An opera is to autumn what a wake is to winter. If autumn is the shedding of skin, a colorful cleansing ritual, and a bath of fire that makes ready for resurrection, then winter is the Sabbath. Winter is sleep. Winter is death, its music full of woe.

In winter, I hunt. I take to the field and I kill. It serves as my own small cleansing ritual. Burnt gunpowder is my incense and my slaughtering knife is a tube of black burnished steel. My dogs are my priests. My sacrificial lambs can fly.

I have an intense intimacy with nature, so it may seem self-contradictory that I might have great respect for life, and yet still be able to kill. Killing is survival, though. As does every other link in the food chain, Man must eat, and eating means killing. In nature, when someone gets hungry, someone else must die.

To me, a part of respect for life lies in knowing how it ends. It is never pretty when living things are born or when they die. At either of its ends, life is messy and no one wants to watch. Being witness to death reminds us of the unpleasant fact of our own eventual mortality. Denial is too easy when dinner is delivered from kitchen to table by a bow-tied bowing waiter, and it is a safe wager that most would settle for a salad if restaurants made their diners kill their own meals.

Hunting is a tiny taste of murder that gives me a conscience and keeps me honest. It is the means through which I force myself to acknowledge my own death, and through such acknowledgement, I gain a greater appreciation of life. It makes me aware of the fact that the chicken I bought in the supermarket once rode down a conveyor belt to a machine that popped its head off like a champagne cork. It makes me aware that the steak on my grill once belonged to a cow until someone fired a bolt into its skull.

A hunter understands the nature of sacrifice. A hunter knows that spilled blood is precious and that food is a form of holy sacrament. No hunter would ever allow food to go to waste. Waste devalues all life, including his own.

I read an article not long ago about a native tribal community in South America that believes a hunter who takes a life must ultimately replace it upon his own death. In their culture, killing creates debt. I like that. I like the idea that I owe something back to the cycles of life, that my soul will be a bequest to the living after my death. It seems only fair. No one eats for free.

The ritual of hunting, then, is one of conscience-building remorse, of guilt and sin which must be confessed and repented. Each year when I raise my shotgun on the first quail of the season and fell the bird in an exploding cloud of feathers, I feel a strong sense of shame.

It's the Shame of Cain. The first always feels like a brother.

The editor hath spoken.

In case you missed it, this post was supposed to be the first of a three-part story about a seven-year-old girl stricken with leukemia. I had been asked to write an article about her for a small regional publication, but my experience meeting her was so touching that I felt moved to post some thoughts about her here, to make this a sort of "story within a story" of my meeting the child and writing the article.

After I posted Part 1, however, I thought it best to ensure that the magazine's editor had no objections, even though I had not planned on posting even quotations from the article itself, so I called and asked. The editor finally called me back yesterday to let me know that he preferred if I did not include this on my blog. He acknowledged that it would not be a violation of their copyright for me to do so, but asked kindly if I would refrain, so I am respecting the request, with disappointment, but with full understanding of and respect for his position.

All may not be lost, however. The magazine has a website, but only a few articles from each print version make it onto their website. If my article is posted on their website, I'll provide a link.

For those who did read Part 1 and either posted a comment or sent me an e-mail wondering about the status of Part 2 and how the story turned out, I'd be remiss if I didn't divulge it. Kaitlyn, the little girl, died last Saturday as a result of complications from an infection which her body's immune system, compromised as it was by the leukemia's lowering her white blood cell count, was unable to fight.

It was the same municipal parking lot in which I have deposited my car every time I have attended the monthly poetry reading. It is conveniently located — directly across the street and only a few short steps from the nightclub which hosts the event — and typically only half-full by the time I arrive. The hour is early enough that the revelers intent on unrestrained merrymaking in the bars that line the street have not yet arrived, and the lot is well-lighted to deter the larceny-minded. I have never had any problem parking there, until the poetry night this past month.

I thought it odd, when I first pulled into the lot, that there were no other cars. Typically, there would already be a dozen or so in the lot by the time I had arrived, but on this night, there were none. I shrugged off the anomaly, parked in the space closest to the road, and climbed out to open the door for my date (chivalry is not dead — badly wounded, perhaps, but not dead), and soon learned the explanation for the missing cars.

