The Way to See Deer--Blog Entry #2

Sunday, January 27, 2013 
3:30pm
31 Decrees

The way to see deer is among the dead and the living, when the light of mid-day has spread her body so thin over the earth she could tear into darkness at any moment. The way to see deer is empty handed and wanting; wanting that face-to-face, that recognition that you are both as afraid as the other. The way to see deer is without guns or motive, carrying only the vulnerable coo of both your hearts. The way to see deer is when your feet are so submerged in the white hair of winter any movement could level you to the hard earth. The way to see deer is in a scared space, when you both feel unexpectedly safe.

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how humans can talk to animals. How a deer or a dog can twist his ear into the curve of an artichoke and you know he heard you; you know that he feels something is wrong.  

                                     "All clearings promise"

This Sunday afternoon a family of deer come up to me as I kneel by a grave stone. They stand stunned, perhaps not seeing me, my gray coat the color of the cold marble. They stare for minutes as though they recognize me from somewhere, as though they want to ask me something, but hesitate. They stay close for a while nipping at the bark of a pine and digging into the snow for remnants of grass; their stout noses coming up from the ground laden in the white body of the earth. This is the first time I pray in a long time and expect a response. With the deer spreading their thimble-legs all around me, I expect something to happen. I bow my head to them, to the white earth, to the cold air, and pray. The deer bend their long necks to the ground that give them nourishment and life and together we expect something to happen. I expect to be told why the world collapses differently for every person. I expect for everything to come into focus. I expect to know why promises are broken, why the world hurts.  After minutes of this, of closing my eyes to the world, I realize the deer have opened theirs. Their prayers are answered with their eyes. “The only promise we are given is this world,” they tell me.   

"Expect nothing always"

My father is a hunter. As a little girl I remember him bringing a deer home after he dragged him miles out of the woods, placed him softly on the rough bed of his truck, and covered him with a blue tarp. I remember him calling my sisters and me outside to marvel at the beautiful life he took. He would tell us how sacred the life was and how he let the deer take the time he needed to die. Deer do not want help in their dying, he would say, but want to be alone under the promise of the sky. My mother would be begged to take a picture of him as held the deer’s head up by his antlers. He would try to drag us into the picture, into the memory. No part of the deer was ever wasted. We would eat his meat for months. There is nothing in this life like being in the woods, my father told me, in a space so uncontrollable, so vast, and so alone to humanity. He controlled life in those woods, but never his own. His life was something not even the woods could control.

I am not sure if the first deer I ever saw was dead, but I know that is not the way to see deer. The way to see deer is here in this cemetery under this forgiving sky. The way to see deer is through their eyes, to be stunned in a moment together, staring at the other. 

"See / what you see"
_____________________________________________________

The Way to See Deer--Blog Entry #2 Inspired By:

"How to See Deer"

Philip Booth

Forget roadside crossings.

Go nowhere with guns.

Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or

stay and be early:

next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.

All clearings promise.

Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.

Expect nothing always;

find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.

Take your good time

to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:

downhill toward slow water.

Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.

Be compassed by wind.

If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:

let your ear teach you

which way to listen.

You've come to assume

protective color; now

colors reform to

new shapes in your eye.

You've learned by now

to wait without waiting;

as if it were dusk

look into light falling:

in deep relief

things even out. Be

careless of nothing. See

what you see.

Finding Morning--Blog Entry #1

Washington Cemetery Entrance

Dear good naked morning, it is me again. I cannot remember the last time we spoke, but I remember your face and the way it lights like the moon in its waking. I’m visiting you from the Washington Cemetery where my uncle spends his forever after. Today I am not here for him, but for you; to see your heavy and pure wash tub of a body drip another day onto the souls that do not remember your face. It is 7 am on a quiet Sunday in mid-January and for me you have just woken up. Your sky is bright as the tip of a just-lit cigarette. Your sky is snowing, morning. White stencils fall from her, expiring into each grave, the home of each still body, like fleeting prayers. A pigeon sweeps his breast against her skin, offering, for a moment, a long river in the snow. He knows, even under the snow’s weight, he will remain a part of her.

At this time of year, in this “thin place,” you do not get many visitors. I am the only breathing human body that I can see, but I do not feel alone. Your body, at 32 degrees, falls all around me, pierces my skin like wet strands of hair, to let me know you are here. I am sitting at the edge of a cedar bench, where the land gives a little under the slope of a hill. A squirrel sits on the top of a nameless stone engraved with the words “My Husband” as if she is waiting for someone, as if she has been there a very long time.

This cemetery is called a “thin place” because the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual world is blurred. This is a place where damage and beauty meet, where there is always life among the dead. Are you the mediator, morning; you so close to the spiritual and yet so a part of the natural? Where is my place here? Do you recognize me as among the living or am I too, a blur?

Cemeteries are a landscape for mourning or healing, but I do not feel up for either. It is nice to just be here with you, to be still as your fierce wind tries to level me.  Everything solid—my body, the gravestones, the thick pines—is a shield against him. He is strong and persistent as if mourning some great loss. Last night, in a seeming rage, he threw a tree on its back, tearing its spindling legs from their roots. It lies lifeless today surrounded by a crowd of gossiping headstones. I wonder if the wind feels my body the way I feel his. Do I penetrate his bones, chill his spine? Does his body calm after passing through mine? Does his body heal?

I begin this blog here, with you, as a way to know nature’s role in human suffering and perhaps human’s role in the sufferings of nature. My father visited his brother’s grave almost every day for years. I want to know what he found. Do you know him, morning? Do you know if he is healed? If he is still healing?

From “Forms of Prayer”

Miraculum

Ruth L. Schwartz

1.

Bring me all the days, I say. Beaten, weeping, scarred.

Bring me the blossoming, the hidden branches.

Bring me the promises, the limbs that break them.

Bring me the love, the history we can’t stop making:

sail-planes of the shoulder blades, slope of hip and thigh.

Relentless untamed life of flesh. Sweet grief.

Bring me before and after; wedge me in between.

Our lips and bodies, our burial grounds.

Together, we dig and undig ourselves

like children in sand.

Aerial Photo of Washington Cemetery