Deer

Deer Story Big old deer came a long way just to tell me a secret then he ducked out the back way and headed on home. At least that’s how it felt to me. Last fall Susan and I fell into a little romance together. We explored a while, we drifted apart, we came back together, we broke up ugly and finally at the end of last summer, by grace we reconnected. Susan wanted it casual but casual is not my best suit. I think we ended up with casually intense or maybe intensely casual, I’m not sure. Whatever the label, it was intensely pleasant for me: very healing and nicely balanced and I briefly considered reneging on my intention to sit the three month retreat in order to continue so sweet a dance. Only briefly considered though because I deeply felt the rightness for me of sitting the course and Susan also encouraged me to go in that direction. For the first month my practice moved gently but continually forward. I sat and I walked and I paid attention as carefully as I could to whatever sensation crossed my mind. Bit by bit the mind grew quiet and steady. Like a tourist in a new town I looked forward with interest to whatever it was that might soon be discovered. Throughout my travels I found ongoing support recalling my warm sharings with Susan and I occasionally sent postcards home to her in the form of short, Zen-like poems about my joys and sorrows and love for her. Even as I delighted in meditation practice, I warmly looked forward to coming out the other end in due time and hopefully picking up with her round about where we left off. Of course, life is never that simple. At the end of the first month on the dharma trail I turned a corner like so many before but suddenly found the straight road ended. Perhaps there was a sign “DECONSTRUCTION AHEAD-PROCEED WITH CAUTION”, I don’t know though because I didn’t see it. All I knew is abruptly and without warning I found myself with virtually no willingness, interest nor ability to continue intensive practice. Since I’d been abroad before, I didn’t immediately panic, these things happen, I just followed the flow, backed off and allowed space in my practice for this detour to unfold and by and by rejoin the main road. Slowly days passed with no progress. Again and again I would reaffirm my commitment to practice and begin anew only to fall back off almost immediately. More days passed. I started to go on bike rides and long walks through the multicolored autumn unfolding in the New England woods. I started reading short fiction and then longer fiction as I waited with increasing concern for a bus that inexplicably wouldn’t come to take me on my way. After two weeks going nowhere I could measure, I started to consider that this trip might 1

be reaching an unexpected and premature conclusion. I had started oscillating wildly between determinedly yet increasingly briefly re-applying myself to practice and then acknowledging that the retreat was already clearly over for me and I should stop dreaming about what was gone and return to my semi-normal life. But whenever I attempted to cross the psychic bridge back to normal mind I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was stuck in limbo it seemed. I couldn’t go forward yet neither could I go back. I was mired in paradox and contradiction, detours, deadends and wrong way streets every which way I turned. In the midst of this strange country, I considered the possibility of reuniting with Susan with markedly mixed feelings. I knew that once I connected with her, there would be no going back to retreat space. I knew that neither she nor I wanted our relationship to assume the burden of ending my retreat. I also didn’t want to burst without warning unexpectedly and disruptively back into her life, so once or twice I wrote to her to apprise her of the ongoing disintegration of my retreat. She responded very coolly and cautiously and I had to tell myself that she was only just carefully and considerately avoiding tempting me off of my precarious perch. The only slight clue I had as to what was blocking my movement in practice was the absence of any significant emotional affect in the mind throughout my month of meditation. One day after things had gotten weird, I was standing in the lunch line and suddenly started to feel quite a bit of anger coming up and the main mind voice responded to it quite clearly saying, “No, I’m not willing to feel this now.” I had become fond of and interested in cultivating a cool quiet mind and perhaps the sign I hadn’t consciously read had said, “WARNING—INTENSE FEELINGS AHEAD. GO FOR IT OR TURN BACK NOW!” Time to get my nice clean mind dirty and I didn’t want to even know about it, let alone jump in. I was just about ready to escape to Susan when the Dharma fairie intervened to play an inspired prank on me. Susan came to my tent in the woods on the morning of her birthday to tell me regretfully that she had gotten involved with another man recently. Backing away from the cliff ahead I plunged into the pit behind me. Suddenly after weeks unable to practice, I found there was nowhere but on the cushion that I could deal with the waves of grief and loss that now relentlessly swept over me. I fell and fell, rivers of loss, oceans of sorrow, on beyond Susan, down through and beyond loss after loss that I had neglected before to grieve, down deep into the echoing darkness of primal wail. Intense. After a while, (days, weeks, years, lifetimes?) the storm passed and I found some footing on dry ground again. At the same time it was clear that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I could suddenly see that it was relentless formal practice that I could no longer manage while it was the 2