As my date extracted herself from the car, I noticed a portly fellow approaching us. He was clad in a security guard's uniform, complete with tin badge burnished to the point of appearing as if it bore some real authority. Since I had not, to the best of my knowledge, acted in any offensive manner, I presumed that our encounter had merely been the result of chance, and I nodded a friendly "hello" in his direction.

Rather than return the greeting in the traditional manner, however, he instead said, "You can't park here."

I didn't respond immediately, but my face must have betrayed confusion, because he repeated this simple pronouncement with added explanation. "You can't park here," he said, indicating by sweeping his left hand, flattened and palm downward, back and forth in front of him that he meant this particular lot in which we were both located. "The lot's closed after hours."

He evidently expected me to utter a mea culpa and immediately mend my erroneous ways by removing my vehicle from the grounds, but I was certain that my ways were not erroneous. Without saying anything, I surveyed the empty lot to confirm my now-challenged belief that this was a municipal lot open to the general public (of which I am a member) for parking at any hour. My eyes came to rest upon a sign that said (and I am paraphrasing here, as I do not recall its exact language): "This is a municipal lot open to the general public (of which you are a member) for parking at any hour." Immediately above these words, the sign displayed the city's logo, an attractive graphic rendered in pleasing pastels with strategic use of white space so as to be both eye-catching and soothing at the same time.

My confidence bolstered by this official confirmation, I then spoke in my defense. "This is a municipal lot," I said, "open to the general public (of which I am a member) for parking at any hour."

Evidently, he was not convinced by my bare proclamation, unsupported as it was at that point by any authority, and chose to dispute it. "Look, I've been hired to make sure nobody parks here after hours," he said, then reiterated his earlier statement, "You can't park here."

"What do you mean? This lot is open 24 hours per day," I countered.

"It is not," he said firmly. I admired him, if not for his tenacity, then at the least for his brilliant rebuttal, but I had a wonderful rejoinder to his argument.

"It is too," said I.

"Look," he offered, "the owners don't want people parking here after hours. They say they don't want to get sued if somebody gets hurt or has their car broken into." I winced at his sentence-concluding preposition, and before I could regain my composure, he added, "That's why they close the lot at six," by which I assumed he meant "o'clock."

"This," I replied, extending an index finger in the direction of the sign I had just consulted to confirm my belief that I was in the right, "is a public lot."

Evidently, however, he was either illiterate or had poor eyesight, as he was steadfast in his mandate that I must leave. "You can't park here, fella," a quaint colloquialism which I found endearing, despite our stance on opposite sides of the issue at hand.

Flummoxed, I stared plainly at him for a moment. I heaved a frustrated sigh and placed my right hand casually into the pocket of my blue jeans, where it came to rest upon my pocket-knife. Suddenly realizing that I was armed and that he was not, I thought briefly of stabbing him to death, but reconsidered when I realized that resort to violence could only complicate matters. I also had practical concerns for the effectiveness of this approach; the man's girth was obviously padded with a thick layer of lard such that, were I to plunge my blade up to its hilt into his torso, its point would still remain yards short of nicking any vital organs. I returned to diplomacy.

"Who, may I ask, hired you?" I inquired.

"Fulbright Company," he said. "They own this lot."

I looked across the street and was enlightened as to the source of our confusion. Directly across the street was another parking lot, above the entrance to which was a brightly lit sign that read, in letters a foot high, "Fulbright Company." To the side of the entrance was a sign announcing a schedule of their parking rates. Beneath that sign, another read in capital letters large enough to be legible from our position: "NO PARKING AFTER 6:00 PM."

With a plaintive smile, I pointed across the street. His gaze followed the direction of my point until it fixed upon the signs and I said, "Au contraire, my friend. Fulbright owns that lot. This lot," I added, adopting the officer's earlier demonstrative palm-down sweeping gesture for added effect, "is owned by the city, and, as the sign over there plainly says," I pointed again to the sign, which plainly said (again, paraphrased), "This is a municipal lot open to the general public (of which I am a member) for parking at any hour."

When he realized he had been policing the wrong lot, his face melted.

There is something in my nature which renders me incapable of gloating over a fallen adversary. I am more inclined, when the battle is had, to render aid to a stricken foe than to exhibit contempt. It is this tendency toward empathy which led me to take pity upon the poor 'fella,' especially in light of the fact that there were a dozen cars now parked in the lot properly falling under his jurisdiction. This led me to speculate that he had, in fact, earlier evicted each from the lawful lot and directed them to park in the very territory which he had been appointed to defend.

