The Silken Tent My Letter to the World October 1999

I took a walk last night just as the light began to fade. At the top of the hill I stopped for a moment to look at a blue heron perched on the roof of Ewings' house. The heron was silhouetted against the pink streaked sky, and it looked rather like a weather vane. I stood gazing at it, mesmerized by its presence. It craned its neck then and seemed to be returning my gaze. Eventually it stretched its wings and lifted off, swooped low over the large pond at the end of the road, and then winged away into the bare sky.

It was nearly dark when I got back to my house. As I rounded the bend beside the forsythia at our northwest corner I began deliberately crunching the tiny acorns that litter our front walk. I stepped onto my lawn and heard a sound like breath being pulled in, lifted my head and found myself nearly nose to nose with a white tailed doe. Two younger deer stood behind her. They too were motionless and watching.

The doe peered at me but did not bolt away. She held her ground, and I held mine. We gazed at each other for what might have been ten seconds (a very long time, in my experience, to be standing three feet from a deer). Then she dropped her tail, turned to the right, and began to stroll back toward the woods. The young deer followed her.

They knew no haste, it seemed. At the edge of our property the doe reached her head up and nibbled some leaves off a small tree. Just then our neighbor's garage door began to close. The animals lifted their tails like flags, hesitated for a moment, and then sprang off across the meadow into the night.

The heron and the deer were the first images that came to mind this morning. I think of them as wild creatures of the lake and the woods, out of place in a suburban subdivision. That they had come so close and engaged my eyes so calmly seemed to be fraught with a meaning I could not discover. Meeting them had been an encounter with the numinous, I believed, and I took their images to prayer as the sun rose over my backyard vista.

Later I went to my study, booted up my computer, arranged the materials I intended to use this morning, and sat down to work. I looked north and west past my monitor and there, framed by the plastic fake mullion of a suburban bedroom window, was the full moon, a mottled gray disc hanging in an azure sky and, like the heron and the deer, looking straight at me. I had never seen it so, and believed that its gaze too was part of a message I had yet to discern.

I know that there are practical, scientific explanations for these phenomena. The deer and the herons knew this land before this land knew me, or anyone else like me. Their natural habitats are shrinking as we suburban pioneers claim more and more acres for our dream homes -- 3000 square feet with cathedral ceilings and clerestory windows, a view of the valley, with a supermarket and video store nearby. The wildlife has no choice but to learn to use our presence rather than run from it. Thus the deer eat our flowers and the heron fishes in our pond.

The moon has always hung just outside my window in its autumn fullness just as the business day begins. In fact it has been in that same spot in the sky this time of the year before the concepts of "year" and "season," "day" and "night" were ever conceived by humans. It is my presence that is the phenomenon, not the moon's.

But I am a poet, not a scientist. I can't shake the belief that something is trying to to get my attention. Maybe it's something deep inside that needs to break into my consciousness. Maybe it's something completely new. Whatever it is, I'm looking for ways to open to it.