Early Morning Deer

I saw the deer this morning. It was the two little fawns born this past spring. They are no longer speckled and wobbly on their feet. They are bigger and leaner now with most of their adolescent look fading away. Winter has seen to that. It's cold here now. It has been a hard winter so far. Lots of rain and cold. I often think about the woodland creatures then. Where do they go when the woods are wet and the wind is blowing hard?

While we are snug inside, where are they in the night? I have been comforted on many a morning to head out early and see the bright white flags of the deer as they scatter from their nest close to the house where it is dry and warm. Fanny, my resident racoon, makes her nightly rounds of the deck around 11:oo. I wonder about her excursions in the cold and rain as she waddles off in search of her supper or when I'm awakened in the night by the sound of her body slamming the bird feeder for seeds and fighting over the spillage! (raccoons do not like to share)

Deer on the native American medicine wheel of life are found in the South. According to their beliefs the soul, represented by the deer, enters this world from the South and begins its journey to the West, then the North and with the goal of arriving finally, in the East. Along the way it learns to shed the past, lose its fear of death, discover wisdom and unite with the divine in order to finally be able to journey back home with it's own personal vision. Then it is able to give it's gift to the world represented by the rising planets in the East. That is the most difficult task of all.

When we consider the mind boggling amount of details which cluster around our daily living, it's very hard to imagine considering such important tasks as these, much less accomplishing them. But it is comforting, especially when life is more than we feel we can handle, that sown within the fabric of it, are the very seeds we need to find in order to move on.

DECEMBER

Mary Oliver from WHITE PINE

Then the deer stepped from the woods. It walked from the shadows under the trees into a clear space. Antlers sprang from its brow, each with five or six tines. From the antlers, from each tine, green leaves were growing, as if from the branches of a tree.

The deer stood without moving, brutish and graceful as deer alive in the daylight, except that its heavy, elaborate head was carrying, upon the usual curvatures of horn, these branches, this fountain of leaves.

Then it turned and vanished. In shyness, perhaps. Or simply because we get no more than such dreamy chances to look upon the real world. The great door opens a crack, a hint of the truth is given--so bright it is almost a death, a joy we can't bear-and then it is gone.