It is early here. I was up at 0500 with sleeplessnesss. Oh well. It gave me time to tidy up around the kitchen after a friend was over for dinner. That was Matt, my Marine Corps buddy who spent the late afternoon waiting for a deer with his name on it to show up. We are back to archery season here for deer. Then he stayed for cider and tapas and for dinner.

So Tuesday, speaking of archery I was giving a lesson to Catherine y Dana. We were out in the woods and they were shooting grouse, rabbit, deer and bear targets that I have set up in a hunting simulation. I think about it as my students trying to get their dinner. It’s very challenging because they have to contend with different sized targets at different distances and under different lighting conditions. Some of the targets are shot slightly up hill and some slighty up hill. They were grappling with that when some eastern gray squirrels showed up, real ones and not my funky targets. I had my bow and arrows with me, left handed bow as I have been trying to learn how to shoot left handed and I managed to harvest one of the furry rodents. That was a big confidence builder for me left handed. So, I cleaned it and marinated it in red wine and we had it the next night for tapas with Matt, remember Matt. I felt majorly happy about turning a gung-ho hunter on to the flavor of squirrel as he hasn’t had it before.

Well, hope I haven’t offended any of the city folks too badly with my hunting tales but it is life out here, slightly out of town in the fall of the year. We call it all Wild Kingdom and it calls to be participated in and not just observed. That’s my take.

So, because I was up so early I had time to catch up on my blog reading that I hadn’t done since Sunday. Terry Hershey’s “Sabbath Moments” had to be read. Good one about him regrouping after election time. Then Richard Rohr’s daily blog about contemplation and action. Man, I love these two guys. They are always urging me in the right direction. Below are two things from Richard this week that resonated with me and are about what I have been wrestling with lately on Phil’s Camino (not the film and not the physical trail but my personal inner Camino).

“Thus, the Perennial Tradition says that there is a capacity, a similarity, and a desire for divine reality inside all humans. What we seek is what we are, which is exactly why Jesus says that we will find it (see Matthew 7:7-8). The Perennial Tradition invariably concludes that you initially cannot see what you are looking for because what you are looking for is doing the looking. The seeker becomes the seen. God is never an object to be found or possessed as we find other objects, but the One who shares our own deepest subjectivity—or our “self.” Merely physical things can be known subject to object; spiritual knowing is to know things subject to subject, center to center (see 1 Corinthians 2:10-13). This is how the soul knows. Not surprisingly, the soul recognizes soul in whatever it sees: soil, waters, trees, animals, and fellow humans. Only such a depth of seeing can enter into a fruitful and mutual exchange with God. To objectify God in any way is not to know God.”

“Evolutionary thinking is actually contemplative thinking because it leaves the full field of the future in God’s hands and agrees to humbly hold the present with what it only tentatively knows for sure. Evolutionary thinking agrees to both knowing and not knowing, at the same time. To stay on the ride, to trust the trajectory, to know it is moving, and moving somewhere always better, is just another way to describe faith. We are all in evolution all the time, it seems to me. It is the best, the truest, way to think.” —Richard Rohr, “Evolutionary Thinking”

Yea, do it all royally with the turkey, dressing and cranberries, oh and not to forget the all-important gravy. Maybe keep talk of politics to a minimum but try to find some common ground always with your meal mates. Love you, Felipe of the North.