My wife loves birds so she feeds them winter and summer. Birds are messy eaters and the seeds that fall on the ground attract a variety of local wildlife including marmotini illiger, one of the most dangerous and deadly of species in North America. These little rodents with saber tooth tiger ferocity have become a menace to both beast and man.
Boo, our fearless canine, does not take kindly to interlopers so she has taken it upon herself to vanquish this menace from the yard. Chasing them does little good as they have the velocity of a speeding bullet and can easily escape. Being resourceful, she has taken to digging them out of their little burrows of iniquity. These vermin had dug tunnels that are the length of the New York City subway system, so poor Boo has been able only to unearth a tiny disco ball (several of the mirrored tiles were lost in the process) and two tiny half filled bottles of vermouth so far. No other trace of marmotini illiger has been unearthed.
The net result of this campaign of digging are hydrogen bomb explosion sized craters that have swallowed a yard tractor, a Mini Cooper, a VW Beetle (the classic, not the new one), and several in-laws. Boy, I really miss those vehicles!
As an aside, I want to stress that Mr. Walter Disney did the world little good by featuring these fierce and deadly rodents in a cartoon and calling them… Chip and Dale.
Enough being enough, as they say, I started a campaign to rid the yard of these critters and have done so with traps and a scoped Winchester .22 caliber rifle.
The other day while Quiet Sitting on the deck (where I have a direct line of sight to the fallen bird seed – the marmotini illiger feeding area), I laid the Winchester across my lap, waited for a 'monk or two to show up for their supper, and began to quiet my mind.
What was surprising was the quietness that I had for long periods in my Quiet Sitting that day. This is very unusual for me as my mind wanders badly every time I sit. I don’t know what to make of this. I know that I shouldn’t have sat with the .22 as Quiet Sitting is supposed to be just that and not waiting for a pest to show itself. I won’t sit with the .22 again, but only with the spirit Jian that Shi-ge Rick Krausman recommended we get.
Do any of you out there have any idea what happened? When I had a focus (waiting patiently for the 'monks), my mind was quiet, yet when my focus was simply to sit quietly, my mind meandered like a river.
Note: while I may have exaggerated the viciousness of the rodents just a bit, my experience in Quiet Sitting happened the way it’s recounted.
