The Game

“Mom, Dad, there are otters on the lake!”

Linda and I both stopped whatever it was that we were doing and rushed to the lakeside living room windows. Chelsea, who had been doing the morning dishes, was peering out the kitchen window and pointing with her dripping, soapy hands.

Sure enough there were a family of otters on the lake, three of them lounging on our dock. Otters always lounge, unless they are playing full out. Most of the lake was frozen over except for an area around our dock just big enough for an otter to slither through and clamber up dockside. These three had each caught a nice fish and were having a delightful family picnic together on our dock. We three stood there amazed, reverently watching at our windows.

We all love the otters, especially me, definitely more than all the other furbearers that we live with on the lake. Wolves are a tad too treacherous for my liking; coyotes a tad too tricky; beavers a tad too pushy; muskrats a tad too anxious; weasels a tad too bloodthirsty. It’s not that I dislike these other fur-folk. But I like them in the way that you like acquaintances, the kind you can walk out on when you have had your fill of them.

Otters on the other hand are my clan. I never get my fill of them. I love them. They remind me of me when I was a kid, filled with playful innocence, a healthy self-awareness and an honest perspective. What I particularly like about them is the way they play the game. And that is what they were doing this fine morning.

As Linda, Chelsea and I watched the serene scene on the dock, over on the island there was someone else watching. Baldy the Eagle was high atop his eyrie on Eagle Island and with his eagle eye he spied an easy dinner to be had—a fish for the taking. He left his perch and slipped out the back door. We could see him slowly and secretively beating the air for elevation as he disappeared north up the valley. If you didn’t know the game, you would never have guessed what Baldy was up to.

The picnic on the dock continued serenely for 10 more minutes with all three otters completely and obliviously ensconced in enjoying their fish, the sun and each other. And then, suddenly a bald buzzard fiercely ripped the air, yellow talons fully bared. The otters didn’t even look up. Apparently oblivious to the threatening eagle, at the very last minute they all just calmly slithered through the slot in the ice, taking their fish with them. Baldy reacted almost too late, nearly drilling his beak into the dock. Somehow he managed to frantically back-peddle with his wings and grab just enough air to avoid complete disaster. The last we saw of him he was beating his tail feathers back to the island, chirping shrilly to himself in frustration. Three lovely furry heads innocently watched him from their slit trench in the ice. And then they calmly climbed back onto the dock to preen themselves and squeak and chortle to one another.

Illegitimis non carborundum. That seems to be the calligraphy that appears on the otter family crest. “Don’t let them grind you down.” That’s how the otters play the game. I’ve watched them hunted by wolves, hounded by coyotes, harassed by eagles and it never stops them from doing the weasel hop and sliding on their bellies in the middle of the frozen lake, often right under the eagle’s eyrie. It never prevents them from wrestling with each other as they play tag near an open air hole in the ice. It never impedes their rocketing head first on their bellies down an otter-slide. It never thwarts their floating down the lake in a family circle as the young kits splash and play in its centre, sunlight glinting off the water droplets like diamonds as they form the classic “ring of bright water.” A group of otters is called a “romp,” and that about sums up how they live and play the game.

I desperately need to learn the way of my chosen clan, to live an otter way. As I write this Linda and I are hiding out on one of the Gulf Islands after an intense time where we have felt seriously ground down. And as I heal and write, it comes to me that most of what grinds me down is rooted in self-centredness; taking myself and what I do, and other people and what they do, far too seriously. This is an old pattern in my life, one that in part drove me to faith in the first place. It grinds away at my innards and my outtards, skewing my perspective, stealing my ability to live well, if at all playfully. But how does a person change? The answer seems to me to go far beyond choosing and changing lifestyles or giving myself a serious attitude adjustment.

So I have been examining this question in terms of the centre of my life, which is my faith in Jesus Christ. What keeps coming up again and again in scripture is the concept that through my faith in Christ, God is changing me. In all of these scriptures the concept of being changed or given a rebirth from God is symbolically enacted in baptism as an outward sign of what God is doing inwardly through my faith in Christ. Jesus talked about it as being “born again” or being “born from above” by the water and the Spirit (John 3:3-5).

How am I changed, reborn, given perspective, saved from my old self-centredness? Paul says by the inward working of God’s Holy Spirit. “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as He raised Christ from the dead, He will give life to your mortal body by this same Spirit living within you” (Romans 8:11). But what I am rediscovering on this quiet windy island in the sea is that, though there is all the power of creation and resurrection in the Holy Spirit of God working in me, there is also a gentleness that seems to await my consent to be changed. And the more frantically I work at everything the more I lose sight of this. This has been a week of giving consent, of change, of gaining perspective and of learning again how to live and play the game.

Spirit, Spirit of gentleness, blow through the wilderness, calling and free.
Spirit, Spirit of restlessness, stir me from placidness,
Wind, wind on the sea.
(Book of Praise, 399)