I was on Zoom yesterday – what a surprise – at our Ner Shalom “Check-In Soup” that happens every morning. It was my turn to share, and I was noticing how even the outdoors are feeling oddly constricting and confining right now. Something about how we’re supposed to traverse it as surgically as possible on our way to get groceries, and on our way back. Instead of a wide expanse, the outdoors have come to feel to me like a corridor, a narrow and sterile pathway.
Maybe the outdoors have become problematic for me because I find it hard to remember all the rules to follow when leaving the house. Does my mask go on when I walk out the door or only when I see other people? When do I put on and when do I take off the gloves? After shopping but before pulling out the car keys? Or after the car keys, but before grabbing the steering wheel? And then do I have to disinfect the keys? Or the car door?
The whole project of leaving the house has become procedurally and psychically complicated. So outside the door now feels, if not hostile, then unfriendly. An easy jump for someone like me who grew up having family picnics at the forest preserve in the parking lot in the car with the windows rolled up to keep out the bees – and all the rest of nature.
So I was sharing this at Check-In Soup, lamenting that even though I live on beautiful Sonoma Mountain, I seem not to be able to accept nature’s healing. Instead I feel the outdoors pressing in on me.
As I was sharing this, I suddenly felt eyes upon me. I was at my kitchen table, in front of my laptop, with which I am now pretty solidly fused. I lifted my eyes over the screen, having to first remember that there is life up and over the screen. And maybe 50 feet away, peering over a fence, through a rosemary bush, right at me, was a deer.
It was one of our lesbian deer. We have a family of lesbian deer that share our land and somewhat share our lifestyle. When I say “lesbian deer” I'm just presuming, of course, because I'm only so nosy. But I know that for years it’s been two does raising the fawns together. This year – scandal – there are three does in the family. I know there is a stag somewhere; we see him once or twice a year. But he’s not really a deer daddy; he’s more of an uninvolved donor. Which seems to suit the threesome of does just fine.
Earlier in the morning I had witnessed the unveiling of this year’s fawn, spotted and scampering. Getting nosed in the butt by one of its moms if it didn't keep pace with their busy grazing.
But now I was the one being spotted; stared at by this doe. And I, a deer in the headlights, was startled and mesmerized. Because you know how some animals see what's on TV and others only see the TV? I always figured it was the same for windows. For some animals a window is the limit of what they see, while others see through it to the life going on inside. And I had imagined that deer are animals that don't see past the windowpane.
But here was one of the lesbian deer, looking right at me. No alarm. Just curiosity. She was sizing me up. Wondering, maybe, just what I was doing. Or getting a whiff somehow of the exaggerated distress that I emanate these days – less pheromone than fear-o-mone – and wondering what could possibly be causing it, considering how I am the same animal in the same burrow as every year and from the outside everything seems the same.
What I think she perhaps failed to grasp was how hard it is to be human. The ridiculous burden we hold. The weight of all this civilization. We are saddled with history and law and religion. Metaphors and misunderstandings. Stoicism and whininess. The burden of language and planning and the weighty illusion of control.
This doe knows nothing of mortgages, medical care or menu planning. She exists in time, but is not obligated to manage her time. She doesn't have to remember birthdays or appointments. I can't imagine she thinks much of the field of philosophy; of course I can’t say that I do either. She has never developed math, not having had fingers and toes to count. And so she has no concept of profit or taxation, even though I've observed through the window her natural generosity with her comadres and their shared children. I'm sure that if she concluded I was in distress, her first thought as to why would not have been a voice in my head telling me to stay home, or an orange-haired human 3,000 miles away suggesting I drink bleach.
Our eyes were locked, through the window, the bush and the fence; I looked at her alert and puzzled face and I thought, "You have no idea."
After a while, I stopped being interesting to her, which I understand, because these days I have pretty much stopped being interesting even to me. To her eyes, my psychic burdens were inscrutable. My worries, although they sprout like weeds, are not in fact weeds, and so are of no importance to her.
She sauntered away, leaving me wondering how we got here. Our glorious, sorry species. How did we end up living this way? So far removed from the rest of Creation that is just outside our door? How did we end up seeing this Earth so imperfectly, as if through carnival glass? We imagine ourselves so free and so powerful. But the deer look and are rightly unimpressed.
Later in the day, I remembered a verse from Song of Songs. It goes like this:
דּוֹמֶ֤ה דוֹדִי֙ לִצְבִ֔י א֖וֹ לְעֹ֣פֶר הָֽאַיָּלִ֑ים
הִנֵּה־זֶ֤ה עוֹמֵד֙ אַחַ֣ר כָּתְלֵ֔נוּ מַשְׁגִּ֙יחַ֙ מִן־הַֽחֲלֹּנ֔וֹת מֵצִ֖יץ מִן־הַֽחֲרַכִּֽים׃
"My beloved is like a deer or a gazelle; there he is! standing behind the wall, peering in the window, peeking through the lattice." (Shir Hashirim 2:9).
I knew this verse, but I had always understood it as two separate thoughts. My lover is like a gazelle – graceful, muscular, majestic, whatever. And, oh, by the way – new thought – there he is peeking through the lattice and into the window. But now I get it. My lover is like a deer because he’s looking in the window, something that deer do that the author of Song of Songs knew but I had never noticed.
Our rabbinic tradition tells us to understand Song of Songs as an allegory about the relationship between us and the Divine. God is the lover with whom we play a flirtatious game of hide-and-seek, peeking around walls and through trellises. Sometimes we find God and more often we don't.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow likes to understand Song of Songs as a parable about right relationship with the Earth. It is all of Creation that is our lover. It is this whole Earth we must love and whose love we must cherish.
Easier said than done. Because here we are playing hide-and-seek with the rest of Life. Building baffles around ourselves, sometimes made of wood, sometimes made of ego, sometimes made of civilization. And our lover – all of Life – stands out there in the Garden, looking at us like a deer, peering over the fence and past the rosemary and through the kitchen window. Looking at us in curiosity and in invitation.
“Come out, beloved,” it seems to say. “Come back to the Garden.”
And yesterday as that doe stared at me, I felt her invitation to come out of the house, to come out of an isolation that started years and generations and millennia before this epidemic; to climb out the window of my worries, wiggle through the lattice of my limitations, and come back to the forgotten bliss of being and belonging.
“It’s vast out here,” she seemed to say. “Why are you locked in such a narrow place?”
And I had, and have, no good answer.
Yesterday I rejected her invitation. But not today. Not this Shabbos. Today I say, “Yes, I'm ready, for the moment, to step out of the narrowness of my humanity.”
I’ve been sitting in the same spot, looking past the rosemary and over the fence. I haven't seen her or her family yet. But when they come, and they will, I'll be ready.