Lloyd Pye

REFLECTIONS ON A COSMIC KILLSHOT

Let’s talk about spirituality. Not the “Touched By An Angel” kind, not the anthropomorphic God of the Bible, or Allah or Buddha or Jesus, or any other deity considered a “divine” being. All such deities result from humanity’s ubiquitous need to objectify and create an emotional niche for a mystical phenomenon we all experience. It is that phenomenon I want to discuss, but not in the manner it is most often dealt with. Forget collection plates and commercial gain. Let’s go to the heart of it.

We live in three dimensions. That’s a fact. The mystical phenomenon we struggle to define originates in other realms of reality. Physicists who attempt to explore those realms call them “hyperdimensional.” The rest of us call them “spiritual” and, in our attempts to give shape and form to the unfathomable, we inhabit them with “Higher Powers.” We do this because we all have encounters with those “other” realms.

Before we go further, let's define "Higher Power" as something beyond the range of normal human senses. Whether we conceptualize it as an inexplicable form of cosmic energy; a plump, serene Buddha; a kind, ascetic Jesus; or even the owner of a Coke bottle from the sky . . . let's move ahead by granting that It or He or She exists and functions.

Let us further note that Higher Power rarely turns the tide for us when we are lonely or afraid or heartbroken and praying for relief from anguish. It tends not to visit when we are swamped by creditors and desperate to win a lottery. (Even friends avoid us at times like that.) Higher Power seems reluctant to interfere in matters we should be able to take care of on our own--which is probably as it should be.

Where Higher Power makes itself felt in our lives is, as a wise man once said, "in the details," in small moments of such scintillating improbability that we cannot accept their existence within the bounds of three-dimensional reality. These are moments where, in later recounting, the experiencer begins with something like: "Listen, I know you're not gonna believe this, but I swear it's true!"

We all know that kind of story; we tell them ourselves when something worthy happens to us. Which brings me to this soapbox. Recently I was blessed with yet another confirmation that someone or something is with me at least part of the time, monitoring my life to some degree, occasionally seizing small opportunities to let me know It/He/She is alert and minding the store.

We have a Lab named Queenie who, like all Labs, fetches for a living. Every day after lunch (I work at home) I play with her for a while, taking a racquetball and racket onto the carport to hit shots that with a good roll can carry fifty yards across our grassy lawn. I hit twenty or so every day, enough to give her a good workout, which means in the six months we’ve had her I have hit well over 3,000 shots for her to fetch.

Seeing the ball and racquet in my hands, Queenie goes into a frenzy of anticipation, leaping and spinning with excitement. She stays near me until I cock the racquet back, then she tears away in the direction I always hit the ball, past and beyond her as she streaks ahead at full tilt. She catches up to it, pounces on it in a sliding skid of muscle and bone and raw animal energy, then she scurries back to me and deposits it at my feet, hopping around on eager, frantic legs until I cock my arm to hit again.

I always hit straight-ahead, waist-high killshots, while Queenie never runs the same way twice: sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes down the middle, depending on where she is when I cock my arm to hit. And in 3,000 plus shots I had never hit her, or even come close. But recently, for reasons I can’t explain, a shameful thought came to me: “I wonder if I could hit her with it? Take aim and actually connect?”

Apart from being mortified to even think such a thing, I promptly dismissed it because I couldn't possibly aim the ball to hit a streaking target liable to run off in any direction. And of course I had to keep my eyes on the ball to make proper contact. Even so, the very next shot started out no different than the 3000 others, waist-high and down the middle. But Queenie had also started down the middle, so when I looked up to locate the ball in flight, my eyes fixed on it about twenty yards out (where I usually pick it up).

"Hey, that's a lot of topspin!” I thought. "It might drop onto her!"

While that ricocheted through my brain, the ball closed on her and dropped onto the tops of her bounding front legs, at the base of her neck, and lightly skipped up over her head, right between her ears. She didn't even flinch. She pounced on it as usual and ran it back to me, eager for me to hit the next shot. But I was done for the day.

Computers can't begin to calculate the number of things that had to line up with absolute perfection in time and space, and in the brains and bodies of Queenie and me, for that shot to happen in the incredible way it did. Supercomputers couldn't work fast enough to make those countless calculations in the few seconds from me thinking about hitting her to actually seeing it happen. And nothing can explain it happening in just such a way that the ball didn’t sting her and no lasting harm was done to our routine.

Something so massively intertwined and complicated is an affront to the concept of coincidence. It can only be called a "miracle," as divinely inspired as those touted by formal religions, but more meaningful because of its modest size and personal nature. It was meant for me and me alone to reinforce my belief that the surest proofs of a Higher Power in our lives come to us in such small, individually unique moments.

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