Deer Heart

October 29th
Yellow Stone National Park

The suns warmth graces me
The air is colder than cool
The ground is frozen where water travels the surface
We are in the midst of seasonal transition
The lone buffalo in the meadow is wearing a thick coat, dressed for ice and snow

Leaving the park, the sun sinks towards the earth
Shadows grow longer
Striking in appearance
Light showing off all that it touches
Deer are out in hundreds
No exaggeration
Eating and hanging with the herd

I drive on
Wanting to enjoy the scenes
Wanting tomorrow’s drive to be shorter
I am now in Wyoming
This land takes a new feel and shape
Golden rolling hills
Pointed peaks
Endless grasslands
where are the trees?
I feel a sense of respect
If I were to walk day after day
What would this land teach me?

As darkness falls, I find my eyes sweeping the path I drive
Looking for animals, mostly deer
I feel anxious remembering my vision of two days ago:

I was driving the highway in Montana
In an instant a deer was in front of my van
I crashed into it
Pulling the van over
Running to the deer
Finding it breathing with difficulty, bleeding
I pull it off the road
We look into one another’s eyes, it’s life draining away
Without words it tells me
“Eat my heart, take my life into you, so that I may live on through you”
Knowing that honoring this request was the only possibility
I began eating it's heart, warm and beating with life
Blood running down my chin and hands

With it’s last breath
The deers spirit enters me
I am wild
I am deer
I know nothing else
Not my name
Not the world around me
We are immersed in one another
This deer's heart beating in my own

As the deer’s breath enters my body
It’s body lies limp in my arms
Something pulls me from it’s body
and it’s body from my arms
My eyes become accustomed to the life around me
People looking at me as though I am lost, crazed with blood on me
They think it is the shock of killing this deer with my van
They could never know that I am now deer
as well as woman

My eyes sweep the road my van flies down
Remembering the deer protectors glued onto the bumper
Plastic gadgets that whistle and warn animals of an approaching vehicle
Work, I pray
Not only do I not want to kill anyone
I feel anxious of the heart
The beating warm heart I may have to eat

My awareness drops to my chest
A deer now lives within it
Vision united us
We have become one