If

What if the election were held today?  I know it was already held more than a week ago, but what if that result were nullified and the election were held again?  Would we get the same result?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Maybe some of those who showed up the first time would give it a pass on round 2.  Maybe some who skipped it would take advantage of the do-over. What percentage of the repeaters would remember let alone stick with their original choice?  How many of the voters who reportedly learned in the voting booth that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race would have educated themselves a bit more on who this Kamala person who replaced him was?  Would the November 5 result inspire a pile-on against the incumbent party or a groundswell for the opposite result? In terms of the electoral college, the usual suspects would probably turn out the same-- it's the swing states where I suspect there might be some differences.  I could be wrong, but listening to the reasoning behind the last minute decisions of the sizeable group of stubbornly undecideds, I have come to the conclusion that any conclusion about the outcome of the election that attempts to explain the result is probably incorrect.  This goes for those that explain why Trump won-- which in my readings tend to be focused on the mood of the electorate regardless of the success or intention of Trump's campaign-- and those that explain why Harris lost -- almost universally faulting the campaign for failing to excite the will of voters.  Given the disastrous conduct of both campaigns, it's not hard to see why blame is the word that we want to apply to the loser whereas credit can hardly be given to the winner.

Until Joe Biden was booted from his own re-election campaign, the rematch between two geezers reeked of staleness and produce beyond its expiration date.  As unprecedented as the switch was, it made for an exciting change-up while the novelty lasted.  While the campaigns were equally rancid in their approaches, the same could not be said for the candidates.  Kamala Harris is actually younger, smarter, saner, healthier, more attractive, more normal than Donald Trump by any measure.  The fresh blood should have-- and in the opening days of her truncated time at the top of the ticket frequently did-- stir things up in unanticipated ways.  It seems to me it would only have paid for her to remind us of her youth and vitality -- and to assure us of the difference she represented from both Trump and Biden-- as frequently as she could.  When she did show up especially in contexts that contrasted her with her opponent, it tended to work for her.  There should have been more.  The counsel she received was apparently the opposite.

If there is one area in particular that is emblematic of the blame the Harris campaign can take for its loss, it is immigration.  Polls since the beginning demonstrated that on the issue of immigration, voters to whom it mattered trusted the xenophobic pandering of the Republicans on the issue more by a long shot.  When Democrats introduced tough anti-immigration legislation last year designed to fail solely as a demonstration of the hypocrisy of Republicans who dutifully cooperated in begging off, they had already ceded the issue.  Similarly, inviting the unpopular with both parties Liz Cheney along on campaign stops sent the conflicting message that you just needed to ask the Republican supporting Kamala Harris and standing there right next to her whether Republicans could be trusted.  Meanwhile, actual concerns of voters were purposefully ignored.

If only there could be a do-over, would Harris have learned that she needed to assert herself more strongly as a representative of a different more hoped for future than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump have demonstrated they are capable of leading us to?  Could she have flipped the coin of those who went with the evil they knew over the lesser evil they didn't?

My thought experiment aside, the rules of the game do not allow for a tie and are not best of 3 but that whoever wins on election day wins and takes all.  Given the increasingly dire circumstances we find ourselves in, I'm not a fan of the game.

Grappling for lessons

As much as it's a certainty that Kamala Harris' grotesque strategy of leaning in on making swing state campaign appearances with an unpopular GOP loser with deep-state war criminal ties softened enthusiasm among her base, squandering much of the good will that came with her replacement of the visibly malfunctioning Joe Biden at the top of the democratic ticket in July, it's also possible that it got her the strongest showing an unknown California woman of mixed non-European stock with a less than stellar (or particularly visible) term as doddering Joe Biden's veep could ever have wished for with the exceedingly short amount of time she had to do it.  We'll obviously never know the outcome if she had gambled on a bold break from the guy who was going to tank anyway-- if she had promised conditioning military and other aid to Israel on immediate ceasing of the genocide in Gaza and other aggressions against their neighbors, making reparations for damage they caused and facilitating humanitarian aid to the survivors of Israel's devastation;  if she had urged a quick diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine; if she had sold a case for distinguishing her position on immigration from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump from a humanitarian and economic perspective; if she had urged expansion of Medicare to cover those that Obama care lets fall through the cracks; if she had promised an aggressive approach to mitigating the climate disasters of increasing magnitude that threaten the future of the planet and frankly portend greater chaos from unprecedented weather-related events for the foreseeable future; if she had articulated a fix to the abortion crisis and thrown her support behind court stacking and term limits for Supreme Court justices as a fix to the Judicial problem that brought it about.  But it's entirely possible her doubling down on demonstrations that she was not intending to make the radical break from the status quo that the color of her skin and the femininity of her gender seemed to signal to even the very organized factions of non-white and non-male traditional voters she courted deprived her opponent of an even bigger blowout.  It was an uphill climb this eleventh hour appointment to assume the head of a badly faltering -- increasingly doomed-- ticket, and she may have done the best she could possibly have done with a larger segment of voters than she would have by focussing more lovingly on the progressive segment she took for granted.

If you want to look for blame, start with Joe Biden and his enablers.  While he still had a modicum of sense, he strongly signaled early on in his presidency that he would be a "bridge president" with a single-term administration whose mission would be to undo some the worst dysfunctions of Trump's first term, clearing the way for younger blood to speed the country away from the dark proto-fascism of the Trump era. Then he didn't restore treaties with Iran and Cuba, he doubled down on Trump's dystopian immigration policies, he wimped out on student loan debt cancellations and used excuses of parliamentary procedure to let COVID era moratoriums on evictions and child tax credits that reduced child poverty by 40% lapse. He expanded drilling and pipelining.  He publicly sided with management in the 2021 railroad worker's strike bringing a rapid end to the workers calls for sick pay and saner, safer working hours and conditions with larger crews on smaller less hazardous trains.   Then he conveniently under-responded to the subsequent colossal derailment in East Palestine Ohio that demonstrated the urgency of what those workers were asking for.  At least he finally got us for the most part out of Afghanistan-- bellicose bellyaching about it from the expected quarters notwithstanding -- with the predictable result that we had nothing to show for our commitment of years, blood, limbs and guilt in too many scores of thousands of civilian Afghani (and American) deaths.  While I applaud the withdrawals of troops and cessation of hostilities in one of too many pointless forever wars of the neoliberal era, the fault for the dubious and ultimately futile mission of democrats to retain the presidency and the senate and to win back the house lays squarely at the feet of Nixon-era perennial Joe Biden and the wimps who let him break the promise of his one-term presidency.  He won the primary by force of the etiquette that sitting presidents are not challenged, and in some cases by legalistic force itself.  By then it was too late to float alternative visions for the future. When his legendary hubris led to a national pratfall of a performance in his first debate with Donald  Trump in June, well before the Democratic National Convention, the ticking of the clock made the temptation to switch him out for younger blood too tempting for the string pullers and back channel operators to resist.  It may have been too late to organize a democratic process to pick a successor-- who, face it, would have been the one the operatives wanted anyway by hook or by crook-- but it was not too late to put forth Biden's hand selected Number 2, the untested but youthful and well-packaged Kamala Harris, who could plausibly be said by virtue of being named on ballots to have been selected in the primary.  By this point, she had no choice but to use the services of the team that graced us with Uncle Joe to run her last minute campaign.

As always, we on the left need to set aside grievances and work toward a world that isn't dependant on suboptimal periodic choices between overfunded under-imaginative careeerist politicians.  In the meantime, if you are complaining about the choices that people made on November 5, you are too late.   The opportunity to vote for change is not November 5.  November 5 is the obligation to mitigate the outcome of a choice made long before.  Being among the 2% that cast a fatuous and futile vote for change on November 5 by voting third party may boost your personal cred.  Good for you.   But if you're complaining about the rest of us, what did you do to make our actual choices better?

Where were you all in the primaries?

The Rules of the Game - Danse Macabre

A spooky interlude set to Camille Saint-Saëns's 1874 death-themed tone poem.  From Jean Renoir's 1939 classic, La règle du jeu.