With tearful compassion, I bid him farewell and wished him the best of luck in the future, then held out my elbow into whose crook my date placed her arm. I then escorted her across the street and into the poetry reading, where, once inside, I announced over the microphone that it would be with the utmost appreciation of a crestfallen defender of law and order if those who had parked in the forbidden lot would kindly remove their automobiles back onto public property. And they all did.

No point in twisting the knife, of course.

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On these still mornings, the last thin and frozen minutes before dawn are holy moments. They are created for contemplation, for forgetting that there is a future and a past and living only in the now, for simplicity, for pause. Nothing stirs. Nothing would dare.

On mornings like this, I sit quietly and watch. As the sun climbs through the trees and its rays reach the ground, its warmth causes the thin crust of frost on the grass to sublimate directly from ice to vapor. Transparent columns of fog rise slowly and float above the ground, hovering like silent ghosts.

Everything stops during these moments. My mind halts and I begin to blend with the morning, to become a part of it, and I begin to see more clearly that everything happens for a reason.

Were I, in this moment, to hear God whisper over me in the stillness, "Ask me anything, child. Anything at all," I would be unable to think of a single question.

Two weeks ago, I climbed the mountain in the dead of night to watch the sky falling. Out in the country, far from city lights, the stars are so thick they seem capable of supporting a human's weight, as if one could crawl up and stand looking down upon the earth were there a star low enough to grasp like a tree branch to begin the climb.

The Leonid meteor shower peaked that night and as I watched, blue-green streaks appeared non-stop out of nothing, blazed across the sky, then dissolved into nothing. All these tiny bits of stardust, each no bigger than the head of a pin, bombarded the atmosphere and were burned to nothingness, vaporized into their bare elements in one breathtaking moment. Meteor after meteor, fiery existence burned into smoky nonexistence.

As I lay back on the mountaintop, I considered how nature is both benign and powerful, benign in the sense of a lazy Sunday afternoon one might spend watching clouds administer their Rorschach tests to see what images our minds conjure in their random forms, and powerful in the awful fury of a thunderstorm, both destructive and beautiful at the same time. A single bolt of lightning burns hotter than the surface of the sun, splits hundred-year-old trees in half, starts monstrously large wildfires that rage in dry hillside brush, and contains enough electricity to power a small city for weeks.

These meteors, formed at the same time as the universe, were woven out of the same rough fabric that comprises me, the same basic elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, iron. These spectacular blazes of fire in the sky were made of nature, of all the matter that exists in the universe, of me.

I am nature. I am the cotton-candy clouds lazing in the sky, the wind blowing through a beautiful woman's hair, the moon, the stars. I am tremendous thunderstorms unleashing furious blue streaks of lightning and peals of thunder. Count the seconds between lightning flash and thunderclap and you can know exactly how far away I am.

An old mantle clock graces the top shelf of my bookcase. It's one of the old-fashioned kind which must be wound once a day. I bought the clock several years ago when I was still infatuated with the idea that time was important.

The clock stopped working long ago. The brass pendulum that peeks from beneath its face once swayed back and forth taking the measure of the universe, but it now hangs frozen in time, unmotivated by the future and unmindful of the past. It knows no "before" or "after." It only knows the present. Here. Now.

I am not sure how long ago it stopped working, and I could quip that I hadn't the means to tell because my clock was broken. The only thing I can know with any certainty is that time stopped at precisely 12:04, the time eternally shown on the clock's face, but I don't know whether it speaks of a few minutes past noon or past midnight.

It seems a fitting metaphor for a life we all want to live. We are constantly rushing – too many things to do and not enough time in which to accomplish them. We never have time to stop and time becomes a bothersome thing, so we try to ignore it. Then, one day when we're much older, we look back and wonder where the time went and how life happened so fast.

We all secretly wish we could stop time, to freeze it in its tracks for a moment so we can catch our breath. We have all had precious moments in our lives we wish could have lived forever – times of success, honor, romance – times we wish we could have captured and held like keepsakes, forever preserved in a present-tense scrapbook.

But we can't. Time marches on and before we know it, now becomes then, and whenever becomes now, and there isn't a damnable thing we can do about it. Except wish. And remember. And envy the clock, forever frozen at mid-day, or in darkness.