The Fawn in the Ferns
The wildfires of Canada certainly weren't going to grab my attention until they affected the air I breathed, and this week, they did. The skies were darkened and the air smoky and hazy across a lot of the American northeast. As for me and my house, we started practicing "inverse COVID protocols," wearing masks outside and taking big breaths of relief indoors.
A fellow mom at school and I were chatting this past week about the strange mercies discernible even within the challenges of this particular moment, how weathering one public health tragedy like COVID had equipped us for this entirely different one. We each still had small stockpiles of decent filtration masks from COVID, and we each had sent in packets of extras to our children's respective classrooms, just in case fellow students needed one.
We loved that our children didn't balk at having to wear a mask, even if the practice was now all inverted. They have those muscles now; they are equipped. They know how to do this, and they understand why they need to. They can stay a little bit safer when the air outside is dangerous, which - for some stretches of time - it was. She and I could see too, that we had learned to think a little beyond our own horizons of mere survival, beyond our usual instincts of just "me and mine." We strapped masks on our kids, yes, and yet we took small actions to address the needs of vulnerable imagined others.
Not insignificantly, my eyes had been drawn all week to a little fawn sitting contentedly and quietly in the back woodsy part of our yard. (I can see it there now, curled up, peering out, as I type.) It would be easy to mistake its ears as belonging to a rabbit when it's really bedded down. From time to time, it stands up to stretch, nosing around and nibbling a little from the vegetation. But it does not leave its spot.
We've never seen the doe that leaves this little one there, but we know to leave her baby alone. (Indeed, our human sentimentality can be downright dangerous to deer!) Because fawns are not yet capable of the demanding sprints necessary to avoid predation, because they are still quite vulnerable and don't have those skills in place, mother deer leave their very young ones alone in tucked-away places while they head out to graze in riskier venues.
This scene has been a strange and poignant gift to witness this week. Each morning, we check to see if it's there, and we've looked out long in wonder and delight at it. The animal's calm quiet is absolutely mesmerizing. We've watched this little one observe its world, turning its big ears abruptly towards the sounds of squabbling squirrels or squawking birds. It's just cute, in the ways that babies, kittens, and puppies are, all equal parts chubby, gangly, bright-eyed, and new.
Yet all that delicate wonder of this beautiful world feels so shattering, because this beautiful world is also a hard, cruel, and indifferent one too. From our back windows, we see a world of risk. We've watched a fox or two slink by closely. I have been startled by how much I ache to protect it, how much its palpable vulnerability calls forth deep anxiety within me, even though I'm not doing anything but looking at it. I'm resisting the temptation to swoop in and "rescue" it, which would not be a rescue at all. My swooping would be more about resolving my inner needs and satisfying my own palpable sense of fragility.
The fawn is at perfect peace, restful in its trust, doing exactly what it needs to do, which is "be a baby deer" -- stay put, look at the world, sleep a little, stand up a stretch, get back down in the ferns. Getting anxious about all the 'what ifs,' getting spun up to make himself a little more secure, wouldn't make him any more secure than he already is.
But his security is not inviolable. It is, in fact, profoundly violable. Which is why it was doubly painful to see that little fawn in the hazardous haze of this past week. The delicate survival strategies of nature -- the wise ways of birds, deer, and foxes -- are not at all equipped to tackle the much costlier realities of human nature, or to be clearer, the costs of human folly and sin. But they suffer under them immensely. All vulnerable life does. For their part, animals are able to fight and flee; they have those muscles. Yet beyond those valuable instincts, they still remain inescapably vulnerable. They too bear a witness in their silent suffering, and I do not doubt at all that God knows the testimony they bear.
I was struck by a Washington Post article about how animals' behavior changed quite responsively to the massive shifts in human behavior under COVID. The featured researchers observed that animals ranged farther and acted in a more relaxed manner because of the changed behavior of people. Just like animals, we people are quite capable of profound, even tectonic change. For good and for ill, we take up new technologies, adopt all kinds of habits and fads, with as much regularity as lab rats! Hidden in that is the reality that we humans are equally capable of making serious changes that demand more of us, enlarge us, meet the needs of vulnerable others, even if for a time we don't feel at all happy about them.
Pain gets our attention in ways that ease, comfort, and convenience simply do not and cannot. During these brief days of darkened skies and thick haze, we all quickly learned to check the Airnow.gov maps to assess the current air quality so that we could assess how to behave in ways that would reduce our exposure to dangerous levels of particulate matter. Even when the skies darken and the air gets thick, we are not without agency; we are not without hope.
Indeed, when we take responsible steps towards pain, when we face difficult realities with courage, we begin to taste the possibilities of that hope. We discover new realms of creativity, and even re-discover that we are not alone nor utterly helpless. Our capacities to reach beyond ourselves is equally wondrous, even surprising, and these practices can offer refuge and hope to others. We do not escape vulnerability, but we can learn to accept them and live within them wisely, even more freely.
I want to conclude this week's meditation on the fawn in the ferns by pointing you to some human creativity and hope cultivation, some fascinating experiments in freedom:
Life Together. On Comment magazine's "The Whole Person Revolution" podcast, Anne Snyder speaks with Elizabeth Oldfield about her family's ventures in living in intentional community in London, a place of hospitality and refuge. She highlights how critical it is that learn to identify our patterns of fight and flight, and seek to live in ways that ensure that we stay aware of God and others in our strategies of survival. So much wisdom packed into this conversation.
Refugia. Debra Rienstra is a professor of English at Calvin University, the author of many good books, including Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth (Fortress Press, 2022). She also writes the Refugia Newsletter, which I heartily recommend. Refugia, she notes, is a biological terms describing places where life endures under great stress or calamity, and invites us to cultivate that kind of "refugia faith." Knowing that word and what it means, helps me so much.
Peace to you, dear reader. Courage and hope.