Non-sequitur Bonus:  To evoke that after party feeling, you can't beat Confidence Man's 3 AM LA LA LA 

An Engagement with Reality

(Adapted from my side of a dialog with a Green of my acquaintance concerning the above video*)

A recent Minority Report segment touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about and that otherwise hit me as particularly salient re what voting does.  For instance, Sam Seder and I are 100% on the same page about why (given our ridiculously intentionally undemocratic political system) Democrats winning is always a better outcome than Republicans winning: because it relieves the otherwise relentless rightward pressure on the discourse. Bill Clinton didn’t suck only because he was a Democrat.  He sucked because he followed 12 years of Republicanism and preceded another 8 years of it.  (And that was all that was needed to get us in the fucking state we’re in.)  This fact as Sam laid out very well is ignored or misrepresented by Greens and other anti-Democrat voters on the left.  Democrat victories don’t absolve the left from activism but they make activism more liable to accomplish some of its goals.  It’s just a fact.

Beyond that, I thought Emma Vigeland was completely on point about what the task of voting is about.  To wit: “Engage with the fucking reality.”  I’ll be honest, that’s it in a nutshell.  One of two parties is going to win.  One is a major ass disappointment that is not what anyone wants.  The other is an evil anti-majority force that is exactly what the tiniest worst minority wants.  One is ineffectual and obtuse.  The other is laser focused on getting exactly what they want.  That is the choice.  That is the fucking reality we have to engage with.  You are free to vote Green to register your disapproval of the choices.  Either way, on January 20,  American foreign policy continues, but with one of the possible outcomes you didn’t have anything to do with, it continues with a misguided (corrupt even) idealism and ideology, and with the other it proceeds with a plan.  Notice I’m not saying this is good.  But one is better because it can be influenced; the other is hopeless. For those who are letting themselves off the hook for not voting for Kamala Harris because of Joe Biden's accomplice-role in Israel's genocide in Gaza, while I can't fault you for your instinct to punish,† as a way of explaining my own thinking on it, I would like to know how a vote for Jill Stein brings an end to Israel’s genocide if Trump wins. To Stein voting vote shamers of those voting for Kamala Harris, if you can’t answer that, then how will I ever be convinced not to care about the outcome of the election?  You may tell yourself that a vote for Stein is a vote against Genocide, but what good is a vote against genocide if you are convinced that you can't win regardless of the outcome?  Is it worth it if abortion rights are removed across the country, tax breaks for billionaires cut deeper into benefits for the rest of us, the Supreme Court becomes irreparably antagonistic to the non-millionaire majority for decades more to come?

Tell me this Green-voting lapsed Democrats: When you voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama were you saying “go ahead, evil neoliberal sham democracy, here's my consent.”?   Were you ever in your life voting FOR the status quo, even when you vote-shamed me for voting for Nader in 2000?  I can tell you what I was thinking when I voted for Clinton—the first time it was “Die George Bush!!” I had registered as an independent by Clinton's second term because of my disillusionment with his first, but I still voted for his re-election as a way of saying “Fuck off Dole, you fuckin’ creep!”  True for Obama I, I was hopeful for change. (and eager to put a knife between John McCain’s ribs).   My point which is getting lost is, voting to me is not about consent.  It’s about engaging with the fucking reality that Democrats winning is better for the people than Republicans winning.  Always.   Sometimes just marginally, always never enough but it’s Always better.  I’ve never in my lifetime known a case when that wasn’t true.  Even in 2000, I voted for Nader but on election night when the outcome was in doubt and for the month after I rooted for Gore.  Because the reality was never going to be Nader brings down the duopoly.  I’m sure I thought I was sending a message to Democrats, but as Sam Seder often says, before the election the Greens are all about their votes sending a message to Democrats (never to Republicans for some weird reason), but when Democrats lose, no Green (least of all the Green candidate) says, “See?  We are why the Dems lost!  Blame us and learn our lesson!  This is the outcome we helped make happen!” Do you take credit for Trump’s victory in 2016?  (Because if you do, shame on you!)  Did Democrats learn a damn thing from the 2016 2% Green vote in Wisconsin?  No they did not veer left in 2020-- when Bernie Sanders won a few too many primaries in a row, they got their shit together and crammed the chronic pathologically unilateral bipartisan down our throats. But it was still better than the alternative. Again, voting is not about my feelings about democracy, it’s about the least harmful one winning.

You anti-Dem leftists who are still voting Green may think you're voting for democracy, but democracy is not on the ballot.  The truth is if you want to change electoral politics, the odds are pretty good you’re not going to be able to do it within electoral politics.  It’s not impossible but would require a groundswell – e.g., if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic primary in 2016 or 2020 or Marianne Williamson had won in 2024.  The time for expressing yourself with your vote is the primary.  If you’re not “engaging with the fucking reality” on election day, it may feel good but you’re too late.

