The Deer Dance: My Most Popular Essay

And Two Special Offers

Dear Readers,

As I’ve mentioned the last couple of posts, I’m offering 20% off a year’s paid subscription through March. Aside from access to paid-only posts, a wonderful benefit of a paid subscription is access to the full archives of mythopoetic essays exploring how poetry and story can rebuild the bridge between imagination and logic. In almost two years, I’ve published almost 100 essays on The Corpus Callosum Chronicles! I am immensely proud of this offering. It continues to expand my frontiers, and I hope it’s also a meaningful contribution to your lives.

As the end of the month approaches, I’ve decided to remove the paywall on all my archived posts (normally they are free for the first 7 weeks after publication only) for those interested in a deep dive into this body of work.

You are most likely reading this as an email. To access the archives go to jenlighty.substack.com or just click on the like, comment, or a subscribe button, which will bring you directly to this publications’s home page.

I’m including one of my post popular posts from the archives with this email. The Deer Dance is also the name of my new book, the story of how I was claimed by the land and sea of Block Island, RI, undergoing a series of initiations that I had no idea were rites of passage because I didn’t even know what those were. Somehow my soul found Block Island, and the soul of the land took over once I committed myself to that place.

I hope you enjoy this essay and others as you explore the archives. And here’s that special offer button. Remember, it’s good through March 31st, 2024.

The Deer Dance

Those were the years when lean, I learned the Earth beneath me. Years I wandered a small island,  following the heart-shaped tracks of deer down dune paths that opened wide on to winter beaches. Crab skeletons and mermaid’s purses entangled in frozen wrack. Wragged gull corpses. I never knew what the ocean would bring. Miracles every day if you knew how to see them, and sometimes so obvious awe was not a choice: a humpback whale struck by a ship, a leatherback turtle almost large as a Volkswagen Beetle, even a shipwreck one winter and the story of fishermen leaping into the sea, struggling for shore by moonlight to land on the rockiest and most remote part of the island.

Those were the summers I lay on the beach for hours, dreaming like a seal, willing to be poor while the rest of the islanders worked themselves to the bone pulling weeds, changing sheets, slinging drinks. People did whatever it took to live in that place.

The heart-shaped tracks I followed always ended in the ocean, or at its edge, I suppose you’d say.

The ocean was named Atlantic. She had labradorite waves, deep gray-green, rainbow-streaked, opaque and iridescent. Phosphorescence was her middle name. She taught me many things— where the fish rested in eel grass and how not to resist a current. Swim sideways to shore, trust you’re part of something greater than your body’s struggles. I never exited the ocean where I entered. The beach was always changing, but she was always there for me.

Those were the years birds dropped feathers in my path. Days on my knees pulling weeds,  opening the Earth with a spade to plant grasses the deer wouldn’t eat, in beds surrounding houses built right on the water. Those houses had reinforced windows, but when nor’easters swept over the island the panes still shook. I know, because I lived in one of those grand houses, sleeping in a twin bed in the smallest room without a view for ten years, servant for a wealthy family who traded me shelter in exchange for vacuuming under their feet and wiping salt spray off their window blinds. Those were the days when tycoons outsourced cleaning their toilets to poets.

It was worth it. Because I didn’t pay rent, I knew where the deer slept in the dune hollow, had lain in their marsh nest at dawn after they’d retreated into the thickets, risen with their musk on my hair and clothes.

In the old days, long before my time on the island, even the white settlers built their houses inland away from the ocean’s blunt force. They knew a water view wasn’t worth the price of having your roof ripped off by a hurricane.

Before the settlers, the people were named Manisses. They slept in wigwams they learned to weave from muskrats who burrowed into dens on the edge of Fresh Pond. When summer came they migrated downhill to the Great Salt Pond where they left midden heaps archaeologists excavated. But shell heaps are not the whole story of a people. There’s a lot missing.

What is known, is the people and the island had the same name. No one knows which came first. Did the people name the island after themselves or did they name themselves after the island?

“Island of the Little God,” is how the white settlers translated Manisses. In the 19th century historians said it was because the island was so beautiful, but now we know “Manitou’s Little Island” is a more apt translation. Manitou is the Algonquin word for the animating force that runs through all creation. To the Puritans who colonized the island this would have been God. For me it was closer to Dylan Thomas’s “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” The island was my church, not a building with pews and a pulpit.

Those days I ran with the deer I longed to learn the Manissean stories, the tales they told in  smoke-burnished wigwams, food to survive the long winter, but they’d been lost long before my time. All I could assume was they’d succumbed to the same fate as so many other indigenous to Turtle Island—smallpox, syphilis, enslavement, outright murder, broken hearts.