slow, quiet, sensitive abiding that I couldn’t bring myself to leave. There was no paradox, just two different aspects of retreat to mix and match as appropriate. So I continued on a new kind of retreat, without fixed form or expectation of progress, just trusting myself to feel and express the ever changing balance of where and how I most needed to be. I looked back at one point and reflected on how my metaphor of what dharma practice felt like had grown and changed over time. Two years ago, when I sat my first three-month course, I viewed practice as a great construction project. Given adequate time, effort and technical expertise, the project proceeds onward and upward and is one day finished. I managed to survive the first three-month course but this mechanical model didn’t. I saw that I entered this course with a more organic model akin to many classical metaphors comparing dharma practice with a wild animal to be tamed. This was still a linear process but one calling for not only effort and skill but also responsiveness to and wise understanding of the nature of the wild thing within. It was still a project but it was alive and unpredictable. If I jumped on, hung on, fell off, got back on, over and over, over and over, finally I would prevail and harness the wild thing to my service and to service of the greater good. Just as the first metaphor had not survived my first long retreat, now I saw that this second model had dissolved and been replaced during this one. But now I searched in vain to compare the new vision with something apt. No metaphor was big enough to contain this new sense of dharma practice. A Lewis Carroll character once made a map so big and detailed that it was as large as the land it mapped. He couldn’t take it out and unfold it because the local farmers complained that it blocked out the sun so he finally had to abandon it and use the land itself as its own map, which worked just as well anyway. Likewise I finally conceded that the only thing I could now compare my newly discovered sense of practice to was life itself. Practice no longer seems as some finite project, mechanical or organic, to master or tame. Practice feels like being here in this world, in this body, in this moment and feeling the touch of the whole universe and feeling the implicit invitation to respond to that touch. How fully can I feel the touch of this moment and how wholeheartedly dare I respond? Just me, just as I am, right now. The universe will take me where it will and do with me as it wishes. That is beyond my control and ultimately not my concern. My challenge, simple and immense, is to let myself be touched by life and to answer genuinely. None of this though is the point of this story. This story is about the deer I met yesterday. Remember the deer? Yesterday morning began the 76th day of this long winding retreat. One week left until the official end of silence. Fall had turned quite fiercely into winter and December 3

had also brought the violent counterpoint of deer hunting season into the background of the quiet life here. I had been gradually getting the rhythm of practice without depending on consistent form. Some days I only sat quietly with my mind, sometimes I walked back and forth discussing with myself what some “it” was all about. Sometimes I would find myself engaged in work which had called me to service for a while or get into conversations with teachers and less often staff and once or twice with Susan only to return always to my quiet place in the wintry woods. Some people treated me as though I was off retreat, some as if on. I found it was up to me to maintain and convey my boundaries as they flowed and changed with the wind. Daily life had become a macrocosm of an hour’s sit. Returning to the central, still focus only to sooner or later wander or wonder off somewhere until finally feeling the pull to return to the center again. No big deal, not good or bad, just the mind doing it’s thing. Life as practice and practice as life. On that 76th morning, I awoke early in my tent, cozy and warm under an array of quilts and sleeping bags but the thermometer claimed it was 17 degrees beyond the bag and in no hurry to squander my hard earned coziness I began watching my mind and breath while still lying in the sack. When I awoke again, (that’s the way it goes, sometimes) it was no longer particularly early and I launched myself into my familiar dance of getting up, bundled up, out and down to the building before the weather noticed I was gone. Official breakfast remained only in the digestive tracts of the multitudes of meditators, sitting and walking here and there according to their own paths, so I composed my manner to resemble one who is accustomed to go into the kitchen and help themself to leftovers. Thus composed and engaged, I met the first messenger of the deer, like John the Baptist coming before an antlered Jesus. It seems, I was told, that a deer had fallen through the ice at a nearby pond and a dismayed work-retreatant was having no luck marshalling support in rescuing it. I could feel my momentum moving me towards sitting and walking, not winter interspecial swimming but moved as much by this man’s dismay as by the as yet hypothetical deer I consented to help. We sent Terry, the cook, out to look for more help and I went to change into winter swimming attire and finally we headed off. The rescue crew ended up as four of us: Me, Jeff the work-retreatant, Terry the cook and Scott, whom I might label as maintenance staff but much more significant to my personal movie, Scott was the man whom Susan had become involved with. The universe moves us as it will, I say. Off we headed, down icy road, across snow bound, dormant cornfield and into the white, winter woods. I found myself alternating between attending to immediate sensations of body and 4

