Missing Witches - We Are Deer Kin

00:00:00.760 Are you dear kin looking to make a home for yourself on the fringes between

00:00:06.880 worlds and support the Missing Witches project along the way? Then join our

00:00:11.880 coven! Find out how at MissingWitches.com You aren't being a proper woman 1.00

00:00:17.600 therefore you must be a witch. You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:24.800 Just the other day, I stepped outside, plopped myself down on a cold wooden step, and, as I do, cast my lazy, sweeping gaze across the forest to watch the snow begin to melt its way down the ridge and into the creek below. 0.93

00:00:43.680 Something strange caught my eye.

00:00:45.820 The sun was setting into dusk, and a blue pallor covered the snowy ridge.

00:00:51.820 Except for one small spot,

00:00:55.600 where the sinking sun cast its rays through the clouds and trees

00:01:00.500 in such a way as to form just one glowing, buttery spot of warmth amid the cold.

00:01:07.860 An organic spotlight that focused my attention on the theater of the woods.

00:01:14.480 And, as a connoisseur of scintillation, the way light sparkles,

00:01:19.780 I fixated my attention on the patch of soft, inviting yellow light.

00:01:25.260 I stared and stared, and seconds later a deer emerged from its camouflage of ash trees,

00:01:32.620 inquisitive nose first and placed itself inside this yellow spotlight to take center stage

00:01:40.640 and start the show and the backup dancers appeared more white tails fawns to round out the cast now

00:01:49.340 this was not the first time i had seen deer in the woods behind my house probably closer to the 100th

00:01:55.220 But it was the first time that the sun and trees and clouds and deer had conspired

00:02:02.860 to stage-direct performance art that only I could see. 0.98

00:02:09.200 And it was fucking magical. 0.94

00:02:11.800 But honestly, it's magical every time. 0.99

00:02:17.020 Every. Single. Time.

00:02:21.080 Much human mythology paints deer as a connector

00:02:24.200 and translator between the human and the divine.

00:02:28.200 And so it is here, in these woods.

00:02:31.820 When I'm washing dishes and glance up to spot that signature, elegant gate,

00:02:36.940 I stop. I marvel.

00:02:40.040 I feel filled with a sense of wonder and awe

00:02:42.780 that is singularly reserved for these pure creatures.

00:02:48.940 They are my unicorns.

00:02:52.140 I am dear kin and I prance in the woods. I am dear kin curious but shy. I approach this life with cautious optimism and necessary vigilance. I have eyes on the side of my head. Equal parts jitter and grace.

00:03:14.360 We share a land, a yard, a creek

00:03:19.080 And we are kin

00:03:21.220 Neighbors in right relation

00:03:24.040 Deer have existed for three million years

00:03:29.440 This land is more theirs than mine

00:03:33.860 At first we were so excited I'd yell to my spouse

00:03:37.940 Deer, deer, deer

00:03:39.400 And startled by my shouts they would inevitably run away

00:03:43.140 I've since learned better

00:03:45.120 I admire in quiet contemplation

00:03:49.000 I spotted a deer in these woods one time

00:03:52.580 And we both froze

00:03:53.700 And made eye contact for what felt like an eternity

00:03:56.940 I bowed my head in silent reverence

00:04:00.560 And the deer understood

00:04:02.220 This time, she did not run away

00:04:05.780 But continued her peaceful graze

00:04:09.220 But I may have misinterpreted the situation

00:04:13.640 What felt to me like a profound connection was more likely just a basic assessment

00:04:20.040 Quote, dear eyes have pupils that are wide, horizontal slits

00:04:26.760 This shape allows them to let more light in than human pupils can

00:04:30.960 Especially as they open wider in low light conditions

00:04:34.460 It is also important in detecting movement across a wide, horizontal view where danger is most likely to appear.

00:04:42.740 While this pupil shape helps them monitor a broader area, they sacrifice sharpness.

00:04:48.380 Normal human eyesight is 20-20.

00:04:51.880 Deer have a normal daylight eyesight of about 20-60, which means they see three times less clearly than humans.

00:04:58.900 If you have ever made eye contact with a deer for what felt like an eternity,

00:05:03.540 it's likely because they are trying to figure out exactly what they're looking at.

00:05:08.840 End quote.

00:05:10.440 So while I was thinking,

00:05:12.800 Our eyes are connecting our souls, dear friend, and we are kin.

00:05:17.320 You can feel my reverence for you and for this land.

00:05:21.780 This deer was probably thinking,

00:05:23.480 What's that thing?

00:05:25.120 And deciding I was nothing.

00:05:27.100 Carried on eating.