I wanted those stories to teach me how to hear trees speak, how to worship properly at a spring, how to navigate from watching waves and sea birds, how to know a week out when a storm was going to buffet the island. I wanted them to carry me back to the stars, our original ancestors. My bones ached with the not-knowing. I got drunk a lot and howled in the wrong places. People mocked me, laughed right in my face and called me a Trustafarian, not understanding I was willing to be poor if it meant spending most of my day not working all the time at something that made my soul ache if I didn’t have to. I worked plenty hard at the things I cared about—dreaming, poetry.

For years I didn’t have a car, even in winter. I walked and rode my bike bundled in so many layers I couldn’t bend my arms locked onto the handlebars. But my legs could pedal hard enough to keep me upright heading into the northeast wind, strong enough it sometimes blew me sideways. From the shadows, from the edge of meadows at dawn and dusk, the deer watched me.

One winter, I worked down the Neck packing holiday baskets for the local bee farm. The Neck was a long isthmus between the Atlantic and the Great Salt Pond, narrow enough to be severed by a storm, which happened in 2012, during Hurricane Sandy. For a few hours, all of us on the far side of the breach were on a new island.

The Neck ended at the North Point, where a granite lighthouse erected 100 years before my birth defied the wind in the dunes. Black-backed gulls nested in the grass surrounding the tower. In spring if you came too close they’d dive bomb to protect their fledglings, fierce as pterodactyls. Their shrieks alone were enough to scare me off.

Once I wrote a story about a legendary island character named The Opium-Eater. In my story, he  was crazed enough to raid the gulls’ nests and eat their raw eggs. He wasn’t that far from some of my friends haunting the taverns and island roads like the real ghosts people often saw, too open to the spirit world to function on the mainland. On the mainland, they would have been in the mental hospital or jail.

Saying you were going up the Neck was a sure sign you were not a local, but it was more logical since the Neck began at the island’s only four-way stop, a crossroads that could send you back looping around the island’s round body, or down the narrow isthmus that, much like a human neck, ended in a head. The head is up, right? Not down. That’s how we define gravity, at least.

I liked this reversal of logic. It said a lot about the islanders. Even in modern times, the island wasn’t stripped of magic. The rules were different here and nobody was going to hand them to you. They were earned the old fashioned way—blood, sweat and tears. You had to put your time in. Stay several winters, work hard or be eccentric enough to justify being lazy, show up at funerals.

The winter I worked down the Neck my shift ended at 8pm. On an island 13 miles out to sea with only 900 inhabitants, this might as well have been two in the morning. Many residents were  already tucked under down comforters, some were getting drunk at the bar, maybe driving home from choir practice or a town meeting. If they were out they certainly weren’t pedaling under the stars dressed like the Michelin Man in down, wool and fleece. I layered myself in the dreams of geese, sheep and recycled plastic bottles.

I rode without a light, even when the moon was dark. The sky was so close the stars could touch me. My cheeks stung, my lungs burned, but I never resented the pain. I was happy. I knew I’d get home eventually, take a hot shower, curl up in bed under the eaves with a book. The internet didn’t exist yet. No cell phones. Ride after ride, running wild down the middle of the road, sometimes with a deer alongside me, I became myself. My spokes flashed silver; stars blazed across the sky.

The deer ran on their own fire, but I rode on the banked embers of the old stories the people once told. With their breath at my back, the embers began to glow again. My lungs shared that breath with my starved heart. My heart shared it with my bones, hollow with neglect and longing. Marrow began to grow. I stood up straighter.

I stopped getting drunk and howling in peoples’ faces. I accepted I wasn’t going to live in the center. I was made for the edges.

I sheltered in shadows, stepped out of the tangled arabesques of thickets speaking a lost tongue, twitched my ears in all directions and was always ready to leap—across, between, over, under—I grew skilled in all directions. Secretive, swift and slender, I told no one who I really was. I worked enough to get by, stopped in the bar, made small talk, went to potlucks. I still looked human, but others could tell—a bit of the wild came indoors when I stepped over a threshold.

Untethered to civilization, my relationship with gravity loosened. I could leap over stone walls and disappear into deep thickets where the ground never felt the direct touch of the sun’s rays. There I learned to rest, to relax without worrying about the future. I wasn’t thinking I would need my strength when winter came and there was nothing left to eat but the bark of apple trees or  chestnuts from the island’s few old trees. I didn’t think about getting hit by a car or shot.

There were still some old trees in the center of the island. All the rest had been chopped down by the settlers who cleared the land to build ships and farms. When the farms became second homes for the rich, the fields became thickets, my haven. In the tangled shade, in the deep green, in Earth’s heart, I waited until it was safe to come out, stepping over the edge of the always moving shadow. Lowering my head to kiss clover and sweet meadow grass, I lifted my eyes to behold salt roses.

