By Rhonda Byrne

 One time the black guy named Victor at the labor pool in Jacksonville wrote out a chant on a small piece of paper and advised me to keep it in me head and just go about chanting it, so I did.

The very next day, after having things already noticeably going my way, I was sitting under my tarp which was shading me from the early afternoon Jacksonville sun, which fell upon the campsite of Larry and I directly from about 1:30 until about 3 o' clock. This was because a large tree had fallen about 15 yards from where I had a green tarp stretched over a pup tent and where Larry's larger tent sat about 10 yards further. The tree took out a big clump of whatever else in its way opening up a window to the sky and allowing us some direct sunlight each afternoon, and more importantly to me, the chance to read at night by moonlight alone throughout the period of about 6 days before full moon, coming and going; clouds allowing.

But, I sat under my tarp, thinking about the raccoon situation, and Larry sat in his tent, still giggling over, and almost in tacit support of, I thought, the raccoons after they had managed to get at our food in a novel way, as if their brains were mutating and they were becoming an even more conniving rodent, or whatever they are, without having to evolve over generations.

"You give them enough time, and they'll figure out the combination on a lock, if there's food in the box." laughed Larry.

"It's not funny, that was a 5 dollar Yule Log!" I had complained about that particularly delicious item that only appeared at Big Lots around Christmas and was like a log shaped bread thing that had the perfect blend of sweetness and melt in your mouth texture, but which was kind of heavy and had dried fruit in it, but not the gummy kind that has found much infamy as part of "fruitcakes" that wind up being thrown away, with one bite mark off one of the corners, right around the same day that the Christmas lights come down. In New England this was when the first warm day in January came and the job would often be done accompanied by the sounds of icicles dripping all around you.

But, I digress.

I had tipped a shopping cart upside down on a flat piece of ground and had put the box containing the Yule Log upright under it, right in the middle of the cavity. Shopping carts are maybe about 50 pounds. I was confident that our gang of raccoons wouldn't be able to lift the thing.

Larry and I knew that particular clan well. I had even given some of them names, like "Little Racoon," "Pretty Racoon," and "Stupid Racoon."

Stupid Racoon was named that after it had gotten a peanut butter jar stuck on its head while trying to get the stuff that had stuck to the very bottom of the jar. It must have made some kind of neck muscle movement that it was unable to reverse, or maybe even put itself in a Chinese finger trap situation, where the very muscles it needed to flex to effectuate the removal of its head, were expanding and sealing it in.

At first I was concerned about it suffocating and watched it pretty carefully, traipsing around the woods like a raccoon astronaut on a mission, and after it remained active for about 15 minutes, I concluded that it could breath in there, and that it would probably lose enough weight after a few days so it could slip itself out, or, more in keeping with racoon ingenuity would find some natural structure such as a couple sapling trees just about a peanut butter jar's opening apart from each other, and would be able to use that as a remover.

It was kind of comical, though, when Stupid Racoon showed up with Pretty and Little and Big and maybe 3 or 4 stragglers, for the nightly throwing of scraps from Larry and I, which took place just about every night, as we sat around the cooking fire, maybe playing guitars, Their arrival always coincided with the last ray from the sun, right before it went down. There was a consistency with which the things showed up which reminded me of the kind of reliability that the street lights showed, back when I lived in a neighborhood where there were street lights.

They would appear earlier on an overcast evening, just as the street lights on San Jose Boulevard would also be lighting up. So, I believe it was based upon luminosity when the raccoons came out.

The shopping cart was upside down and protecting the box of food; too heavy for even Big Raccoon to lift off it. Plus, with the box inside being upright, there was an added level of security.  

Well, morning came and I walked over towards the cart, and I could already see a disturbing sight. There was a pile of loose dirt, with shredded scraps of Yule Log wrappings laying about it, and there was a U shaped tunnel going under one side of the cart, the box inside it was on its side, and the Yule Log was gone.

I had been doing the chant all that morning. At one point I envisioned the perfect food locker as being one of those iron barred dog kennels, and I told this to Larry. "One of those that are about 4 foot by 4 foot and have a door that opens on one side to let the dog in and out."

They came with a wooden floor board that sits inside the thing, but underneath that are bars.

I eventually got around to bagging up all the trash, including the scraps that had been dragged by the raccoons, off in all directions. They apparently had taken turns going through the tunnel; most likely according to their pecking order. 

I was chanting the chant: Nam Myoso Ryenge Keeyo, or something like that, as I walked to the dumpster that sat in a corner of an apartment complex's parking lot; right at the edge of the woods.

When I arrived at the dumpster, there, apparently being thrown out, was a dog kennel just like the one I had described to Larry. "Man, that didn't take long," he joked, after I walked up carrying the thing.

I remember deciding to stop doing the chant, after enough things like that had occurred; enough to make me believe that the chant worked, because I wanted to kind of keep it in my back pocket. I felt like I still had lessons to learn in life, and maybe some karma to work out; but I stopped doing the chant; because it felt like having things materialize out of nowhere was going to deprive me somehow. Maybe that was the belief that "there is nothing free in this world" that was instilled in me at an early age.

But, now that I am reading "The Secret," by Rhonda Byrne I am starting to question that axiom; and to consider that perhaps everything is free in this world. To those who understand the immutable laws of "attraction."

That's all I have to post. Nam Myoso Ryenghe Kio!