Awful and Awe-full

This following was written by Dana Knighten, who tells my story, too.

Last evening as I was walking, there was a moment, just at sunset, when the sky over Good Prospect Farm dimmed down under a diaphanous web of gray, and the breeze quieted, that I felt that troika of Rohr’s: open heart – open mind – receptive body. Just for a moment. And a herd of ten deer, does and yearlings, froze in the fallow field, whiffed the almost-night air, then threw their white flags up to the sky and loped off into the verge. So easy, so light… so physical. I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to feel the rimy earth hard beneath my hooves, to take the hillside in easy strides, to feel my sinews stretch and bunch and my senses all afire.

To be like that, like a deer, no filter of consciousness between me and the land I live on. Pure physical presence. And the terrible wonder of the natural world, grace and death, and that awful screech when something – owl, fox, hawk – caught and killed something else just as I arrived, and the thing that gave its life did so not-quietly, screaming its death agony into the metal-tasting air over and over again until all was quiet, and the quiet was more terrible still than the sound. I carried that scream all through my walk, tasted the copper sting of blood on my own tongue even as something in me dissolved into that moment of world presence.