I read your blog on my morning flight above the valley.

Twit! Twit! What an imagination!

You make up a sermon in your own mind and attribute it to me. Please don’t humiliate me with credit for this.

I do not mind you coming to my valley. You are too big to eat, but otherwise you’re just a curiosity. You’re in poor condition. You’ve lost all your feathers, and your skinny wing bones are pretty comical. You have two legs, but you also seem to need to carry a wooden leg to help you walk about. I don’t see how you manage to eat, but since you obviously can’t fly to spot food, and are way too slow to catch it, you aren’t any threat to my territory.

You are surely full of your thoughts, whereas I’m never troubled by all your energy expended on “free will,” “choice,” and other such inventions of your mind.

Though you disparage my habits and limited thinking, my freedom lies within them. Unlike you, I don’t spend any time fighting them, worrying about them, trying to eliminate them. I kill to eat when I’m hungry and find something; I don’t have any moral suffering about that at all. Peck, chomp, tear – yum, yum. God is good. When my body tells me it’s time to procreate, it also knows what to do without requiring flowers, chocolate, or liquor.

I don’t know what you mean by transcendent bliss. Could it be something like the energetic fun of flying in a cool breeze or drinking from the sparkling water in the creek?

I’m easy with death and even suffering, because I cannot worry about it. This moment has my full rapt attention. Like a leaf floating in the stream, or the moon in the sky, I am part of the flow of nature without any sense of being constrained by it. I don’t understand all this difficulty you have in “accepting life as it is.” The moon does not feel some terrible burden of gravity, and I don’t feel any urge for a life that is somehow better than I’ve found it.

My memory serves a functional purpose of helping me adapt to the needs of life. I don’t use it to remember all my past children or to stir up the loneliness of bygone times. I’m baffled as to why you would do this.

You sit and blink at a wall all day so that you can live in each moment as I do, and then in the comedy that you call your mind, you belittle the fact that I do so.

Twit! Twit!

If you don’t mind, though, don’t be too tidy in cleaning up this morning. It would make for an easy breakfast, and you know me, I’m “hardwired” for simple efficient living. Leave something the chipmunks will like; they are so tasty.