00:05:28.900 but that's okay. The deer will never see me the way I see them, and it's important for me to

00:05:37.180 remember to see my world through their eyes. In I Opened the Gate Laughing, Mayumi Oda tells a story

00:05:46.100 called The Deer's Path, in which she describes building a garden, a paradise of safety and

00:05:51.780 comfort and building fences all around it to keep the deer and the world out. One day she opened the

00:05:59.560 garden gate and walked into the woods. She wrote, quote, I waded down the creek bed and came upon a

00:06:06.940 quiet, deep pool. I took my clothes off and jumped in. Floating, I noticed at the muddy corner of the

00:06:15.760 pool many deer footprints, small and large, sliding into the water. A family of deer must

00:06:24.260 have come here to drink, I thought. The place felt sacred. I saw my pink house in the distance.

00:06:32.780 I stood there and saw my garden through a deer's eyes. The garden that I loved so much looked

00:06:40.320 ridiculous to me. It had the self-conscious stiffness of a proper English garden, and now

00:06:47.680 in the summer heat it looked dry and completely alien from the wild green of the alder grove

00:06:53.860 surrounding it, as though it did not belong in this mysterious valley at all. I was dumbfounded.

00:07:02.160 Now I had taken the deer's path and had seen the other side of my fence. The whole world became my

00:07:09.280 garden. I decided to take the fence down." What happens, witches, when we take the 0.92

00:07:19.240 fence down? When we look at ourselves from the vantage point of the deer's

00:07:24.100 path? It's a useful perspective because, like witches, deer exist on the edge.

00:07:32.780 quote, deer may seem elusive, secretive, but there's a reason.

00:07:39.820 They live on the boundaries, the borderlands, making a home for themselves in the places between worlds.

00:07:47.300 The spaces between the wilderness and the man-made.

00:07:51.660 It's the habitat known as the edge, where farms meet the forests and backyards meet the backwoods, end quote.

00:08:02.560 Does that feel familiar?

00:08:05.300 We witches also make a home for ourselves on the fringes between worlds,

00:08:09.480 between the real and imagined, the material and the mystical,

00:08:14.140 between the wilderness and the man-made.

00:08:17.720 And like our dear kin, this makes us particularly adept

00:08:22.200 at seeing the ridiculousness of self-conscious stiffness,

00:08:27.080 at seeing the world as our garden.

00:08:30.100 And our white-tailed kin live on another edge, that between day and night.

00:08:38.340 Deer are precuscular creatures, which means they are most active at dusk and dawn,

00:08:45.220 those liminal spaces of time when their eyes, with fewer cones but more rods than human eyes,

00:08:51.720 see best, and shadows camouflage their movements.

00:08:56.280 Quote,

00:08:56.540 Even though they have lower image sharpness, deer receive and process images nearly four times faster than humans at dawn and dusk.

00:09:06.320 Based on tests conducted at the University of Georgia Deer Lab,

00:09:10.500 this means they are extremely good at detecting even the slightest movement in their visual field.

00:09:16.700 Which is one reason this prey animal has survived for so long.

00:09:21.020 It's almost like they perceive the world around them in slow motion.

00:09:25.520 end quote. Perhaps this can also be true for witches, that we are somehow protected by our

00:09:33.400 powers of observation and our ability to see the world differently, to observe from the fringes of

00:09:41.060 day and night, from the edges of human existence. And this is a gift that my dear neighbors have

00:09:49.580 given to me. To spot them is a reminder to enter a state of slow motion, to stop and observe the

00:09:59.100 grace and wonder of magic that lives hidden amid the trees. Bucks and does, that's male and female

00:10:08.200 deer, tend to live separately. The bucks seek out locations high in food availability, while the 0.91

00:10:15.360 Does look for places with good ground cover, safe places to hide and rear their fawns. 0.98

00:10:22.560 And we humans can see this in ourselves, the masculine bravado versus a feminized fear.

00:10:30.400 Some of us have spent our whole lives feeling hunted and doing everything in our power to stay safe.

00:10:37.780 We become shy or skittish.

00:10:41.620 Sometimes bucks fight one another for mating supremacy,

00:10:45.000 and in doing so, their antlers become hopelessly entangled together

00:10:49.180 until both bucks die from starvation and exhaustion.

00:10:54.100 This is a warning from our dear kin to the warmongers among us humans, 0.89

00:10:59.160 that to become entangled in fights for power can often lead to mutually assured destruction. 1.00

00:11:06.040 Antlers, locked together in battle until there is no victory

00:11:12.100 Only loss

00:11:14.060 Only death

00:11:16.040 In First Nations mythology, tribes, including the Potawatomi, Creek, Omaha, and Ponca

00:11:24.800 Tell stories of the dear woman, or dear lady

00:11:28.360 Who, in some tales, takes vengeance on men who are violent toward women and children

00:11:34.380 Though our whitetail kin are native to North America, the deer family comprises 43 species

00:11:42.780 around the world.

