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Caged Beasts — Addiction

Lucas A. Davidson
3 min readJan 15, 2025

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Daily Meditation 1,046–1/15/2025

These are grizzlies BTW. We have black bears.

Growing up deep in the wilderness where the nearest stores and hospitals were ~45 minutes away and a call to the police meant waiting 30 minutes, you tend to get fairly tuned-in with nature.

Nature always wins, though, and that’s the thing you keep in mind living in such environs — you can beat nature back, make special homes etc., but nature gon’ win, ultimately.

Anyway.

Black bears were a fairly common sight and occurrence. They are generally a bit nosey but can be incredibly dangerous and destructive.

At our house, we fed deer, turkeys, and birds. At one point, I remember something like 50 deer in the dead of winter coming streaming out of the dense woods to our clearing where my dad, each morning, had fixed the fire with more wood and then would rattle corn in his bucket with a metal pie pan. He’d exclaim in a silly, loud voice “CMON! CMON! GETCHER CORN! GETCHER CORN!” and them deer’d come a-runnin’!
They genuinedly loved my dad.

Across the road and up a quarter-mile long driveway were my great grandparents and their farm. My great grandpa, Harry, also enjoyed feeding the critters, but had a more automated system (I suspect due to him being nearly 80 at the time). It was an old metal barrel he had rigged up into…

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Lucas A. Davidson
Lucas A. Davidson

Written by Lucas A. Davidson

Daily philosophical meditations on Eudaimonia. These are distillations from the forthcoming book on the topic. Comments or jobs: lucas@multistatewide.com

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