My bottom line on this is I don’t care necessarily how or whether people vote if they just keep it to themselves  (Personally, if you don’t want to engage with the reality, non-voting seems a bit purer of an expression to me). But if they are not advocating for the least harmful of the two possible outcomes, they better not be shaming those of us who are actually trying to actively mitigate the outcome.

A post-script about my 2000 Nader vote—I don’t know how I would have voted if I had lived in a swing state.  Probably for Gore, but not necessarily.  I was disgusted with the democratic party.  I honestly thought if Gore lost, so there.  I thought George W was a fuckup who would be a dopey one-term president.  I was obviously not looking at the big picture.  I was not looking at who would be in his cabinet and who he’d nominate to the Supreme Court.  I think we know what Emma Vigeland would say about that.

Truthfully, I don’t care who you vote for—it might be personally meaningful to you to vote Green, and that I think you’d agree is maybe a more immediate effect for you, maybe the sum total of what it does, a good in and of itself for you irrespective of what it means for anyone else, but it’s a different effect from what votes are traditionally supposed to do in an election.  That’s fine.  Here's a proposition, you don't have to apologize for your feel-good vote if  I don’t have to apologize for my nose-holding one.  

~~~~~

*The Green is the one who brought it up.  I was merely responding to his reaction to it.

† There is a precedent.  Anti-war voters punished Lyndon Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 for Vietnam by withholding their votes for him-- and for their protest they got Nixon and Henry Kissinger and escalation instead.

The Mourning Cloak

The Wikipedia Entry for the mourning cloak butterfly (also known as the Camberwell Beauty, the White Petticoat and the Grand Surprise) reads in places like a David Lynch script.

• L. Hugh Newman likened the butterfly's pattern to a girl who, disliking having to be in mourning, defiantly let a few inches of a bright dress show below her mourning dress.
• The larvae and pupae ... respond to disturbances by twitching simultaneously.
• Newly hatched mourning cloak caterpillars can display selfish behavior, such as siblicide, by eating non-hatched eggs.
• Defense mechanisms include loud clicks when the mourning cloak flies away from a predator.
• Mourning cloaks also play dead by closing their wings tightly together and tucking their legs up against their body for protection and holding completely still.
• Mourning cloaks ... join together with other butterflies in a perch and fly menacingly towards their attackers—most often birds or other butterflies.

A widespread species, they tend to be seen in cooler more mountainous climes across Eurasia and North America, but they can be found as far south and outside their range as northern South America and Japan.  Newman, referenced above, observed that sightings of the butterfly in the UK were "concentrated around London, Hull and Harwich" all of which, being ports receiving regular shipments of timber from Scandinavia, led him to theorize that they had "hibernated in stacks of timber which was then shipped to England, and had not traveled naturally."  Newman "raised thousands for release at his 'farm' in Bexley, but none were seen the following spring. Specimens stored in his refrigerator for the winter, however, survived."

They are among the most long-lived species of butterfly.  Adults begin to emerge from their cocoons in late spring, upon which they aestivate -- the summer counterpart to hibernation-- remaining in a low energy and activity state known as torpor to weather the hottest months.  In fall, some migrate, but most remain in place.  Some pollinate, but most feed on tree sap and fallen fruit, or the "honeydew" exuded from aphids.  To weather the winter months, individuals will find a notch in a tree or rocky cliff face or nestle on the ground under bark.  Their ability to survive winter in adult form makes them among the first butterflies to appear in spring.  

Mating season begins in early April.  A non-dimorphous species, males compete for widely dispersed females over a broad range by displays of maleness characterized by domination of a desirable territory, a location "that females would want to visit," such as "sunny perches near ravines, wood margins, parks, gardens, lakes, ponds, around stream edges, or canyons in which males can perch and defend for multiple days." In this way, they attract females to themselves.  Females deposit eggs in 3 or more broods in colorful "ring clusters" on the twigs of plants, typically willows or poplars, likely to grow leaves in abundances that will nourish the hatchlings when they emerge as caterpillars. 

According to Wikipedia:

In several European countries with Germanic languages, other than Britain, the name for this butterfly literally translates to "mourning cloak", such as German "Trauermantel", Dutch "rouwmantel", Swedish "sorgmantel", Finnish "suruvaippa" and Norwegian "sørgekåpe". This suggests it is a name which came with Scandinavian or German rather than with British settlers, for whom this species would be considerably less familiar. Other common names include: Czech "Černopláštník" . "Babočka osiková". Polish "Rusałka żałobnik". Russian "Траурница" . Japanese "キベリタテハ" . Chinese "黄縁立羽". 

Having mated and laid eggs in spring and survived the year, the adults then die. 

Memoriana

Graphics above and below are from The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward - Prepared by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, October 7, 2024

For many of us, something has changed in ourselves as a direct result of Israel's conduct of its ongoing "response" to Hamas's surprise breach of the Iron Dome October 7, 2023.  In the aftermath of the attack in which 1200 Israelis were killed and hundreds were taken hostage, as tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian bodies piled up within the open-air prison of Gaza throughout the month; as hospitals, schools, homes and apartment buildings crumbled under the force of 2000 lb bombs leaving 90% of Gazans unhoused within a span of weeks and the onslaught continued with unquestioning, ghoulishly apologetical American support and no end to the carnage in sight,  our world crumbled too.  

I remember back in October feeling very strongly that Israel had broken something it would come to wish it had not broken and that broken thing was the compact that we in the west have had (in so many unwritten words) to grant Israel the exceptional license to take reparations in perpetuity for Hitler's holocaust against Europe's Jews in whatever form it deemed necessary in how it conducted its affairs.  We agreed to grant Israel the right to arbitrate the equivalence of anti-zionism or opposition to Israel with anti-semitism.  We agreed to let Israel run roughshod over propriety and precision in how it characterized its enemies, in its right to perpetual victim status regardless of its culpability -- to grant its special pleading the power to erase its cruelty.  We agreed to look the other way as it constructed a separate and unequal life for the Palestinians it walled away, their access to food, water and supplies as tightly controlled as their freedom of movement within the homeland that Israel now occupied-- we agreed not to call it apartheid.  But it did not take the over 100,000 Gazans, the nearly 700 Palestinians in the West Bank and the growing number of killed civilians in Lebanon and Syria that Israel has slaughtered in the past 12 months , to say nothing of the hundreds of civilian Israelis similarly needlessly killed a year ago as mere collateral damage in their country's wars of choice to put the lie to the tales we let ourselves be told about Israeli virtue.  October voided that.  

As a result of Israel's self-exposure, I no longer believe that Israel's project would be rationalizable but for the unfortunate prevalence of odious conservative elements in its government, but rather that its birth out of European racism, anti-semitism and colonialism-- and especially in light of its conduct in the world to secure its dubious future ever since--should doom it.  The current ethno-state should be succeeded by a single state of egalitarian democratic rule for the current citizens of Israel who wish to remain and for the Palestinians that Israel has displaced.  I no longer accede to the proposition that the right of Israel to exist outweighs the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in whatever peace they can forge together as equal citizens in that land, from the river to the sea.

Wicked Game

Thinking about it later, I wouldn't remember how I came to be here, emerging from a wood, suddenly surrounded by green, striding through shin-high grasses under a flaxen sky.  It had something to do with an urge for health-- a pursuit of clean air for my lungs and for the dark musty corners of a brain reluctantly coming to from hibernation after a persistent winter.  However it had come about, here among the insects springing and darting,  chirping and buzzing about me with blades of grass whipping my legs as I propelled myself forward across the meadow, it felt suddenly as though I had removed an iron shell from my back.  Where I had been weighted down somewhere back there behind me, on the other side of that forest, with the concerns of daily business, here I found myself unburdened, recreated.  

I paused midway across the clearing and surveyed the terrain before me. Which way to go?   The insect thrum was punctuated by the calls of crows to the right of me.  To the left was a sun just along a course of setting.  I proceeded north tentatively - the direction I was already heading - when I thought I caught glimpse of a flash of tawny red parting grass as it bounded away from me. I felt my heart skip a beat.  It stopped me where I was.   The creature seemed to stop as well.  Was it a fox?  Still preoccupied with my quandary about a direction, I looked away, but  something about the red-- I found myself looking back in spite of myself for another sip.  Failing to see it right away, I absently made another few steps in its direction and suddenly there it was again-- a vivid, earthy red peeking above the grass.  It bounded forward.  I stopped again to watch for a better look and again it stopped.  This was going nowhere.  I turned toward the northwest and took another step.  It seemed to alter its path in the same direction.  Before I was aware of it, I was changing my course to match its course, and heading again North, now finding myself in spite of myself in pursuit of it.  