00:11:44.460 And everywhere that we find deer, we find deer myths.

00:11:49.320 But before we impose a human-style gender binary onto our deer kin, the deer themselves

00:11:56.020 remind us that the fringes of biological sex traits are also a part of nature.

00:12:03.040 In general, male white-tailed deer have antlers, while females don't.

00:12:08.200 But, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation,

00:12:12.060 as many as one in every 65, or as few as one in 4,437 female white-tailed deer may grow antlers,

00:12:23.320 depending on the region within North America.

00:12:26.680 It's all a question of hormones.

00:12:30.260 End quote. 0.92

00:12:30.760 Our trans or non-binary witch siblings can look to deer as kin

00:12:35.880 As evidence that there is a lot of life in the color gradient space between two ends of a spectrum

00:12:43.780 In her poem, The Faces of Deer, Mary Oliver reminds us that

00:12:50.000 Each hoof of each animal makes the sign of a heart as it touches, then lifts away from the ground

00:12:59.040 end quote. And we witches can be deer hooves ourselves, leaving heart-shaped prints on the

00:13:07.500 earth as we move through the world. Like many witches and poets who spend time in the deep

00:13:13.200 woods, Mary wrote a lot of poems from the viewpoint of the deer's path, wishing, as I have so many

00:13:20.940 times, that she could befriend them, that they would see her as kin and not as a threat.

00:13:30.560 I've wished this of people, too.

00:13:34.860 Anyone who wept when Disney's Bambi lost his mother knows this guilty grief that seats

00:13:40.960 itself in the harm that humans do.

00:13:45.180 Our dear kin are right to fear us.

00:13:50.940 In This Morning I Watched the Deer, Mary wrote, quote,

00:13:56.000 This is the wish that the deer would not lift their heads and leap away, leaving me there alone.

00:14:03.420 This is the wish to touch their faces, their brown wrists, to sing some sparking poem into the folds of their ears.

00:14:15.180 Then walk with them over the hills and over the hills.

00:14:20.940 And into the impossible trees.

00:14:25.980 End quote.

00:14:28.740 Sometimes, though, like our dear kin, we can't run away.

00:14:35.200 Like deer in the headlights, the dangers of life overwhelm and paralyze us, and we freeze.

00:14:42.860 At other times, we laugh at obstacles and hurdle ourselves over them in pursuit of what we want and need.

00:14:50.560 Whitetails can jump an eight-foot fence if what's on the other side is compelling enough.

00:14:55.860 Because while our dear kin are shy, they are also extremely curious.

00:15:02.560 And, like us witches, sometimes the need to know, the need to experience,

00:15:09.480 trumps the compulsion to hide in fear.

00:15:12.800 What happens, witches, when we take the fence down?

00:15:17.980 When we look at our world from the vantage point of the deer's path

00:15:23.060 What happens when we take down the fence that we've built 0.50

00:15:27.020 Between the human and non-human worlds

00:15:29.560 And recognize ourselves as kin

00:15:32.240 In Psalms 1833, the Bible suggests that belief

00:15:38.680 Quote, makes my feet like the feet of a deer

00:15:42.660 Enables me to stand on the heights

00:15:46.040 End quote

00:15:47.140 Because our craft is not just a faith, but also a practice

00:15:52.680 We walk the edges of stories

00:15:55.760 And sample from wild hedges with the curiosity of a whitetail 0.69

00:16:00.360 Bibles even if we want to

00:16:02.840 Our love for the natural world

00:16:06.240 For the gentleness of deer

00:16:08.780 For the perspective of the deer's path

00:16:12.460 Can be a meeting place for practitioners of different faiths

00:16:16.660 Where the common goal is peaceful, curious, kinship.

00:16:23.800 Through kinship we can stand on the heights, walk together on the edge,

00:16:32.120 leaving heart-shaped footprints as we go, jump fences and see the whole world as our garden,

00:16:40.960 equal parts jitter and grace.

00:16:43.640 Sometimes brave

00:16:45.820 And sometimes scared

00:16:48.100 Situated between the earthly and the divine 0.97

00:16:53.360 And it is fucking magical 0.99

00:16:58.620 We are witches 0.99

00:17:01.540 We are dear kin

00:17:04.800 And we make our homes in a place called The Edge 1.00

00:17:10.860 you must be a witch

00:17:19.200 are you dear kin looking to make a home for yourself on the fringes between worlds

00:17:27.960 and support the missing witches project along the way then join our coven find out how at

Missing Witches - April 18, 2024

We Are Deer Kin

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