Barking Deer by my Bedside

I awoke before dawn to strange noises outside my bedroom windows.
My heart was already pounding as if my body had heard the sounds before my mind could even get involved. All my senses sharpened on the footsteps that surrounded my little cottage and my eyes attempted to make sense of the silvery figures that floated ethereally in the moonlight. Terrorists? Ghosts? Reindeer? Reindeer Ghost terrorists???

The full moon still lit up the sky despite it nearing 5am and bathed my back yard in a glow that made the coats and antlers of my guests all the more haunting. The westerly wall of my room, made up primarily with windows, allowed me a unique opportunity to spy on my visitors. From the shadows of my room they could not see me and as the creatures came into focus my rapid heartbeat became one of excitement rather than fear. Only feet from me I was watching a huge herd of barking deer feasting, existing together without the knowledge of human presence.

Though my instinct was to frighten them away to prevent any more of their carnage fest on what remained of my grass, garden and sprinklers, I stopped myself.
I became aware, this feeling, unmistakable, that they belonged here far more than I. And that they were not the ones disturbing my sleep or my naupaka plants but that I was the one in the way of their nightly travels through the land. So sure I was of this that I half expected them to walk straight through my walls and stand inquisitively at my bedside, munching on my bedspread.

I couldn't breathe and dared not move. I sat there entranced with their different shapes, from fawn to buck, and listened to their intimate conversations attempting to translate the barks, grunts and gurgles into something I could understand.

As I waited for the sun to rise and as my night visitors dispersed to greener pastures I was struck by the magic and the mystery of the morning and of all that surrounds me here.

I've been trying to figure things out you see. Miller Molokai has brought me a lot of new challenges and I am in a state of constantly trying to manage it all; the pool pump, the sprinklers, the fertilizer, the bug control, weeds, etc. This coupled with a natural tendency to reduce anxiety through organization has led to a life where the enchantment of everyday things is chopped up, dissolved, and diffused so that I make order, so that I may neatly fold it into a box and place a label on it.

It is as if, by putting a label on something, we can then imagine some sort of control over it. I see myself do this not only with the objects around Miller Molokai but in my new friendships as well.

I rob myself of the enchantment that is inherit in all that surrounds me when I attempt to "make sense of it." It becomes lost when our human mind tries to find order to the seeming chaos. There is something miraculous in letting life and all it brings to offer (be it new relationships or creatures of the night) unfold from the box and go undefined.

The barking deer woke me up this morning.
They woke me up to the absolute bliss of living in a mysterious and magical world.