mind and then hastening to keep up with the quick and unfamiliar pace that our mission spurred upon us. Finally, the woods opened up to reveal the frozen, snow covered pond and there fifty feet or so out was the deer, ten point buck, turned suddenly real, stuck in a dark circle of water in which he slowly was paddling round and round. I remembered the previous winter in the mountains of Washington State, when I had been summoned to extricate a wounded German shepherd from a small, icy creek by neighboring children in tears. I had tried to do that job without getting too immersed in creek and dog but finally found that in and under, down and dirty was the only way it could be done. Thus, I knew instantly upon surveying this current situation, that what was true for dog and creek was only more so for deer and pond. To get him out, someone had to go in. Over many years, I have slowly learned not to simply take over in group projects but to allow the group dynamic to express itself in solving the problem in front of it. I therefore paused in my urge to plunge right in, and instead to let action flow out of the whole group. I offered the honor of leadership to Jeff, since in my eyes it was his deer but Scott had taken a stand furthest out onto the ice and he began to speak for the group. Who weighed the least, he inquired? Terry the cook did but he was way back on the solid shore, with lunch prep for 110 lying ahead of him and clearly not up for a swim. After a few moments of further body weight discussion, Scott announced that he should go since he had on water-proof clothes. Did he mean that he wouldn’t get wet if he went in, I asked? Gore-tex, he replied. I thought this strange since once inevitably submerged, the water would be on the wrong side of the Gore-tex to make any difference. In any case, off Scott went, tied to me on a rope too short for the distance, inching his way very cautiously across the thin creaky ice. Terry suddenly thought a canoe would be a great help but I observed that the only known canoe was rather heavy and very far away. But Jeff suddenly remembered the boat at the house a quarter way around the lake and the two of them quickly disappeared in search of it. Meanwhile, Scott continued at an ever-slowing crawl across the ice until its growing, groaning frailness brought him to a stop. Suddenly, apparently appreciating the precariousness of his position and the importance of the rope that tied him to me, he turned to me and said, “You know, I just want you to know that Susan and I officially broke up last night.” He obviously wasn’t thrilled with where he was sitting and he wanted to insure that I was actually on his side. I could only laugh freely to appreciate his predicament and then assured him that throughout the dance that we were indirectly sharing through Susan I had been endeavoring not to put him on the opposite side from me and that he should dare to trust me at the end of his safety line. 5

As time passed, the deer swam slower and slower, mutely witnessing our efforts, and it slowly became clear to me that Scott had hope of freeing the deer with out getting into the icy soup with it. Lying flat on his belly at ropes end with a long branch he hoped to break the ice from a safe distance but he had no leverage and soon found it couldn’t be done. The deer watched and waited; waited with the patient calm that comes from great wisdom and equanimity or else advanced hypothermia and exhaustion. Increasingly, it seemed to me that Scott was fiddling endlessly yet doing nothing constructive and my patience began to wear thin like the ice and I began to offer more and more urgent admonition that he had to get in the water, just jump in the fucking water for God’s sake. Still, I realized it was Scott who must choose; it was he now who was at the edge and my role was support. Easy for me to advocate dunking when it wasn’t my skin. Scott continued with, for me, maddening caution, now trying to hook a short limb of the branch over the fading deer’s antlers and pull him onto the ice. No way. On his belly, Scott’s pull was all horizontal, no lift to get the deer up and out. Finally Scott got up on his knees to gain some needed leverage but still not even close to enough. He didn’t know about the German shepherd in the creek. The deer’s head drifted down into the darkness of the water looking perhaps for a new escape from his dilemma. Scott continued to fiddle. I started going crazy. “Get his fucking head out of the water!” I screamed. Scott reached for it and finally got wet as the ice started coming apart underneath him. He regained his stable perch after some effort but I had lost mine. I abandoned my backup role and scurried, quickly, snake-like to the edge. Scott didn’t think it was the best idea us both being out there. I encouraged him to take a break. He needed one and retreated. Somewhere around here, Terry and Jeff came back without a boat. The deer was strangely still and his eye was looking at something very far away. Wild yet one pointed frenzy overtook me now. I untied the rope from me and lassoed the deer’s antlers. I reached into the lake and pulled his nearest foreleg out onto the ice. Whoever was at the end of the rope pulled but it wasn’t enough yet. With an inner gulp, I reached deep, down under to find the deer’s other foreleg. I pulled and rolled him on his side to bring that leg out onto the ice too. Everything caved in and I finally joined what was still the deer amid the ice and water and frenzy. I’m not very clear on the sequence of events at this point. The universe was touching me all over and I was too busy dancing to pay attention to the steps. I recall a lot of yelling and wrestling and ice breaking but it’s all a wild kaleidoscopic tumble. Somehow, when the music stopped, both the deer and I were up on solid ice and I was trying hard to fill myself up with 6