I was on the other side of the meadow, tracking the shadows of forest again when I realized it. There was definitely something about the red-- I needed to verify what it was about the color that motivated me.   As I became conscious of it, I marveled at the growing certainty that something had taken possession of my will and that that something was the fact of the red of the fox.  I found myself trying to reconstruct the moment when it took hold of me.  I recalled the instant just moments before as I came midway across the meadow again in my mind-- the slice of time that the exquisite tawniness pierced the barriers of my perception and seeped into my brain, compelling me before I was conscious of what was happening.  But why recall when the fox was before me darting in and out of the dappled sunshine that pierced the canopy of forest and splashed the earth?  Where was that fox again?   A sudden bark told me.  I scanned the landscape before me trying to connect up once again with the possessor of that magnificent coat, but my search was in vain.  The only trace of the fox now was the skittering and scraping of its mane and the disturbance of ferns as it tunneled through the underbrush a score of yards in front of me.  It was like a hunger.  Or was it hunger?

As I came around a cluster of young fir, the unmistakable red of its coat bounded into view above the brush ahead of me.  Was it something bigger-- with the same red hair?  How could that be?  I struggled to understand what I'd seen when suddenly I came to a small clearing around a stump with a clean flat top.  Someone had hewn a tree in this wood.  Atop the stump were 3 brightly colored mushroom caps that looked freshly torn from their stems.  In my hunger they looked delicious.  I glanced ahead, and saw the undergrowth rustling where my quarry was advancing.  I picked up a cap, studied it briefly.  I took it to my mouth and gave it an exploratory tap with my tongue.  Perhaps I was paranoid-- I felt my head encircled by stars.  A barklike call brought me back to attention.  I quickly set the mushroom back from where I'd taken it and proceeded in pursuit of the red.  I picked up my pace, but the distance only seemed to grow between us.  And yet I got enough of a view now through the brush to see that somehow the red that I was pursuing was on a different form. Not the fox but on a very-fox like creature.  

Could it be?  It appeared to be running on two legs.  At times it seemed to stop and look at me as if to assure itself that I was still on the trail.  It waited for me to catch up just enough to gain some hope of closing the distance between us, and then turned and bounded away.  There came the bark again.  I was close enough to see for certain that my leader was no longer a fox, and not quite a human, but a kind of fox human.  With fox ears and what looked like a white tipped bush of a tail still trailing behind it. Still wearing a mane of luscious red. Was I the hunter or the prey?  I seemed incapable of surrendering to failure at the task of achieving an intimate encounter with the beast.  And just when my endurance seemed most eager to yield the chase altogether, there on the path lay a long flat object, black in color.  A ribbon.  I stooped to collect it and continued on my way, unable to tell by its condition how long it had been lying in the elements.  The question was soon answered by inference, as it now seemed that along the path every fifty yards or so were purposefully strewn an array of objects-- a dead sparrow, an handful of berries, a marbled stone, a hickory nut, a crudely fashioned nosegay of wildflowers, another collection of mushrooms.

These last and the berries, I again paused at, the hunger I had experienced having grown only more acute.  I consumed the berries.  The mushrooms tempted me; but again, I had only to dab my tongue on the cap of one to invoke the sensation of my head detached from my body and suspended amid the comets and satellites of space. I scanned the forest ahead of me for a sign of the creature. 

"Hey!" someone called.  It was a woman's voice.  There beyond the scrub that I was wading through, on the other side of a thicket, amid a stand of pine she stood,  a possessor of the same red hair that had set me on this detour from my solitary walk.  Was that a smile on her lips?  Was she speaking to me?  Before I could satisfy myself with an answer, she turned and ran, in the same prevailing direction that I had been going.  There was no sign of a fox, nor of a fox human, just the lovely figure of a woman, hair ablaze in the late afternoon sunlight, hurrying through the pine before me.  What was the harm in thinking it was me she had addressed with her "Hey!"

