"...another sleepy, dusty delta day"

Pepper Power reminds me of my first homicide site visit with the Medical Examiner's office in Vermont.  The victim's bicycle was leaning against a three-foot wide pine where she must have gotten off to admire the view of the waterfall cascading down into the brook about 300 feet above the trailhead.  The roar of the water drowned out our voices and we had shout to each other what must have happened.  The perp grabbed her here by her necklace, drug her over there off the trail, see, you can follow the heel marks, and then covered her with leaves there.

One of the female attending physicians gave me a Mace cannister that night, and for a month I carried it when getting out of my locked car, running in darkness to the locked door of the solitary country house, fumbling with the keys.  After a month I put the Mace away in a box and purposely decided it was more calming to imagine the house surrounded by a beautiful protective light than to see attackers behind every tree.  Perhaps the new Pepper Power has already joined the old Mace cannister in the basement boxes.  It only took a day or two this time.  Progress!

And the moral is: Ahimsa pratishthayam tat samnidhau vaira tyagah.  In the presence of one practiced in nonviolence, all hostilities cease.