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.