Today I find myself with the control over the life of another. I could take this life or not, free the beast or not.... lots of things to do or not. A skunk might have been chewing on my beans and sunflowers... hard to say, but someone did, maybe a skunk, maybe a woodchuck, but the skunk in the cage was the one that I caught. And now I could walk it down to the stream and lower the cage into the water, slowly, slowly...asking questions it doesn't understand while it tries to figure out how to get out, how to run back to it's home and even maybe it's children. I don't even know if this animal is a female or male. And I don't care. My garden was violated and some one must pay. Tonight the trap goes back out, empty and waiting and maybe tomorrow some other beast will wait in fear for the appearance of the Great Ape and destiny.

Our boys and girls in Iraq had a similar problem and did rather badly with it. I fear the grade at the top of their papers must read "F".

The analogy of the Garden is found throughout history....long before the Jews and their Testaments and Genesis and Moses. In later years the Garden is also an analogy to the Body and our Spirit is caught in the cage of our Body, with God the Gardener having control of us, asking questions we cannot understand, sometimes lowering us into the Stream of Time while we, panicked, try to claw our way out. Sometimes all we did was Believe in Truth as we saw it. The fruit, the bait was there and we took it as we always do, unaware that this fruit was not to be touched. So we find ourselves in a cage not of our making, waiting our fate.

In it's own world the skunk is powerful and yet peaceful, attacking only when pressed... no pre-emptive strikes in the Real World, just animals in the Stream of Time, scratching at the walls of the Cage, trying to understand why that blob of peanut butter...such a rare find...so out in the open....was wrong to eat.

The skunk is not a powerful beast per se, but it hides a secret, a power so great that it can blind and make the strongest beasts run, screaming into the waters. The skunk warns and stamps and pleads in a way for the confrontation not to occur, but the attacker will not listen and so the weapon is unleashed and even the plants nearby will die and for some time after the area is unclean and dangerous. This is it's fate and now I hold it's life in my hands. I cannot see very well in the dark, and wandering in my garden in the moonlight I have held out my hand to the skunk, thinking it was a cat, risking my eyes and body. This is not acceptable in my mind and in my eyes and so the trap was put out and the Garden will be cleansed.

I have a white cloth from the days of my daughter's crib. It served as a sheet and today I will drape the trap in white and remove it to a far away place where skunks run free and peanut putter is unknown. Maybe the skunk will try to explain the trap, the white cloth and the journey in the dark, and maybe the others will not understand. I wonder about it, I try to explain to others, but they will not understand, they cannot see the analogy. Like walking on water or feeding with a loaf of bread those many people on the mount, they cannot and will not understand. Mistakes may be made and people may be plunged into the waters, screaming and afraid, but not because I told them to. I never said kill the children for the crimes of the father. I never said hate those who make mistakes or who cannot understand the words I spoke so long ago. Lifetimes pass and summers burn and winters freeze and another skunk pushes through the weeds and berries, aware of those which feed and those which hurt. It smells and feels food ahead and wanders where it shouldn't and another foolish beast is caught and carried away.

You never hear of the First Parents weeding in the Garden, just wandering, naming and eating, right and wrong. The cage they are caught in is the Truth and their bodies are the reason they were trapped in their nakedness, but in Truth, all they learned was that their Father was not the First, that the Fruit was not poison and that Father was to be feared. They were not ashamed of their nakedness, because all the animals in the garden were naked. They were ashamed of their foolishness at believing a lie. I think if they had not been cast out they would have left sooner or later, because their Father had lied to them and then they knew that their Father could not be trusted, but had tricked them into a trap not of their making, but a trap which condemned them to a fate.

You can't go back again, but you can find another place to go. When the cage is opened and the new land is revealed, you can go, free, and tell the others. Tell them all that the Garden is closed to them forever, and the peanut butter of Truth is not for them. I say this now knowing that others will, in truth, follow the wrong path. They will partake of the forbidden and will be cast out of the garden and perhaps children will wail in some dark hole, waiting for the parent that will never return. By my hands have I done this, and my heart is heavy as I do this, but the fruit of the garden is for me and mine, and not the beasts.