One summer I found myself with a spear in my hand looking down at a tautog tucked under a rock. Without thinking, I pulled the rubber sling back and shot it. A perfect hit right behind the gill. It didn’t wriggle off despite my shock, and when I got to shore the look of admiration on my friends’ faces had me back in the water the next day, and every day that summer. Somehow I went to work too, but that’s not what I remember. What I remember is I slept in a tent in a salt meadow listening to the deer huff, rode my bike with a giant backpack that could hold a speargun and a keeper striped bass (at least 28 inches), and that I clambered down bluffs to rocky beaches where I slid on my belly over rocks through a veil of bladderwrack to the deeper water where my prey taught me how to stalk it.

I learned how the stripers would circle back after we’d made eye contact, and from what direction. I learned to only shoot when they were headed toward me. Never chase. I made some bad shots that way I’m still ashamed of, gut shots; the fish wriggled off to a slow death.

But the fish I did pull in I shared, sometimes handing them to surprised strangers right on the beach. I scaled and gutted and filleted on the rocks. Out of nowhere, the gulls always appeared. I threw them the guts. On the best days, the ones that make your heart ache when you remember them, my friends gathered at sunset and made small fires on the beach ringed with wave-tossed stones, smooth to the touch as polished marble. We wrapped potatoes in tin foil and tucked them in the coals. Corn, dipped right in the ocean could be roasted in its own husks. The fish we ate with our fingers, stripping the meat to the spiny bones one friend took home, along with the heads to make soup.

And then I stopped. I’d lost my taste for killing. People thought I was so badass, they didn’t get it. The lesson for me was in the stalking, not the kill. I had learned to think like a fish and ever since then, in certain light, my skin glistens like scales. If I’d gone on killing there’s a good chance those scales would now be dull.

When autumn blew down from the Arctic, I broke down my tent. It was time to relinquish the meadow to the deer herd. I didn’t have many possessions. I slept on a Persian rug, a gift from my parents for my 21st birthday. It was the color of burgundy wine, a gold mandala in its center. It was the only thing of monetary value I owned. More than that, it was beautiful, handmade. All summer, it wove me into its pattern.

When I rolled up the magic carpet I found a snakeskin, right beneath the center mandala. Inch by inch while I slept, a snake had left its old form behind, slipped out from under me anew.

She left me her skin. I was translucent. I glimmered in the moon. I walked through a haze of magic, winged milkweed seeds drifting over bluffs, monarch butterflies flapping just high enough to clear the breaking surf, heading south to the mountains of Mexico. Honeybees drenched in goldenrod pollen, so heavy they staggered mid-air on their way back to the hive. Those were the days the deer walked in broad daylight, mesmerized by the rut. One day I came upon a buck and doe in a field. So close I could smell them. We faced each other in a silence so long I forgot who I was.

---

One winter day my love and I found a swan’s wing snagged on a shad bush. We stood on our tip-toes and untangled it, took it home to live in our house. At the hinge, bone poked through the white feathers.

I let love strip me.

“I was always afraid of you,” he sobbed when we broke up.

“Why?” the one word I could choke out through my tears.

“Because I knew when we met how much I’d hurt you.”

He made it sound like a prophecy. I trusted like a child.

In the absence of color, I disappeared. There was no one left to haunt.

I stood in the white flame of my soul adorned in swan feathers.

Colors returned through the wound, brighter. Feathers dropped in my path by birds heard, never seen. Goldfinches, wrens, warblers, chickadees, sparrows; pheasants on winding trails and manicured lawns where I was on my knees again pulling weeds and pruning hydrangeas. Twice a cardinal, once a bluejay, crows by the roadside. I always stopped my bike and picked up the black feathers, tucked them in my hair, paid attention to what direction they were pointing.

Once, laying in bed looking out a skylight, an arrow shot across the blue gap and the sky exploded. I walked outside and discovered a mandala of yellow feathers flecked with blood on the grass. The tail shafts of a flicker plucked straight from the sky by a falcon.

Once I found the wing of a falcon itself, a slate-gray merlin flecked with blue and apricot. He lent me some of his magic when I had been grounded too long. Skyward, the merlin took me, leaving his wing behind when he flew beyond the clouds.

Once, on a winter day when dusk couldn’t come soon enough, in February, the month with only 28 days everyone on the island said felt like it had twenty-eight hundred, I stood at the window above the kitchen sink looking out with ghost eyes, just able to see this world.

I was holding on for life to the memory of the first red-wing blackbird in the spring marsh, the chorus of peepers, and the time I’d walked out after a three day blizzard through snowdrifts to discover where the robins had taken shelter in a pine grove I’d never noticed.

What I saw from the window: wings, precise as knives, a bride on her way to marry a Fae King, the ghost of a woman who’d been burned at the stake as a witch.

I ran to a back window as the snowy owl circled the house, watched it vaporize over a stone wall. Not a ghost.

