Stags’ Wood

Nature Poet and Painter, Wang Wei. From a series of 20 poems he wrote at points along the river he lived next to

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It is the last day of November. I’ve been watching the moon rise. It’s a full moon. The afternoon is already very dark. Over the course of the year, I’ve watched the Plough flip like a pancake across the horizon. Tonight there is lightning high up in the clouds, and it feels very neat and orderly that the last day of the month, before the last month of the year, is also the completion of this moon cycle.
 
Since the hour shifted, I’ve been trying to chase the light - walking away from, then back towards the night, each dusk, wringing out the last of the day in one direction, where the sun is lowering and the sky becomes the colour of duck-egg blue and the yellow of the duckling within it; then turning home to grey and the moon.

When environmental activist, Satish Kumar was seven, he went each night to hear Jain monks tell the Ramayana, the monks didn’t use any light, so he sat in darkness, for over 10 weeks, listening. ‘Dark is beautiful’ they said, ‘not to be burnt’.

We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.”

Satish Kumar

In the last week they've been so many mists, at first encircling the land like skirts at dawn and dusk, then becoming fog that stayed for two days. It was so encompassing that I could hear cars' music as they passed, but couldn't see their lights from the road 40 yards from my home, but if I looked straight up, I could still see stars 5.88 trillion miles away. My favourite thing to do on my pre-night pilgrimages, is to walk in the woods. At the moment, the only 'rains' that fall, fall in the woods. It is more like a temperate rainforest than primeval woodland: water droplets falling from the ivy, white stags in white mists swimming between trees, living stumps looking more like the broken pillars of Victorian cemeteries...

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."

Thomas Merton, "Rain and the Rhinoceros," Raids on the Unspeakable, 1960

Last month, I only walked at the field edge alongside the spindle trees, field maples and field elms. Here, most of October was mating season, so it felt like trespassing to cross into their space. Instead, I listened to where the roars came from in the different rut stands. Now the shape and map of the woods in my mind is devided into the different stags' leks, not the human boundaries. As you walk between territories, you can smell them so strongly. Yesturday, a tree fell in the centre of the wood, uprooting two others with it and now all around them, there is a Glastonbury-level mud fest, where deer come to circle and eat fresh roots. With the fallen leaves and the cocktail-glass-shaped trooping funnel mushrooms knocked over, it's a bit like arriving a day late to what looked like an epic party.

I have been researching fallow deer's history, learning about their first sea voyages, their first extinction on our island, the long associations of women and deer in art; the rare, Persian species Dama dama mesopotamica... but mostly I have been sitting in damp moss, as still as possible for as long as possible watching their slow movements as they walk past me; getting very cold, then returning home by moonlight, with gnome cheeks and dew in my hair.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

From 'Standing Deer', by Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart