Thursday, Day 33: Deer

We were at our first house, where we lived until I was about 5.

We went outside on a new, spring day, the whole world that too-bright-green that lasts only about a week. Everything was in bloom, and it had been raining. There was a rainbow, full arch, directly over our backyard. We gasped, startled, and stood still, just staring. Where had that come from, color in the sky? And then we saw the deer, a family of three, walking casually just beneath the arch.

Sometimes I dream this memory. Sometimes I’m not sure it happened. My mother was there, and my father, my aunts and uncles too—it might have been Easter, I’m not sure. Or, it might have been any other Sunday—we were together a lot, for all kinds of reasons.

In her poem “The Faces of Deer,” Mary Oliver writes,

When for too long I don’t go deep enough
into the woods to see them, they begin to
enter my dreams. Yes, there they are, in the
pine woods of my inner life.

I remember, years later, when one of our Sunday School teachers asked us to recount a time when we felt our hearts swell up with God. I knew exactly what he meant. “There was this time when we saw a rainbow, and then some deer,” I said, but I couldn’t quite explain it. 

How dusk began to settle while we stood by the garage, just watching. How the deer kept passing, again and again, stopping occasionally to stand still. What were they looking for?

Oliver continues,

I want to live a life
full of modesty and praise. Each hoof of each
animal makes the sign of a heart as it touches
then lifts away from the ground.

And the amazing Louise Gluck, almost as if in answer to Oliver, writes in her poem “Messengers”:  

And the deer--
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of sunlight.

Why would they stand so still
if they were not waiting?

That was it, exactly—we got still in a way we weren’t usually still, all of us. The men stopped joking loudly. The women didn’t hurry off to do the next thing, wash the dishes, gather up the crumbs.

Oliver, again:  

Unless you
believe that heaven is very near, how will you
find it? Their eyes are pools in which one
would be content, on any summer afternoon,
to swim away through the door of the world.
Then, love and its blessing. Then: heaven.

But I can’t think about deer without also remembering these lines from Tom Hennen’s poem “Love of Other Things”:

It’s easy to love a deer
But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees.
Love the puddle of lukewarm water
From last week’s rain.
Leave the mountains alone for now.

Eventually, the rainbow faded with the sun. The deer walked away, into the distant woods. I still remember the last glimpse of the baby's tail. 

How to sustain that kind of love, to extend it to everything and everyone? That is the real spiritual work. Not only to slow down and pay attention, but to carry that attention to the bugs and scrawny trees, the lukewarm puddle, the ordinary, not-all-that-beautiful day.