Ghost Deer

exquisite strangeness

A white Deer, by Thomas de Fretes

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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Joyously, the Cherry Blossom is here, seeming to offer up well wishes for the newly nesting Birds. An occasional gust of wind makes confetti of her blooms. The celebratory nature of the season—heralding new life, the creative act infused through the day—makes only more stark the insanity of the needless destruction that plays out against it. I wonder when, or if, we as a species might finally rejoin nature in her regenerative ways; when, or if, we might remember how to listen to the world.

There is an albino Deer who keeps appearing on the edge of the village. She’s only been seen at dusk, most often in the fields bordering the churchyard. Always alone. It’s as though we’re being haunted by a ghost that everyone is desperate to see. There is a fizz to the talk of her, a childlike excitement, whispered and wide-eyed. News of her appearance moves through the village as she moves through shadow, her numinous presence seemingly awakening something long dormant; something which, in the age of the endless scroll, had gone to ground. We are a people made mythless, slowly amnesiaed by black mirrors and bright lights—the subtle sound of life speaking through symbol, sign and synchronicity made inaudible over the din of a world that refuses quiet. But the arrival of the Ghost Deer has seen us remember that we’ve a double-helix shaped thirst to be in dialogue with nature, that we are children who need the world to mean something. Who need story and symbol and, sometimes, a white Deer to remind us that we are not separate from the wild, interpretive fabric of things. Take that from us, and instead of becoming more rational or evolved, we become only more like the machines which extend from our hands: fiercely efficient, and ultimately hollow.

Recently, driving home late at night, utterly exhausted, an old friend suddenly came to mind. We’d been at school together and were, for years, incredibly close, but life—as it so often does—happened, and we lost touch almost twenty years ago. She had a wisdom beyond her years, and a tender compassion that was a balm to many a wound. As motorway lights ticked by in metronomic fashion, a procession of memories moved through my mind’s eye; the two of us collapsed in laughter, collapsed in tears, heads close in mischievous plotting, dancing like wildlings, her teaching me how to drive—me using the handbrake instead of the footbrake—more laughter. Fondness glowed in my chest and, on arriving home, I collapsed into bed, asleep before meeting the pillow, and promptly began to dream of her. She stood, looking no different at all, smiling, as she did, like the sun. “Hello, beautiful” she beamed, and we hugged a familiar hug. Upon waking I mused as to how I might find her, thought of all I’d say, awkwardly tried to craft the apology I’d offer for allowing us to lose touch. As the day came to an end, I gave a last cursory glance at my emails and, as I was looking, one dropped in. The contact form on my website had been filled in, and so I opened it to read, “Hello, beautiful…” And there she was.

There was a time when I would have labelled something like that a coincidence, because there was a time when I was lazy and incurious. These days it seems to me that the more courageous thing to do in response to life’s exquisite strangeness, is to allow it to be strange, and to see where the strangeness might lead. I can’t help but wonder whether my tiredness had seen me undefended, that my weary mind had quietened in a way that made an already unfolding conversation, briefly audible. Perhaps it would always have culminated in her email to me, but, through exhaustion, I heard the prelude of it. The reflex that files synchronicity under coincidence is, I suspect, the same reflex that files Death as ‘ending’—or Birds as ‘just birds’—when, ultimately, we do not, cannot, fully understand any of them. It confuses understanding with power. It plants a boot over the top of mystery and calls that knowledge. And while that may feel safer than the alternative, delusions of dominance shut down the possibility of conversation, of being taught by the thing, even if we never come to understand it. Press down hard enough, and yes, the mystery will go quiet, but only because it’s given up trying to speak, not because it’s been solved.

Thresholds, evidently, lend themselves to peculiarities. Time bends back on itself, spirals, speeds, slows, stops, becomes more animal than clockwork. The doorway between waking and sleep, like the doorways that sit either side of a life—or a day—seem less like passages from one place to another, and more like openings onto everything. The likelihood that our day-to-day experience is an accurate representation of reality is so slim as to barely warrant the confidence we’ve staked on it, but I suspect that at Death we might finally get to see it for what it is.

Yours in aimless flight…

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Friends, I recently joined the wonderful Dr Maria Christodoulou on her ‘Awakening Doctor’ podcast, in which we wandered through the territory of life, death, birds, writing and coming to land in the world. You can listen here:

And, if anything you’ve found here has stirred something, The Deep End is where we go further: