80 Comments

Honoring the totality of your sharing with silence.

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Reminds me of the opening lines to Althea Davis’s poem:

And God

Please let the deer on the highway get some

kind of heaven

Something with tall soft grass and sweet reunion....

May we all find that heaven

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My ex boyfriend grew up hunting with his Paw-Paw in Louisiana and he told me that his Paw-Paw taught him to kiss the dear after he killed it.

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Yes, to honor the animal's sacrifice.

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A deer, a doe, a female deer--I found a bear skeleton once hiking across the Olympic Peninsula in the 70's--feet and claws splayed out, skull intact, and everything else, as if it had laid down to sleep. Maybe it face-planted from a constellation, I don't know, but I considered taking the skull, and thought better, since hitch-hiking with a bear skull in my back pack could be detrimental on long rides. Although I did do it once with a skinned-out Bobcat in Yosemite, but that was different. I had salt. I wondered if someone shot the bear, just for its gall bladder. There is no gall bladder constellation, as far as I know, not even next to Canis Minor

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A bear skeleton! Whoa!

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Your beautiful poem caused my thoughts to wander and remember reading about a woman who memorializes and photographs roadkill. https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2023/09/22/finding-the-beauty-in-roadkill/

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Oh, wow, those photos put tears in my eyes.

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Yessss

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Beautiful.

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Thank you.

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Probably insignificant, but I love the juxtaposition of prayer and play... I don't know if you were advancing the narrative, or commenting on the nature of either one, but if the gospels admonition to approach God with the faith of a child is true, can those things possibly be separated? I hope not.

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"To everything there is a season..."

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Funny... in the middle of visiting a past season on your recommendation... listening to Peter Case... Old Blue Car right now. Wore the grooves out of this back in the day. Saw him play a solo show in SF opening for a band that was on the charts... he came out with an acoustic guitar and harmonica and stole the show. Changed my perception about what mattered in music, then and there. Horse and Crow just started... gotta go!

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Peter Case, yes!

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A warm and unexpected testament to the insight of kids regardless of circumstance to find solemn beauty and insight in an event that, to others more hurried, would appear to be "over". Is there a phrase in your tribal tongue to describe such understanding?

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I'm sure there is but I only speak a little of our language.

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beautiful.

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Thank you, Kim.

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Thank you.

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Half-broken=half-working=fully surviving.

'nother hitter.

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I too find beauty in the mostly decomposed;

feeling like they slipped through the floor and left only the hide (trickster having made off with the rest!)

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Aha. I knew a crow or raven was involved.

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!!!!!

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Beautiful.

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Thank you, Amy.

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We Indian kids, who already

understood more about death

than we should've, marveled

aloud at the beautiful finality

of that deer.

*

Thousands of ways to be blessed by the wilderness when blessings otherwise seemed few. That was my experience as a child. And this story came to mind when I pictured the sacred remains of the deer on the forest floor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofnCdC8P70g&t=2s

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I love the turn in this one...I just taught that. You are so sensitive and it shows.

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Thank you.

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and there are countless ways for all of us bless the wilderness, in our eternal and unbroken treaty signed day one for us to treet our wilderness as our greater )and rentfree hearth Let us globally unite against the greedy grabbers with their obscene machiines, keeping our hearts and deeds raising the arc of justice in an unbreakable rainbow of love and determination.

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Yes!

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