don't know why.
several times today i saw a deer i didn't even almost hit, but one I simply shared a moment with on a very, very snowy night, when I'd left my college in New Jersey after hours in a past that feels more like the future.
The snow was blanketing everything quickly. The flakes were huge and joining together on the way to their soft landing. The college was closed. Everyone seemed to be in. My car slid just a bit as I pulled over, seeing a reflection of my lights in the eyes of an animal up ahead.
I stopped the car and turned the lights off (music:off, mechanisms:off, noise-of-self:off) and felt the fat snowflakes land and melt on the back of my neck. My eyes adjusted. Between the dark but white flaking sky and the glowing wide ribbon of white where the black road had minutes before been - was a deer, an especially big one, it seemed, just standing, as if the four lane road had that quickly become a meadow again.
I just looked back and held the gaze. Long, quiet minutes passed. My car began to be blanketed, my footsteps had mostly disappeared and my good ol' sloppy east coast navy pea coat had gone white, the snow: erasing me, including me, taking me, too.
i don't know why i kept sharing that gaze throughout the day today.
there's nothing to it. (not like the time I went for a hike in the same area and immediately saw seven deer. ... and then, maybe a two dozen, and then realized that just about everything I took for a leaf was a deer. Forty at least there, each giving me the hard stare like when was i going to leave so they could get back to taking minutes, or if I didn't leave soon, some kind of trampling would ensue. This wasn't like that. Not a breath of threat or interruption. We were just one animal and another, in acknowledgement of that.
And winter coming sweet and hard.
I've just been off and on again back on that road today - in the middle of news of the Marriot blowing up in Islamabad, of unbelievable campaign inanities and Capitalism on improvised life support with our progeny once again paying the bill for the grotesque, irreverant, untethered orgy of IMAGE and STUFF. (what a week! what next?) It feels like by Tuesday the lights could go out.
And there was the snow deer, in the middle of my sunny Saturday rock 'n roll skating. Later - as I was painting (whitewhite) and earlier scrubbing the rings in the bathtub - hearing, inside myself, that sound, the best sound of all. Snow.
Nature: the context of all.
We've gotten so far from knowing it, ...but are sure to be reminded.
Could be a tough winter coming.
(fade to white)
