Follow the Deer
How a chance encounter changed how I saw myself
She walked through the garden in utter serenity, unruffled by our stares and quiet exclamations. A doe in a public arboretum, a queen in her court, a wood sprite secure in her forest home. A pang of longing ran through me and left the thought: I want to feel as secure in my body, in the world, as this deer feels. I want to know that I belong.
The fawn darted in front of us in a desperate zig-zag attempt to find his bearings. We were on our way to school. My children and I exclaimed at how tiny he was, how lonely, and when he darted back into the thicket he’d emerged from, we hoped aloud he would find his mother again.
She preferred strawberries and granola, they said, chuckling at how they’d spoiled her. She stood in the front yard where they’d raised her, watching the dogs sniff a friendly greeting and dash away, her liquid eyes reflecting the Halloween bonfire. I didn’t know anyone else there besides the hosts. I sat with her for most of the night, stroking her smooth, coarse fur, and she was the best of company. They told me she’d never tolerated anyone’s presence for so long before.
I have always loved deer. Their stately, quiet, and graceful presence evokes forest mysteries and a watchfulness easily ignored. When I encountered the doe in the public arboretum several years ago, I had just experienced multiple traumas and had no idea how yet to navigate them. My edges felt frayed, my soul felt unmoored, and yet in this cultivated space on the edge of a forest I felt open to wonder and unexpected beauty in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It was the start of my healing. I had no idea what I was desperate for until I saw it mirrored in the doe we crossed paths with.
She became a touchstone for me over the next few years. When we moved to a location where I struggled with isolation and feeling out of place, deer sightings reminded me I was not alone. It was as if that doe from the arboretum had followed me into this place that felt all sharp loneliness and dull repetition, offering a tender, vivid presence. She was reminding me that no matter where I lived, I could find a sense of belonging and serenity within myself, even when the world was chaotic and unsafe.
Once, in a time of writing stagnation, I engaged in a creative meditation. I went back to that garden on the edge of the woods. I stepped towards the forest queen. She looked at me, a question, an invitation in her eyes. If I was not brave, I was desperate. We traversed cobbled paths and grassy slopes until we left the the cultivated plots behind. We reached the edge of the forest. The doe paused, looked at me again, and opened her mouth wide, showing unnaturally sharp teeth, as if to remind me that she was more than she seemed.
Somehow, I understood she was asking me if I was brave enough to follow her into the unknown.
The forest was everything you’d expect and everything I didn’t know I wanted. She led me to a familiar stream, but not where I anticipated. She stopped at the mouth of a tunnel echoing with the voice of running water. Above that, the bridge connected the arboretum to the outside world. This was a crossroads. I could climb up the embankment and go back to steel and asphalt roads and organized city layouts. Or, I could go into that dark tunnel and follow the water’s path into somewhere I’d never been before.
In my time there years ago, I’d never entered the tunnel, so what would I imagine? What would I find? But when I chose that path shrouded in shadows, the deer vanished. My meditation ended. I felt frustrated and still dry of inspiration. Why couldn’t I imagine what came next, when I have such a vivid imagination to begin with?
Because it was time for me to continue this exercise not just in my mind, but with my body, too. It was time to walk through the forest in my everyday, mundane moments of life.
These days I dream with my eyes open. When I let myself explore or read or sit quietly in nature, my hands listening for the heartbeat of sun-warmed stones or treading cool, crystalline depths of water, I am open to the mysteries all around and within me. Sometimes I still dart to and fro without direction, as frantic as a lost fawn. But I can always return to the havens available to me.
Like the deer, creativity may be still, silent, all but invisible, but she is there. She is both the beauty around me and my quiet inner strength. To see them, I have only to wait and keep vigil.
I have only to follow the deer.
What an inspiring story! Thank you for sharing with us, Stephanie 🤍
Ooh! Sounds like you met Elen of the Ways! Deer are special to me as well. I recently had a beautiful encounter with a fawn (what is the deer equivalent of fledgling?) who I’d only ever seen with his mother but this time he was on his own.