breath again. I was clearly alive, the deer clearly not. Jeff made some attempt to invite the deer back to life but the deer was not impressed. Finally, we all in our own way encouraged the deer-spirit onward with our best blessings, left his mute body to nature and turned ourselves back into the woods each carrying not only what we had brought with us but also what we had found there. For me, as I walked, soaked and mostly silent, back through `the woods towards home, I first became aware of being angry. Angry at our failure, at our hesitance and incompetence, angry at Scott and angry at me. Angry. My rational, reasonable mind told me I was mixed up in my feelings. I had been very close to the deer for a while and then he had left. This was cause for sorrow and grief; being angry at Scott, who had done his best, was avoiding my deeper feelings. Probably true, still I was angry. When we got to the road, we met a small group of re-enforcements, including Susan, coming to join the battle but the battle was done, time only to go home and talk about it. When we got back to the Center, I found I felt a deep hurt inside. I saw Susan and was drawn, despite being rather wet, to ask for a hug, but as I approached I could see Susan was wrapped in suffering of her own, crying her own tears, getting her own needed hug from a friend. I remembered Scott’s announcement of their having just broken up. I paused uncertainly on the periphery for a moment then went my own way in search of warm, dry clothes and space to sort it all out. I spent the rest of the day alternating between talking my feelings out to what wise friends I could engage and sitting and walking and chewing the events over and over in my mind alone. I remembered Susan complaining of my tendency to plunge too directly into delicate situations like our relationship and I marveled at the symbolic irony of me adamantly urging Scott to plunge in while he hesitated on the brink. Days before I had been considering my relationship to relationship and life and had decided that I was not afraid to love but I was clearly afraid to live. That on a deep veiled level, I had a bad relationship to life that caused me to hold back, to push away, to plunge into love as often as possible but then pull away before reality could seep in. I’m not yet able to see this bad relationship directly, only to feel its inferences but I feel how essential it is to make space in my heart and mind to meet it by and by. But I saw that I had not kept my distance from the deer and the lake. The deer didn’t offer to love me but I plunged in anyway. It’s not that I’m afraid to live, it’s that I don’t always know how. And bit by bit I’m learning. I also realized that I was angry at Scott because I sensed a level where it’s me who’s freezing and drowning and waiting for rescue, not unsuccessfully by well meaning timid incompetents but for good and for real. I realized this in my reasonable mind and it sounded 7

