The God of

Someone killed a deer on Scout Camp Trail

There’s a kill, probably by a cat, on the Scout Camp Trail. Rick, my neighbor walks his dogs every day around that steep loop through the canyon. I asked him about it when we met on the more genteel bark chip trail behind our two houses. He says the carcass has been moving around over the last few days.

Perhaps as scavengers pick at it the body drifts down the slope, then the “owner” returns at night and drags it back up toward the rimrock.

I was heading down to fish Saturday and smelled the stench. I followed the dried blood up to a flat spot. Fur was spread about. I looked toward the rimrock, made out all the ways something could be hiding up there ready to protect its meal. Headed back to the trail towards home.

“I know that the cougars are out here, but it is different when you have to think about it,” Rick said when we met two days later.

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It is December 2025. You and I are in the cup of winter solstice, dear reader. A measurable, rational day to take note. We are together at the peak of darkness, aware that soon the renewal of light comes.

In a few days it will be Christmas. The start of the story of Jesus. I dread the holiday, but I am enthralled by the story of Jesus’ life.

Rick and I are gentle humans who fill out tax forms, protest the nature of our government, and follow the proscribed rules such as which side of the road to drive upon. But today we are reminded that predators take prey and that scavengers take from predators. This is not what happens in our daily lives, and it is not a good way for us to model our community.

To me, Jesus’ story came when people needed to think about how God can express himself in a world centered on humans. We needed Jesus when we came to cities, when we established governments that reached into our daily life. When we anchored ourselves to cultivated land next to other anchored people.

We needed to shift our view of the world from what we see in nature to what we see in ourselves. What we see when we look across at each other.

The old stories that came before, the Abrahams and Davids, pushed forward in silence and action. They woke and traveled and slept in deserts that sent beasts upon them. A war was an absolute end for the nation that lost. You were the carcass or the cat.

But Jesus was born into empire. He was born away from the wild. The curious location for his birth was for tax reasons. Perhaps there were agreed upon rules of which side the road to steer your cart.

If we only have a story of God (or whatever you like to call the Out There) that shows itself to us in the wild, we will drift far apart from other people. Even as our homes and days are closer together and more wrapped up in each other, we will be alone trying to be the hunter instead of the meal. Our neighbors would be competitors. We would need rigid health codes and strict, harsh laws.

Our experience changed from what guided the Jews and others before empire. Jesus’ story asks me to consider aspects of us that preserves us here, where we are.

Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

• A rule for community dwellers anchored in a place. A reminder that we each live with the outcomes of our deeds.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

• Even as we are in spheres of power, keep that which is true for you. Don’t carry the weight of your ruler for them.

Jesus’ story does not erase the lessons of the wild. We still need the old stories and guidance; the wild world still exists.

It exists on the trails and paths between our homes, passing through at night in a mind untroubled by civility. A mind bonded to the world it passes along.

The wild world still exists within us as well, and it can come into our acts. Witnessing it can be beautiful and terrifying. The ills of it are available to us in news feeds any time.

Perhaps my thinking is off base. I am not informed by any deep scholarly query, only the contemplation of the long nights of winter and the advent candles of my childhood.

Transitions like solstice and the births of promising babies continue to happen to us. I can’t make out much of the patterns. Maybe the patterns I do see are just noise I am trying to will into melody.

I lean on these ideas that arise within people seeking to live well. I can raise up my own love with those ideas. I can see how people areound me express love. I can discover the world — wild and cultured — as it starts to again grow bright.

Merry and bright.