High spring is thick through the green valleys of Devon. I am leaning into it like an animal into shelter these frightening, heart-breaking days of global tragedy. Come lean into it with me for a little while, and into the heart of a great, undying benevolence.
The sheepfields smell of wool in the sun. I’ve heard my first nightingale. Wood pigeons leave silver feathers all over the place for me to gather. Scout bees have come to my Cornish hive in the garden. I sit by it and pray for a swarm, pray for the wombic heat of a colony, their sweet song to the Divine touching my hands again after almost two years without them. Deer are hidden secrets, leaving tracks at dusk. Sunset is so late the sky still looks blue when I go to sleep and dream.
This week I wanted to leave a few deer tracks for you. Their gentleness and sanctuary. Something of the old language of Britain, the one spoken by the cadences and textures and contours of this place to the animal that is Sylvia, puts me in mind of hoofed women. I’ve circled around them for many years, tracking tule elk herds on the Point Reyes Peninsula, writing my novel-by-mail Elk Lines. Now, the deer are moving back through me, leading me somewhere new. I’m reminded of the chapel and well of Saint Gobnait that I visited in Ireland several years ago. How, based on the counsel of an angel, she did not stop her wandering or build her sanctuary until she came to the place of nine white deer grazing. To a place of peace.
I’ve woven pieces of a 2017 poem from Our Lady of the Dark Country, a fragment of a 2016 short story called “Maest,” and the beginning of a prose-poem from 2021 called “Deer-Woman, Bear-King,” into something new. Three pieces that never quite satisfied me on their own have suddenly become a mosaic I like far more, an offering to Britain’s deer-folk, and to the quiet histories of peace. To the deer mothers who nurse their fawns in secret, wild sisters of the generous ewe and lamb. To the bluebells on the site of an ancient woodland on Exmoor, growing again after centuries dormant in the earth.