after that first drink, but it would persist, that feeling, for days sometimes. There were people who won lotteries and recovered from cancer, and some people saw their dead husbands and sons. So we couldn't keep it a secret any longer. Word got out. They'd march right out into the desert. You'd see a whole line of them stretched out for miles, single file. Orderly and calm, and the strange thing was that nobody spoke at all when they were haeading out to the orb, or coming back. It was spooky quiet, like some holy passage to a shrine. Two lines of hopeful pilgrims, one coming and one going, and nothing but the wind and the sound of their feet in the sand. Some folks would talk to it and others would weep. But there were a few who howled in pain when they touched it for the first time, like they'd stuck their hands into fire. They would run off into the desert, never to be heard from again, shrieking like the swine of the Gadarene. But that didn't happen often. Mostly you'd see people with that expression of beaming hippie joy, like they'd just been let in on some wonderful secret of which they were beneficiary. But some got very sick, as I said. They fell into a coma-like state three days after they'd touched the orb. They didn't seem to be suffering. It was like they'd fallen into a deep, hibernating sleep where there was no dreaming, no brain activity at all. This all gave people pause, but they came anyway, all kinds of people. There were the homeless and downtrodden as you'd expect, but there were businessmen and doctors too. All walks of life. Many said they felt called,  they said they saw the red orb in a dream and headed south. It was like some vestige of a migratory gene got turned on. An ancient homing signal. Bald men grew hair and terribly obese women underwent miraculous transformations. Meth addicts never hit the pipe again. They say it permanently cured depression. Cured it, as in it was gone and never returned. Nobody knew why it chose who it did, to cure or to punish. If there were theories nobody voiced them. There just no longer seemed to be the need to gossip or conspire. People were happy all over, not just in proximity to the orb, but everywhere. The feeling was spreading, and for those who had touched it, and remained unstricken, they found that their own touch could pass the light on. The orb's joy was infectious and it spread. And anyone who caught it would see it in their dreams where it would tell them things, sometimes just a word or two, like believe, and be brave. And people listened. In a matter of months everything had changed. People were no longer afraid. The secret was that each person was given a secret that they believed was all their own, but that it turned out was the same secret for all. We didn't discover that until the no-dreamers awakened. That's what they started calling the coma victims, the sleeping ones. And they told us something else too. They told us that there was a place now were all the stricken had been banished, those who were burned and ran away. And we were to go to them, for it wasn't true, what everyone had been saying. It was never too late to be saved...

o O o

A Girl, a Dog, a Bike and a Car

A girl, a dog, a bike and a car, together beneath a smoky gray sky in the town of Petaluma, California. Both the girl and the dog are looking off to their left, which is the northern sky, right where those darker gray clouds are forming. Something is happening. Something is coming. Paint is cracking and chrome is starting to blister. The earth itself seems to be tipping over and that brown brick building feels like its going to slip right outside the frame. The car is standing still but that sliver jet, or whatever it's supposed to be on the hood, is screaming off into to some future we've still not arrived at. Perhaps those Detroit designers believed they could just will it to happen. The future. Speed. As if all we had to do was visualize it. Just like if you wear the skin of a mountain lion you'll gain his power and his strength. No matter how far we advance in our mastery over metals and electronics we're still suckers for sympathetic magic and anything shiny. But this was a special time for us humans, so we should be forgiven our hubris and our crazy dreams. We just mastered the atom and were already bound for space. The weight of something no longer seemed to matter any more; the mass of it. As long as it was streamlined it could be big. We could wield fire now and had interesting fuels. Why even worry about cost or corrosion? There is only one reality and that is the now. Now a young woman is sitting on bench baring her taut skin. Now a storm is brewing. Now the paint is drying like mud. Now the silver phallus promises endless tomorrows. Now the camera takes it all in and holds there forever, the reflected light of a local start collected and coded in a sequence of 0's and 1's. Even this, this blog, this collection of tiny lines and curves is a code and a symbol. Can you imagine when this hood shined like a wet tooth in the showroom window back when Ike, the vanquisher of Nazis and architect of the Interstates, was presiding over us poor numbed-out traumatized fools? We had no idea what was coming. Duck and cover and light up a Lucky because Billy, you're going to space where nobody ever, ever dies. Oh what a wonderful bubble that was, the days of Fonzie, poodle skirts and hula-hoops. Happy, happy, happy. Let's all go to the lob-by, to get our-selves some treats! You can still see the flicker of the Drive-In screen. John Wayne and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The phantom malts are hanging from the window and that rocket ship is still headed for space. But where are you going young lady? Is that your dog? Is that your bike? Might this even be your car?

o O o