I had lain too long in the ashes. I walked upstairs and lowered myself into the claw foot. Heat flushed my skin rosy. When I looked up through the skylight I saw the first stars come out.

Once, in the golden hour, I stood with a wise woman as two massive birds circled.

“Those must be bald eagles,” I said. “Nothing else could be that huge. But their heads aren’t white,” I remarked.

“Those are golden eagles,” the wise woman said.

“They can’t be. They live out west. They don’t come here,” I countered.

“Those are golden eagles,” she repeated.

“Did you see the golden eagles?” I heard in town the next day.

The local bird experts confirmed it. I called the wise woman and told her the ID was official.

“I know,” was all she said.

She didn’t gloat, but there was no use for modesty in the tower where she dwelled. I began to wonder what magic could occur if I released even a little of my doubt.

It  was rare I never heard the sound of water, so rare I didn’t notice how its rhythms also moved through my waking dreams. On nights when the wind dropped off a sense of unease hung in the air, then wonder if you could sit with it long enough. After wonder, sometimes the deep peace we call silence welled up. Those were the years I learned that silence isn’t empty,  that it was actually so full it overflowed like a waterfall over the lip of a valley and split into a hundred rivers that always ended in the same place—the ocean on the other side of the dunes. Keep following those tracks, my heart told me.

The island was made of very old rock, Cretaceous blocks deposited by a glacier in the Pleistocene. The wrinkled faces of ancient sages appeared in the eroding bluffs. I began to hear their stories, just whispers, but it was enough.

The rocks were so old, carried down from the north by a glacier, they’d almost forgotten they were made of fire. I had forgotten, too. I moved slow. For years, I moved slow. But I moved. Kept riding my bike and walking over the dunes to follow the heart-shaped tracks that ended in the ocean. Could the deer swim? Did they step into the waves and bound up the crests to the stars? There were never any tracks heading back. None that I saw. I thought I would live on the island forever.

That changed one day in early December when I opening my front door on my way to work on the oyster farm, I came face to face with a snowy owl, sitting in the condo field as if it owned it.

That’s a phrase humans created to say the owl looked like it belonged, because possession is our God, maybe a false one, but still the most powerful. But I had walked the fields long enough, stood at the edge between thicket and open meadow listening in all directions to know a different story. There was always more to let go.

That was the story I saw in the burning yellow eyes of the white owl. Like flint, they struck my bones. My anguish was incinerated and my future ignited. It was time to leave.

And so I left the little island where I ran with the deer, where I rested in the deep shadows and sighed with the ocean. The grief was bad as any break-up and I’m still resisting, holding on to the pain on my new island where I sometimes find myself sobbing as I drive down the road at sunset. It’s never as beautiful as back home.

There is no beach here. I have to throw myself off the edge into a blue so deep it burns. The land is so new it hasn’t been worn down. The rocks are jagged. I rarely stride, walk cautiously. Sometimes I feel hobbled.

But here, I witness first life, green ferns rooting in rock so recently lava the ground still steams. Because I’m in a new place, I see it’s a miracle.

When winter ends, the snowy owls fly back to the Arctic where the ice is melting. They say water will pour down from the top of the world to surge over the islands first.

Even here where there are no deer, I keep looking for heart-shaped tracks, but I swim now, rather than walk. I dive down to peer into caves where sharks sleep, am enveloped in the clicks and squeaks of the dolphin pod. I’ve been drummed by sonar, swam side by side with green turtles, tipped my wings to the mantas when they soar past like undersea angels. I can dive deep enough to hear the humpback whale’s song.

I can’t ride a bike here. I’m not a triathlete. The mountains are too steep for me to. They could flick me off their backs like a giant. They have fire in their guts and often rumble.

In the bay where I swim, I look up and watch white-tailed tropic birds disappear in holes in the thousand foot cliff where the bones of kings were buried. I sit by tide pools long enough for the black-crowned night heron hiding in the tall grass to feel safe enough to step out and begin to hunt. Her beak stabs the water and she swallows gobies whole. I imagine they die in a dream and awake in a new form, always shining.

Offshore this island, surrounded by water named Pacific, a new island is forming, lava spouting up from the sea floor. Who will be the first to root when fire breaches the water’s surface and hardens in minutes to rock? The first to roost or nest, to root or wallow, to laugh and gasp, to bellow and howl, to grieve and surrender? To love.

Who will be the first to tell the stories learned from living rock, dormant in bones, even those that have been dishonored through forgetting? The story of how the dance began in fire, of how the fire became solid ground, of how, when the ground was ready to receive it, the whirlpools between worlds opened and water poured down from the stars.

Who will tell of how water filled the Earth’s waiting hollows, and of how the deer came to rest there when the Earth had prepared a place for them?

I will be gone.