Deer

I parked my car and returned to the garden that was calling me and only to me for help. On my early morning drive home with supplies I passed two deer on the side of the road. I slowed right down and we looked into each others eyes as I passed by, confirming our shared life together in this place and the safety of their bodies in my neighbourhood. They returned to their munching and ground work when I passed by.  I didn’t think of them beyond the pleasant surprise of our encounter but did carry the beauty of their life-filled eyes and the clean smooth warmth of their bodies with me into the day as a silent thanks to life.

After working for a while in my garden I looked up quickly for some urgent but unknown reason to see the same two deer bounding at full speed up the street toward me. They must have cleared fences and hedges on their low straight flight toward me.  The force and beauty of their movement held my deepest attention and wonder. Despite the deers’ speed and the fantastic height of their bounce there seemed to be moments of stillness in their stride. In particular, the stillness in their bound seemed to be a place of intuition; a place where decisions of direction and survival were made and changed without thought.

 

I never knew what fearful thing pursued them across yards and up the street behind them and whether or not it was real or imagined and if it were real - when it was left behind. I did identify with them and remembered fleeing as a young child, when I strove to outrun my own imagination, leaving our family’s basement in darkness behind the lightening fast click of a light switch and the breathless clack of a basement door-lock. I will never know what ghosts lived in that old basement as my back was always turned to its vastness when I ran up the stairs to the safety of a higher level and my own kind.

The two deer passed me in my lower garden on a bound with their heads 3 feet higher than mine – one on each side of me at full speed. For a moment I feared they were tethered or that the slightest confusion between them would leave me flat, run over and bleeding.  These two deer had looked so vulnerable to me before when I was driving by in my car. Now it was my turn to feel vulnerable.  I never did see anything behind them as they approached but I saw their eyes looking into me as they raced against their own fearful need to escape.  But underneath that surface of fear was the same connection between lives that I had shared with them earlier in the morning. They left me alone in that instant with my own wide eyes and a fast pounding heart but in that moment I clearly knew the difference between our living body and our being.

The experience of my own vulnerability sticks somewhere deeply submerged inside of me but in that moment it moved toward the surface. I have never seen the front end of a fleeing deer before and I will never forget it. It is so very different from their back end that I am more familiar with.

Moments Beyond Self

When we think back to moments of absolute joy.  When we remember instants of profound knowing.  When we stood outside of time and were able to see and understand clearly, ourselves and others.  During those moments compassion was always as just as deep as it needed to be in order to float any shortcoming (ours or others) on a deeper ever-present sea of truth and gratitude.  That simple place - where the love we give is exactly the love we feel.  I don't even remember being caught up in the notion that I was a human at those moments.  In fact, it is like there was always something missing or absent at those times.  Our own identity (the image of self) or one we identify with was not there in that moment at the center of the stage.

Our sense of self – (the one who we think we are) was not in the way – sometimes it wasn’t even on the stage at all.  A restroom break or a brief holiday or maybe even an accidental and short term death kept our sense of a self from standing at the centre of our stage.  Sometimes, a moment is just so very important to us that we choose to set aside our self-image.  In that flowing moment of freedom we hold an open pass to all of the love and all of the wisdom and all of the knowledge that has ever existed.  There is nothing to block our access to it.  There is also nothing that we need to protect from pain or rejection or abandonment or even the embarrassment we might fear.  It never takes a long time for that moment to pass but it also never takes any time at all to know that the heart of life itself, beats for us with joy and without hesitation during any moments we need it – during any moment we invite it.  During those instants in our life when we find the courage to set aside who we imagine we are, or who we want others to think we are, or (basically) who we identify with – we find that we can just simply ‘be’.  The incredible thing to notice is that fear doesn’t even exist when the miracle of courage and knowing is so easily uncovered in us and so easily becomes a part of our presence.  Life loves life – wholeheartedly - in a new and different way in every moment and the true nature that we feel and share with the universe is filled to the brim with love and compassion.