here we are
I pull back the curtains to let in more light and there in the meadow beyond the creek bed, the sweet deer family stands nibbling the grass that is greening with the viriditas that Hildegard of Bingen intuited was the innate potential of all of creation, to green its way to holy communion in space and time.
Sweet deer, there you are! I speak to them from a place where they cannot hear or see me, a place behind glass and wood where I am set apart from the day’s moist shine. In the rains, the deer had kept away from open spaces, and a mastiff watchdog down the hill had likely kept them from this meadow for years, but the mastiff was gone now, his deep barks and lunges existing only in the muscle memory of us creatures who had been taunted by his instincts. Still my youngest dog, who is mostly Staffordshire terrier with enough miniature pinscher to make her look innocent, whimpers whenever we walk across the driveway where two-hundred-pound Champ would spot us, stun us with bass beat eruptions, the warning booms before he might charge, which he had on occasion and caused fear and trembling and traumatic collisions with me and mine. Hard ones to endure.
Sweet deer, there you are! Come out to feast in the blessed light of this March morning that promises breath and shine. That offers the greening that comes after the quiet endurance that must be born by us all, the elements of wear and tear and trip and push and pull and pay and cold and rain.
To participate in the returning, to resupply the nutrients of toil and tingle and stare and rest, to speak and not speak, to live in the space between the notes and know you are not alone there, these are the makings of today’s sunrise, these hours where the robins may come again in great numbers to peck through the wet leaves of autumn, where the daffodils in the cemetery stand as tall for the dead as they do for the living, where all that a body has moved through becomes a simple story whose telling no longer holds a need to tell itself again, whose hard parts feel like those wet leaves that have nothing for me now. The learning has become me. Let the birds take the rest and fly on.
Quiet endurance. Is that a mantra or a curse? Superpower or restraint? Aspiration or penance? Sweet deer, what do you say it is? You who have found the meadow free from predators in the brightness of day and now feed there.
Related piece titled Dogs-R-Us linked here.
