Doe, a Deer

“Why did you leave?”

I can’t point to one thing. It was so many things. But if I had to think of a moment when I began to trod the path less traveled, (metaphorically and literally) it would be when I began chasing deer. But like any Jew worth his salt, I can only answer questions with questions, and to tell you that story, I have to tell you a different one.

One early California morning, I woke up for Vasikin (sunrise prayers), around 5:30 AM. I snuck past my sleeping roommates into the misty California daybreak. The campus of my Yeshivah, for the entire duration of the 4 years I lived there, was in a state of half-completed construction. I left the trailer we lived and slept in and headed towards the Beis Medrash (study/prayer hall). I walked around to the back, where the air conditioners whirred sporadically and no one would see me. It was a relatively safe, and very beautiful place.

I set my Siddur (prayer book) on the railing and began to wrap my Tefillin (phylacteries), slowly and intentionally, focusing on God’s presence, and my desire to bond his words to my flesh. I slowly uttered the appropriate prayers, holding in my mind on both their literal translations and the Kabbalistic meanings I had learned from books I had to hide from my friends and teachers. I arrived at the words “Like a deer thirsts for rushing water, so my soul thirsts for you, Oh Lord.” As I said this I heard a rustling in the trees surrounding the river in front of me, and looked up from my Siddur. Two stunning does bound down from the hills and to the river, slowing to a trot, and bending their necks to lap up the cool waters of the river.

I was in a dazed euphoria for several days after. I was elated, manic, over the moon, however you want to put it- I was a man blessed with the grace of God! He saw my pain, He saw my sacrifice, and He rewarded with me with literal miracles. And what beautiful miracles! They moved like nothing else in my life moved, with instinct and grace and speed! They were everything I subconsciously wanted to be: naked, fit, and free.

When the high ended, its horrible counterpart took over- a terrible shame, depression, and existential anxiety. The flipside of the religious fervor always took hold when I was told God was no longer with me; in contrast to those rare peak experiences, the long stretches of feeling abandoned by The Lord Of All Everything was excruciating and all-encompassing. But the value of the really good highs is not just in the experience itself- the memory, the knowledge that life can be experienced in such a way that one is brought to his knees and tears through sheer awe and gratitude, can be enough sometimes to keep plugging through the darkness. And now, I knew a secret; the hills are full of magical, holy, God-sent Creatures.

So I headed out one afternoon into the wilderness, solo, for the first time in my life. I was too scared to go far enough away that I lost sight of my yeshivah, but I found them, on that first day. I even got a few photos and a moment of intense eye contact. It was a pair of doe again, but soon after they caught wind of me they were gone. I gave a little bit of chase but fear kept me from going too far.

That was only the beginning. Over the course of the next year, I ventured further and further away from my yeshivah in pursuit of the deer. I left more and more often, until it got to a point where every single day, I would skip the afternoon classes, and slip off into the wilderness, returning just in time for dinner and night classes and prayers. After the first few weeks, I gained enough courage to go far enough that I couldn’t see the yeshivah. After a few months, it reversed, and I didn’t feel safe until I had reached that point in the trail. I began to prefer my time in the wilderness to everything else. On weekends, when they let us off for sabbath, I went to the library and borrowed every hunting manual and book I could. I learned to stay downwind of the deer, how to track them, how to identify their scat, their eating and sleeping habits, everything.

One day I chased this one doe and her fawns around for a mile or until she turned to face me, as mule deer do. Unlike whitetail deer, mule deer will stare down and threaten their predators with stomps and glares, which is ideal if you are trying to photograph or maintain eye contact with them, which was at that point the sole obsession of my life. She put her body between myself and her fawns and we had ourselves an electric, blissful staring contest.

We stood like this for what felt like hours. Many years later, over a fire and music, a childhood friend told me of an Irish myth about a young boy who chases a deer into a new world, where the deer then transforms into a God. That’s definitely the way it felt for me. I felt the presence of God, or at least the presence of something, more powerfully than I ever did in the synagogue, or while learning the Talmud, or when speaking to God in my own words, as I did incessantly in those days.

The deer were honest- I hadn’t fooled myself into thinking they were happy about my presence, that they missed me as I missed them in the study hall, staring out at the hills everyone around me thought of as pretty background scenery if they thought of them at all. The deer were more genuine and alive than anything I knew at the time. They taught me truths I can’t speak in words, truer than what was being forced down my throat back in the compound of trailers, dining hall synagogues, and teenagers robbed of their adolescence.

In class, as the teacher lectured us on the nature of hell, I wrote about deer:

There is nothing more thrilling
than coming in contact
with a sentient being,
completely at peace.

To stumble, uncoordinated,
into the gaze of a thing-
a real, live, thing-
that stands firmly in its existence,
it’s very shape a symbol of its confidence
that it belongs exactly where it is.

To lock eyes with an individual
to feel time stop
like a rock dropped on an ant.

To observe while being observed,
to assess while being assessed,
to know that curiosity is a two way street,
yet all the same take part
in a head-on collision.

Completely at peace,
There is nothing more thrilling.

Many years later, in a forest in the pacific northwest, I saw them again. It was early in the morning, cold and slightly misty. Two friends and I had been up all night, dancing and enjoying a small music festival. The grounds were nestled in the middle of rolling hills and mountains covered in the most delightful assortment of greens I’ve ever seen, so when our respective trips came to their peaks, we walked past the dance floor into the wonderland before us. It was already stunning sober, but now, the flora and fauna were dancing and morphing and wiggling around us, celebrating the fact that existence is.

We danced along with them to a track I can only describe as a psychedelic take on frog mating calls; riveting electronic ribbits echoed throughout the forest as we explored and pranced around like little kids. That’s when I saw them. First in the trees, then literally in the trees, in the bark and the leaves and the branches- the deer were back! They looked identical to the ones I chased for all those months, and they were tranquil and present, just staring calmly, smiling with their minds. A wave of a feeling I can only call ‘Home’ filled my soul, and some kind of circle closed in on itself and ate its tail. This time though, I was not alone with the deer; I put my arms around the shoulders of my buddies, and we watched nature dance together.

Completely at peace,
There is nothing more thrilling.

A few more favorite photographs of the Deer: https://goo.gl/xrHzgY