A KINSHIP WITH DEER
This morning I took my coffee outside, stepping out on the patio of my home in the Catskill Mountains, still wet with morning dew. There is very little birdsong at this time of the year, but I could hear my Cardinal singing in the distance. And not 10 feet from where I had paused on the patio stood a fawn, the same one that’s been racing around our pond, quietly nibbling on grasses and wildflowers, all alone. “Where is her mama?”, I whispered under my breath with more than a bit of anxiety rising, instantly fearing she might be gone.
Just 2 nights ago, I witnessed something I’ve never seen in the many years of my mountain living. Driving on a winding country road, the car in front of me hit head on a doe who had bolted out from the tree lining, striking so hard that the deer was thrown straight up and back. I gasped wildly, instantly nauseous and weeping as I slowly drove by her collapsing body and then, the car that had hit her, the driver bizarrely smiling at me as I passed.
It was a split-second tragedy that mirrored for me the catastrophe of climate peril. A grim metaphor of capitalism decimating Mother Earth and her Beings, while Big Oil pats themselves on the back, hiding behind sinister smiles. It was a difficult image to wrestle from my mind, as I said a prayer for the deer, as well as for the person who’d hit her.
I thought of her yet again as I watched this fawn, smaller than the others, a later birth in the fawning season. Could she make it this winter without her mother? As I began to fret about her care, a beautiful doe strolled around the corner and the fawn pranced over to her. I sighed in relief.
I have long felt a kinship with Deer. In cultures around the world, particularly in Indigenous and Earth-Based Wisdom traditions, deer are revered, with the belief that the large, tufted ears and the antlers, like the tree of life, reaching up and outward to the sky, gave them supernatural powers. So, like antennae, they were seen as having the capacity to pick up on extrasensory information. Gracious, gentle Deer watches over the veil, the threshold to the Otherworld. Long before Santa charioted his flying steeds across our mythical skies, it was the female reindeer, who keep their antlers in winter, who drew the sleigh of the Sun Goddess at Winter Solstice.
As an Inter-spiritual Minister, I have enjoyed learning about the religious traditions of history, because I am curious about the spiritual journey and how people choose to connect to Wisdom Presence. My personal practice is eclectic, and I refuse to call myself anything. I was raised in Christianity, and while I feel a depth of closeness with Jeshua (Jesus), Magdalene and Mary, and their teachings, I was quite clear, by the age of 12, that organized religion was not for me.
I am most drawn to the practices of earth-based and indigenous traditions that connect deeply with the Kincentric understanding of the Interconnectedness of All Life on Mother Earth. And I continue to be deeply appalled at organized religion’s understanding of separatism from and dominion over Nature, with her resources and sentient beings culled and pushed for profit. Is THIS “Heaven on Earth”?
What is my relationship with Nature? It is in nature that I feel the most profound Presence and expansive experience of the Creator, God/Goddess, All that Is, Oneness and Unity, Wild Enchantment and Magic, the Great Spirit and the Eternal Mystery. I have felt this connection to the trees, the wind, the birds, the rivers, the polliwogs, the deer…since I could walk and talk.
And it is to our relationship with Nature that we ALL must return if we are to salvage the disintegrating ecological systems of the earth that WE DEPEND UPON for life, if we are to put an end to the incalculable extinctions of our relations, and if we are to ensure some semblance of our very well-being here on Mother Earth.
Tell me, what is your relationship with Nature?
#TheEdgeofEveryday #ClimateRealityLeader #ClimateCrisis
