What the darkness can teach us

On the way home last night, in the darkness of a wintery  night, my fair fawn friends again in their deer grove. The field was very  icy melting snow grey not the  white of glistening snow. The deer moved cautiously , slowly as the earth  was in that slippery,precarious , tenuous stage, between, freeze, ice, water.. I watched  them  as even in their caution,the fluid effortless grace of each movement of their limbs, their silvery tongues licking softly at the ice ,a slight murmur of a sipping sound.. I was slipping a little on the ice just a little, not yet as fluent fluid as a fawn. I could not get too close this time.It was so dark,so I photographed them at 3200iso  to make the camera more sensitive to the scant light available  in the night, again the assignment 1/60 second of  a shutter speed. I was reminded in the darkness of the notion of "trust".trusting my own instincts in this dark clearing of a winter night forest and the trust  the fawn  must have in  this water, this ice, this field, this fawn family, that this earth will keep them safe,cared for and well and the return to such safety  all days and nights. Today , in my yoga practice I was thinking of my fawn friends, their trust in the darkness, of the earth, of each other, of themselves. I was thinking of their  ease and softness in their every movement, their every breath....
This poem reminded of the issues of trust we think about in the dark.

By Dark

by W. S. Merwin

When it is time I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day

I can see nothing but the black dog
the dog I know going ahead of me

not looking back oh it is the black dog
I trust now in my turn after the years

when I had all the trust of the black dog
through an age of brightness and through shadow

on into the blindness of the black dog
where the rooms of the dark were already known

and had no fear in them for the black dog
leading me carefully up the blind stairs.
"By Dark" by W. S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius. © Copper Canyon Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission