Unseen Connections

Back in the early 1980s, the woman's group I met with discussed Hannah Hurnard's book Hinds Feet on High Places, an allegory in the tradition of John Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress. Hurnard wrote several other small books, one of which is God's Transmitters,

 which was part of a boxed set I bought.  She says:

It seems terribly possible, indeed almost certain, that our minds are broadcasting stations, and that all our thoughts are being broadcast all the time, touching and influencing the thought waves of others for good or evil, just as their thought waves influence ours....

We are thinking spirits, and our spirits appear to be separated from each other by our material and temporal bodies. But it seems possible that our thoughts go out into the universe of thought, over distances beyond our conceiving, touching and influencing others...

And no, she is not off into psychic stuff, although some of her later writings did stir up quite a lot of controversy in theological circles. What she has to say in in this book, and in context is ultimately about prayer. It seems OK to me and is quite profound.

At any rate, that there might be something going on in the unseen realm that we can't exactly explain probably does not come as a surprise to most of us, even if we don't believe in the paranormal psychic stuff that seems to be so popular now on the "small dish." In particular in my case, there have been a number of occasions when I have been thinking strongly about a woman I know, that I should write her, and have sat down to e-mail her only to find an e-mail from her has already arrived.

So, last night as I was trying to fall asleep, I suddenly found myself thinking about Rudyard Kipling's story Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, about a mongoose in India. I had no idea why that particular story out of the thousands of books I have read over the years might have popped into my mind other than I loved it and read it many times, but then I got a little frisson -- an "oh wow!" moment  -- when I turned on my computer much, much earlier today (like at 5 a.m.) and beginning downloading yesterday's e-mail.

My computer, Porky, is running on borrowed time, a "wing and a prayer" so to speak, and sometime in the near future,  I fully anticipate he will catastrophically crash  (our computer guru is currently building my new and improved computer). So, I give him a day of rest on Sunday: one day he isn't running means one more day that he will run.

The fact that I did not see the e-mail my cousin had sent yesterday before I went to bed makes it all the more interesting:

We have this mongoose that lives in between the old burn pile a ways from the house and in the palm trees just outside the fence line. This mongoose runs from one to the other. Mmaybe he has a girlfriend or something hanging out in one of the piles. Well, on Thursday, Joane and the dogs were walking in the yard, and the mongoose was doing his visit. George got it in his sights; Lola also, and the pursuit started.

They almost got the mongoose; and in the process, it got inside my greenhouse under the shade cloth and in between the pallets that I use for tables. Male mongoose have anal scent glands that they use for marking their territory. Somehow, our dogs both got covered in this horrible, horrible scent from the mongoose, it was oily and so stinky.

Of course the dogs thought they were in heaven with the smells, but it took Joane and I both to give them their two baths to get rid of the smell. Joane had gone into the green house after letting the dogs inside, and then she had to deal with a screeching mongoose and two barking dogs going crazy.

The "goose" is still alive and George sits on the deck upstairs and looks for its movement every day, tries to run and catch it, but always comes up short. Some day...

The dog with its nose to the ground is Lola, the Dachsund. She spent the night with a Jack Russell Terrier and along came her son, George, who is on full alert.Good luck Mongoose. Being stalked by 2 little dogs bred to be tenacious hunters? He's gonna need it.