Before long I was in the same endless stand of pine, running after her on a carpet of needles.  The items I encountered on the path left were fewer and so far between and of such a random nature--  a large brass button, a scrap of colored paper, an apple--that I could not tell if I was imagining that they had been left there purposefully for me.  Still, the mere act of pausing to collect, study and ponder them slowed me down to such an extent-- and the descending twilight was a factor-- that my guide through this wood had reached a lead beyond my line of vision.  I could only hear the occasional commotion of her progress through the woods, punctuated every so often by bursts of sweet sounding laughter, and what could have been another "Hey!" or two seeming to let me know that I was going in the right direction.  By now my hunger had grown, as had my trepidation about the looming darkness.  Did I know where I was and how I would make my way back?  It seemed prudent to forge ahead in hopes that my red-haired companion would lead me to a settlement or a road by which I could find my bearings and make my way home.  The hunger was becoming unbearable.

I was no longer running, but walking as fast as my aching legs would carry me.  There she seemed to be yards ahead of me in the darkening wood.  At length, I heard what sounded like steps landing on wooden boards.  The rushing sound of water confirmed she had reached a footbridge.  I emerged from the wood to the edge of a much sparser clearing.  Across the bridge, she seemed to be waiting for me at the door of a well lit cottage.  How could this be in this forest that I thought I knew from years of childhood exploration and adult refuge?  I hurried to the bridge which spanned in an arch  over a splashing creek, and crossed it.  As I approached the house, I raised my arm in a wave.  She returned the gesture, turned away and entered the cottage, leaving open the door.  The closer I got, the stronger became the scent of something cooking.  A smell I'd never smelled before.  It was sweet, rich, earthy.  A nutty smell; almost a liqueur.  As I stepped up her front stoop, I saw her through the crack in the door, more lovely in this proximate approach than I had imagined as I made my way toward her in the diminishing sun of late afternoon.  I entered, removing my hat. I wanted to thank her for her hospitality, to ask her her name, to see if she could tell me where we were so that I could begin to plan my way back.  I opened my mouth to speak but before a word came out, she gestured at a pot steaming on the stove, the locus of those incredible smells.  She was so insistent and I was so famished that I knew I could not rest until I had tasted the contents of that aromatic pot. "Please" she said.  I nodded my thanks.  As I made my way to the stove, she turned and disappeared through a doorway and up a stairwell behind her.  Did she want me to follow her? It was clear the answer could wait.

A small bowl and a spoon lay on the counter next to the stove.  Into it I scooped ladles of a rich earth-colored mash of some kind.  A sweeter concoction I could not bring to mind.  I sat down with it at her table.  As I raised a spoonful of it to my mouth, I could sense that it had been cooling a while.  Inhaling the aroma, I took the sweet smelling paste into my mouth.  I savored it and swallowed, its substance blazing a path of delight from my tongue to my throat.  I eagerly took another mouthful.  As I did so, it suddenly seemed as though the world spun fast around me, sweeping me up into a bed of clouds and hastening me over acres of land and across miles and miles of sea to new shores on the other side of the world.  In its savoriness, I tasted the birth of civilizations.  Carts rolling, pulled by beasts of burden over mountain paths, their beds laden with the riches of the earth.  The sun, not just a star in the sky but a god, a provider.  The source and inspiration of every wondrous crop and the teller of tales of how to use them sacredly.  Letting the concoction wash over my tongue, I felt myself rising to the snow-capped peak of a mountaintop, set down at the foot of a path to the temple of the gods. Casting my eyes upward, I rose, ascended, ever higher to the gleaming auburn coat of She who walks in Light.

The next thing I was conscious of was myself lying leaned against an oak, under a canopy of stars on a moonless night, at the edge of a field I knew well was the very place where I first saw the red coat of the fox.  Amid the dewy grasses, I thought, How had I come to be here?  If I didn't die, I couldn't say whether I would be able to make my way home.  Unsure if I was breathing my last,  I distracted my mind from the pain that enrobed me by peering passively into the vast ocean of stars.  I contemplated the night and thought of her, wondering if somewhere out there amid the wisps of cloud had seeped the memories I sought in vain of how my time was spent with her.  Had I at last for even a moment been the possessor of that red?