likely but I knew that it was, so far, just a good theory. I couldn’t feel the raw cold drowning truth of it in my heart. Not yet. By and by I went to sleep and dreamt. I dreamt I was in bed asleep with Susan but we were not happy together and she got up and left the room. I wanted to leave her space to do so but was upset and didn’t know what to do. I got up and tried to tape together pieces of a torn up map but it wouldn’t go together right. Finally I went out to look for Susan. I’m in my parents’ house and my father is wandering around in his pajamas, half-asleep. I don’t want to run into him. I find Susan but it’s not Susan any more, it’s Carol, another significant lost lover from the past. She’s very tense, she just needs some space to be alone, she tells me. She’s making up a couch to sleep on. I try to tell her that she should do what she needs to do, it’s OK with me. I reach to touch her in a small reassuring way but she pulls back like I’m the enemy. Time to wake up. Two AM as usual. 17 degree on the thermometer again. I lie awake and feel my way through the feelings of the dream. They are too familiar. Lover stuck in the cold and dark. I want to help but don’t know how. I’m afraid to do the wrong thing. I’m afraid to do anything. I just stand there fretting and paralyzed while love sinks into darkness and dies. Oh, my. Earlier in the day after I had seen Susan in tears, I wrote her a note acknowledging her obvious grief and my love for her and offering any support I had that she needed. She wrote back thanking me but that she needed space not love notes, could I just be her friend? Part of me volunteered to give her the space she’d asked for, part of me felt hurt inside. Clearly part of me was not offering help, it was asking for help indirectly. I had felt then that same feeling of wanting to help, needing to help but afraid to and not knowing how. Seeing all this in the mid-night darkness, feeling this, comparing this to the plight of the deer, I drew my mind back and tried to visualize Susan as the drowning deer and me as the paralyzed non-rescuer. I couldn’t hold it steady, though. It kept turning inside out. I was the one trapped in the ice, I was the one drowning, slowly dying, waiting in vain for rescue. Me in the center freezing, drowning, dying and me on the outside afraid to break the ice, afraid to plunge in, wanting badly to help but afraid to risk freezing, drowning, dying myself. Pretty wild image: letting myself drown, freeze, die because I’m afraid to risk drowning, freezing, dying. I asked drowning self what it needed. To be heard, to be held, to be healed. I heard that. I cried a while. I went back in my mind to the lake. I pictured myself doing what was needed. Crashing through the ice into the frigid water, leaping up, breaking more ice, again and again, smashing a path from the shore to the deer. It was so cold, so painful, exhausting, even in my imagination. It 8

felt great. I thought about the deer. I imagined him being chased by the dogs onto the ice, driven by clean fear and will to live. No doubt, no confusion, he did what he knew how to do because he had to. Then stuck in the ice, did he ever say why has this happened to me? Who am I and what should I do now? I imagined not. He did what he knew how to do. He tried to get out up onto the ice a thousand times. Every time, the ice broke but I didn’t imagine him despairing. He just did what he knew how, over and over. It was a good-sized circle he carved in the ice before his strength ran out. If he had aimed always for the near shore he might have made it out. He didn’t know that, apparently. Don’t forget, he’s just a deer. By the time we arrived, he could only swim slowly and wait. I imagined his mind filled with very simple patience, very simple hope. He would wait and swim as long as possible. I imagine he never panicked, never doubted. He never quit. He waited and swam as we did our little dance and when he used up every ounce of life in him, he went quietly out the back door like an old cobbler man at the end of another day’s toil. He quietly put away his tools, turned out the light and locked the door behind him. Just the end of an endless stream of working days. Nothing special. Just time to go home and rest. I thought about the deer and the power of simplicity and directness. Feel the touch of the universe in this moment and respond wholeheartedly. Just do what you know how. I saw myself stuck in fear and doubt on the edge while drowning in grief in the middle. I watched myself on the edge worrying and fretting: who am I, who should I be, how should I be, what do I know, what must I do, what if I don’t, what if I’m wrong? I watched myself in the middle fretting and worrying: why am I here, why am I suffering, what’s gonna happen to me, who’s gonna save me, what if they don’t? I saw the truth in the deer’s way. I saw that it was right. When it’s time to plunge in, plunge in. When it’s time to back off, back off. Even when it’s time to be confused, just be confused. It was so simple and obviously right. I thought I should try to remember this lesson, maybe write it down in the morning. Maybe try to practice it a little. Maybe I would. Suddenly, I remembered the last words the deer said to me. I didn’t imagine them, I remembered them. That’s the way it felt. He was already a dead deer, his head and antlers destined for the wall at the game warden’s office. We were just giving up, wishing the deer-spirit well. I was cold and wet and angry and sad but none of that had begun to sink in yet. I opened my heart to say goodbye to this animal that I had spent a small part of the morning with and in that moment he said to me: “Don’t worry. I’m OK. Thanks for caring. It’s time to take care of yourself now.” I remembered this finally in the pre-dawn darkness and found myself crying and 9

crying. I must have eventually fallen back to sleep because when I awoke I found a new day beginning. It was time to get up and meet it.

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