“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I pushed Jane in her chair out on the porch, as close to the hemlock as we could get behind the floor-to-ceiling glass; we looked up at the chattering animal from only three feet away. We’d seen raccoons playing in the tree a few times, and Floyd, who lives on a farm, sees them often. This one was fully grown and bore a heavy coat of mixed black, brown, and gray hair; the colors exactly matched those of the tree trunk. In the gloomy day we couldn’t see eyes in the black face. We couldn’t tell the animal’s sex. [I read later that females and the young live in groups, the adult males usually alone—perfectly suitable accommodations of consciousness for raccoons!] “Coons can’t run fast,” Floyd told us, “and big dogs will attack ‘em if they catch them out in the open in the daytime. But that coon could kill even a big dog, if it got cornered.” He added that if we heard a loud thudding noise on the roof tonight, it meant that an animal had managed to dislodge the stone cap on the chimney. And Floyd had been right: The raccoon stayed in the tree until dusk, then descended and ambled into the woods in back of the house.³

The comical series of events involving Floyd, one of his sons, and another helper had started this noon: “Hell, Rob, it’s a coon!” a surprised Floyd called down to me from the roof of the house, after the beam from his flashlight had illuminated the black mask across the animal’s face and made its eyes shine as it crouched at the base of the fireplace chimney. The raccoon had evidently picked the site as a secure, heated refuge from the winter weather to come. The three men vainly tried several methods to coax the half-wild, half-tame creature back up the chimney. Finally Floyd opened the damper a bit and lit a sheet of newspaper in the fireplace: The smoke immediately sent our very upset tenant scrambling up the chimney, across the roof and into the hemlock tree growing at one corner of the front porch. Then while his two helpers stood guard to keep the raccoon in the tree, Floyd lugged a very heavy flat stone up the ladder and planted it across the chimney; he’s going to cement a wire mesh in place as a permanent seal against animals and birds.

(“Yes,” I told Seth. I was getting the rather odd impression that to some extent his material this evening would grow out of our experience with the raccoon, even if he didn’t mention it.)

3. Jane and I regret that we’ve deprived our guest of the protected and warm—if not natural—habitat it had chosen. We had certainly enjoyed watching the raccoon. I told my wife I’m particularly pleased that even though we live within the confines of a small city, we’re also in close contact with the natural world and its creatures. I think of this enjoyable proximity as an excellent way of keeping in perspective our human position upon the planet. I don’t want to be simplistic here, but for some years I’ve been concerned that those living in large metropolitan centers miss a certain daily, vital participation in the very environment within which by far most of the life forms on earth exist. I’m not sure what percentage of the human population now lives in urban areas, but it must be high, and climbing. Yet beliefs rule all: Evidently, even with all of the challenges that crowding can set up, it’s just as natural for people to congregate as it is for them to live spread out—perhaps even more so, if one facet of their behavior can be said to be “more natural” than another!

[...] He came to get his rope out of the fireplace chimney—our family of raccoons is still there, evidently immune to the temptations offered by the rope. [...]

[...] As I turned on a couple of additional lights in the living room, to see to write by, our friends in the fireplace began to sound off —adding a new sort of whistling or crying sound—and Jane made what may be a good point: light may leak past the closed damper enough that the raccoons respond to that stimulus. [...]

[...] He returned at 5 PM to drop a heavy rope down the chimney in the hope the raccoon might climb out. [...]

[...] Up beyond the damper, I could easily hear our raccoon guests busily chattering away: perhaps it was feeding time, their noise was loud, now—a sure sign of growing things, I thought. [...]

(All of a sudden the noises from the fireplace were so loud and intimate that I thought that somehow the raccoons had managed to get past the closed damper and were behind the screen in the fireplace itself, but Jane continued as usual in trance.)

[...] Behind me in the fireplace our raccoon friends were mildly active. [...]

[...] A note: It appears that the family of raccoons inhabiting our fireplace chimney may have left—or so it seems. [...]

(Our family of raccoons was stirring a bit in the fireplace behind my chair as I sat facing Jane on the couch. [...]

(Our raccoon friends were stirring in the fireplace behind me. [...]

[...] The family of raccoons in the fireplace behind me had been quite active and sometimes noisy during the session. [...]