#700 + LUMINOUS DEER + “WHERE I CREATE / THERE I AM TRUE” R. M. RILKE + “Pine Tree: An Appeal to Heaven” 1998 Catherine L. Johnson

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Deer / Deer

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A sacred animal

with the spirit of gentleness and softness,

a messenger,

and

a shaman.

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He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to stand on the heights.

(Psalms 18:33)

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The deer’s antlers are one of the characteristics

that have made it the figure of a spiritual superiority.

Like a crown, the antlers grow beyond its body,

bringing it closer to the sky and making it sacred.

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In many cultures,

the deer is a symbol of spiritual authority.

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During a deer’s life the antlers fall off

and

grow again.

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The deer is also a symbol of regeneration.

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In the Christian imagination,

the deer is a symbol of piety,

devotion and of God taking care of his children.

The legend of Saint Eustace, tells the story of the Roman general who,

before becoming a saint,

was out hunting and came across a magnificent and enormous deer.

When Eustace looked at the animal’s eyes,

the light of Christ shone out of them

and

the voice of God spoke to him through them.

Placido, the Roman name for the saint,

gave up hunting and became a Christian.

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In the Celtic tradition,

there were two aspects of the deer:

the feminine element, called Eilid in Gaelic,

the female red deer,

symbolizing femininity, gentleness and grace.

It was believed that the female deer called to men

from the kingdom of the fairies

to free them from the trappings of the earthly world

and

taking them to the world of magic.

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Deer often turned into women in such legends in order to avoid being hunted.

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On the other hand,

there was also Damh, the masculine element,

which was also related to the sacred and to forests,

independence, purification and pride. 

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The stag is the king of the forest, the protector of all other creatures.

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For the native tribes of North America,

the deer was a messenger, an animal of power,

and

a totem representing sensitivity, intuition and gentleness.

Some groups would entrust the hunt to the deer,

which was also associated with fertility.

There is a Cherokee legend that tells how the deer procured its antlers

after winning a race against a rabbit.

The animals of the forest wanted to know

which of the two was the fastest,

but the rabbit cheated before the race

and

the deer won its antlers.

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In Buddhism,

the deer symbolizes harmony, happiness, peace and longevity.

When a male and a female deer are represented together

 it is a direct allusion to the first teachings of Buddha near Varanasi.

In one of this former lives, Buddha was a golden deer that spoke to men.

According to that tradition, deers are by nature

timid and serene animals

and

their presence in a place represents

the purity of a kingdom bereft of fear.

There are also Tibetan legends in which deer help men to solve problems.

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For the wixaritarie people who inhabit central Mexico,

and are more commonly known as huicholes,

the deer is an animal that translates the language of the gods for men.

For the huicholes, the deer is the first shaman or mara’kame

that later becomes an interlocutor between the shamans and other gods.

The deer is closely linked to two plants: its heart is a peyote

– the animal and the plant are one in essence –

and corn, which is a deer and is represented by its antlers.

In this tradition there is an infinity of deer

and

the most important are the original five,

which are located at the five cardinal points

(the blue, red, white, black and yellow deer).

The reproductive cycle of the deer is connected to the huicholes’ ritual calendar.

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The deer,

which is related in many traditions

with kindness, softness and gentleness,

is connected to the gods and the sacred.

One of the reasons for this could be its physical characteristics

– its stare, its agility, its speed and its antlers—

which inspire those values and symbols

in the imagination of humans

and

in its metaphorical nature.

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Often when I imagine you 

your wholeness cascades into many shapes. 

You run like a herd of luminous deer 

and I am dark, I am forest. 

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You are a wheel at which I stand, 

whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up, 

revolve me nearer to the center. 

Then all the work I put my hand to 

widens from turn to turn. 

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 Love Poems to God, 

The Book of Monastic Life

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Pine Tree: An Appeal to Heaven                                  Catherine L. Johnson  1998

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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves,

like locked rooms and like books

that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

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Do not now seek the answers,

which cannot be given to you

because you would not be able to live them.

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And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then gradually,

without noticing it, 

live along some distant day into the answer.”

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R. M. Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet

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Letter # 7.

Rome May 14, 1904 My dear Mr. Kappus,      Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don’t hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.      You see: I have copied out your sonnet, because I found that it is lovely and simple and born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one’s own in someone else’s handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.      It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.      And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.      It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.      But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.      It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?      They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, how ever unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.      Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand, on without opening, there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.      We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.      The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately , more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.      This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.      And one more thing: Don’t think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn’t ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life. – All good wishes to you, dear Mr. Kappus! Yours,    Rainer Maria Rilke

R. M. Rilke  – Letters to a Young Poet

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 FEMALE + MALE REINDEER

(Note: All male deer bear antlers. Only female reindeer bear antlers.)

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….the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other…

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PLEASE CLICK FOR “HurricaneRAPTURElantern” LIBRETTO:

https://catherineljohnson.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/16/

 

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