What’s Missing?
“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals . . .
Walt Whitman
they are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.”
One evening, at a home we rented in Utah near Bryce Canyon, I sat on the edge of the porch, my bare feet in the stiff grass. We’d hiked a couple of trails in Bryce that day and driven through the park, marveling at the endurance of the strange hoodoo formations and the grandeur of the canyon itself.
On the porch back at the house, I looked out across the colorful field of brush and wildflowers and stones, past the winding Sevier River, to the mountains in the distance. Tired in body, calm in mind, I sat, feeling the sharp blades of grass on the soles of my feet, a slight breeze against my face, and . . . something else.
I turned my head slightly to the left and encountered a doe—head up, large ears pricked forward, her dark eyes taking me in. With her whole body, she seemed to be assessing me with calm, alert attention. In pure presence, she held her stance long enough to decide I was no threat. Then she dropped her head to the grasses, moving quietly just beyond the stones that edged the lawn of the house.
The moment felt timeless to me. How long was it before a fawn, slightly more startled by my presence, came around the corner of the house to join her and gave me the same long, assessing gaze? Seconds? Minutes? And how long after that did the third deer arrive?
I couldn’t tell you. Their moment-to-moment presence brought me with them, anchored me in body, to the fullness of the four of us sharing the evening together, breathing the same cool air.
What’s missing? Only an arrangement of pixels in a digital space that looks to the eye like deer grazing.
I took the photos with this post the next day. Our three graceful visitors grazed just beyond the stones in the picture. Had I moved to take a photo that evening (my camera and phone were both in the house), they may have bolted. Even had they stayed, the small act of photographing them would have separated us, broken me out of the moment and the image in my memory. As it was, I saw them; they saw (and probably smelled) me; I heard them move through the brush and pull at the tough grasses. We hung out in the glow at day’s end like kin.
