Eyes of the Wild

One morning a few days ago I walked out to my car to leave for work, opened the door and then looked out from the garage about seventy feet away to a low hill at the border of my lawn where some shrubs grow and where day lilies bloom in June. Red oaks and a few birches shade the little raised bed, and stones form a border with the lawn. A creek bed lies behind it. On some ground cover between shrubs and lawn, a doe was lying down in an alert but relaxed posture, her head up and eyes toward the house where the noise of the motor, gears, and chain that raised the garage door had just caught her attention. Despite the mechanical rumbling, the deer didn’t bolt or even stand up. I walked to the rear of the garage, a few feet closer, but stopped short of walking onto the driveway. The doe and I locked eyes for a long moment, both of us unmoving, curious about the other. I felt calm in that surprising space, glad the deer remained and held my gaze.

Then I walked back to the car, started the engine, backed out, and closed the garage door from my car with the remote control. The doe remained still, while still watching. I drove slowly out of the driveway, glanced into her eyes again briefly, and drove away. I wondered that she was so relaxed. Was she hurt? Or just accustomed to human activity from living in a neighborhood where cars and garage door mechanisms make their noises, and two-legged creatures scurry busily about?

In another incident, closer to fifteen years ago, my wife and I were driving at a pace that allowed us to watch for birds on a gravel road in the National Wildlife Refuge at Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee. I stopped on the road in the low-lying bald cypress woods on the lake’s northern boundary when I got a clear view of a barred owl. I slowly stepped out of the car to try for a closer look at the owl. I stopped, stood, and stared. The owl looked back, watching me cautiously, then flew away a few yards while remaining in sight, and perching in a tree where he could keep an eye on me. I walked down the road a little further and stopped where I could engage the owl again in a mutual gaze. We repeated this a couple of times, the owl and I, until the bird flew deeper into the woods and out of sight.

What did I want from the deer and the owl? The favor of their momentary attention? If so, why? My first thought is that I’m drawn to the wildness, the health and vitality, the fragility and uncertainty, of creatures that do not need to live within structures (literal or figurative) other than those dictated by their nature. I won’t speculate on whether they’re confined to their nature and unable to transcend it--they simply have the freedom to be entirely what they are. No one is asking them to be anything else.

My affinity for these fellow creatures grows from no desire to be a deer or an owl, but from a need to enlarge my sense of the scope of the world. I reach for a connection with their otherness and with their wildness. I reach for that out of curiosity, itself a form of desire, and yes, a need. What do the animals “want”? Maybe just to be vigilant in the presence of a creature they don’t understand, that often-threatening bipedal animal that takes up so much space in the world. And somewhere in the vigilance is also a kind of curiosity, a need to learn anything that might help with survival. Other animals may have no interest in probing our consciousness, but they can benefit from any knowledge of our behavior that might lead to predictions of what we’re likely to do, what we’re capable of.

We the wise (sapiens) no longer need to know only how to hunt the ones that might feed us. We can study them now, make whole academic disciplines out of knowledge about owls for the sake of knowledge about owls. We study the world, the universe, this way--objectifying it as if we weren’t part of it, distancing and detaching ourselves, divorcing ourselves from the rest of reality in order to understand it better. Stepping back this way often serves a goal of effective inquiry, but it dilutes the direct character of our experience in the world. We miss the unmediated moment.

The natural history of homo sapiens goes back in time to common ancestors of owl and deer as well as to much earlier creatures. And our eyes and theirs are very much alike. I have looked into the eyes of deer and owls and seen the spark of something I faintly recognize but can probably never name.

I see just the spark because I don’t have the sensual capacity to take in the flame behind it. But the spark, nevertheless, opens me. I feel more capacious for having the brief but timeless moments I had with the deer and the owl. It could be, though, that what I feel as new inner space is not so much extra capacity as it is different inner-space allocation. What created the feeling of new space was a relegation of my ego to the sidelines. I was absorbed enough in the wild eyes to get out of the way and let in something larger.

Getting one’s ego out of the way, even for a brief moment, is not easy, and in modern life, so full of structure, so full of navigational challenges, we may simply need to have that concern for our safety--physical and emotional integrity--out front, never far from awareness. What’s more, the myriad demands on our attention are unrelenting, ceaselessly clamoring for all our sensual space, congesting our senses with trivia of the moment, or messages about buying and selling, or information we need to guide our moving conveyances through traffic safely.

So it’s hard to stop and listen--to notice things we don’t regard as immediately essential, to feel how warm the sun is or the direction the wind is blowing, to notice whether the air smells dusty or moist, to hear birdsong over the song on the radio. Or maybe even appreciate the taste of minerals deep within a bite of fruit, brought to us by the ongoing, everyday transformation of earth, air, fire and water processed through something like an apple tree.

The eyes of wild animals have provided me with a window into the place I live but fail to notice most of the time. With my human community I share a culture, a way of seeing things, which can become so much a part of my identity that I may forget humanity isn’t the whole of reality. With the deer and the owl I share membership in the natural order of things, the air I breathe, a skeletal structure, the land I live on, DNA, eyes, optic nerves, and curiosity about what other creatures are like. And, in the most fortunate moments, respite from the demands of my ego. Something in me is still a little wild, and that unnameable portion lives in an unnameable immensity. I will probably never understand much of it, but I can experience it, and that’s even better.