Stillness

Deer photographed from my car (August, 2019)

Often in these last days of summer, the mist makes its way up the canyon from Santa Monica Bay and swirls around the Spanish Colonial architecture of the college where I work.  On these days of meetings, working with students, organizing lists and course syllabi, I try to get in at least two or three walks around campus to keep the blood flowing.

The thing about Los Angeles is that you are never more than an hour from every kind of geographic environment:  oceans, lakes, a river, flood plains; mountains, deserts, and several valleys.  On the steps of the chapel on campus, I can see mountains, the flats of Santa Monica, and the bay itself stretching out to Catalina Island on a clear morning.

Quite often, especially in the monastic summers when the campus is mostly in repose while summer session is being held downtown at our other campus, the lawns and walkways become the province of nature:  deer, coyotes, squirrels, sparrows, red-tailed hawks, owls and butterflies.  Occasionally, during the fall and spring semesters, we see wildlife in the quieter corners of the campus.  I have felt a particular kinship with the deer.  It is ironic that I used to accompany my father on his quest to shoot one every fall Saturday morning of my childhood.

A typical encounter goes like this:  I feel the fatigue of looking at paper after paper from my writing students.  Or, I have a challenging problem in research or writing that I must work out in my head.  I excuse myself from the office and go out and begin a trek around one of the walking paths that crisscross the campus.  A spot I like overlooks a deep canyon that flows south passed the Getty Center.  Red-tailed hawks ride thermals all the way up the canyon, searching for field mice and other small prey.  It is necessary to stand for a moment, close my eyes, and breathe deeply.  When I open them, I allow my vision and awareness to lock in on the canyon choked with eucalyptus, sage, yucca, and scrub oak.  Only then do I become aware of an otherness, a presence, and inevitably, the deer will materialize out of nowhere, grazing lightly while watching me.  I do not move, and they relax and go about their business.  I watch them, their movements, their patterns.  Usually, I see females and young ones; rarely do I catch a glimpse of the more cautious males, or bucks.  Sometimes, their antlers are in velvet, meaning they have not hardened yet and can be tender if the deer bumps into something or tries to fight another animal.

These deer seem to exist in a parallel universe to ours.  I have seen them gently grazing while students or cars pass within feet of them.  Only occasionally do they spook and lope away with a speed that is breath-taking.  Once I saw one sprint back and forth repeatedly across a rectangular patch of grass, relishing freedom like a condemned man.  I’ve seen them bedded down in the dense brush.  They do their thing and the human beings inhabiting their space do theirs.

I drink in the calm, measured life of grazing the hillside.  I feel the tension slip away as it does in deep meditation.  Feet away from each other, we human beings, facing tests and course work and rushing to class, exist parallel to the deer who take their time meandering across the canyon.  Two universes, two speeds, both unique.

So daily, I seek out this parallel dimension alongside the academic human reality.  I connect with nature—the deer—and allow my human cares to dissipate.  When I am driving onto or off of campus and I see a deer or two or three, I’ll stop and watch them.  Often, they have come right up to the car and walked so close I could have touched them.  I don’t.  I think that would disrupt the transparent membrane between our reality and theirs.  I just watch, and they watch me.

Once, while driving onto campus one early morning, I saw two coyotes in an open meadow, circling around, warily staring at me, baring teeth even though I did not even get out of my car.  This is strange behavior for coyotes except when they are cornered.  Normally, they run for cover and do not like to be out in the open.  If they are stalking something, they attack and carry the unfortunate prey away to the underbrush to strip flesh and gnaw on the bones.  But these two stared at me defiantly, and kept circling around.  I waited, holding my breath, and watched them from the safety of my car.  One, feeling I was not a threat, went down into the tall grass to pull and rip at something while the other kept watch.  The other came up out of the grass with a deer leg in his mouth and blood covering his snout.  This was desecration, a bloody testament to the horrors inherent in nature.  It is never all peace and tranquility.  This is life—predators and prey.  Even in the realm of the deer, every day is a struggle.  The rules of their universe parallel the rules of our own.

Not too long ago, our campus security saw a mountain lion crossing near the guard shack at the entrance to campus.  This hunter, the most fearsome predator in this area of the Santa Monica Mountains, was out and about.  A week ago, a mountain lion managed to cross from our western side of Interstate 405 in Brentwood to the eastern side where Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are located.  This is an amazing feat that a human being probably could not duplicate as the 405 is one of the busiest freeways in California.

We exist side-by-side with nature.  In Los Angeles, this means dealing with an alternative universe of great beauty, tranquility, violence and danger.  In short, one not unlike our own.  It is what makes Los Angeles unique as a large metropolis with a population equal to some countries.  It is the intersection of several strands of existence, and if we live here long enough, it becomes part of who we are.  Humanity and nature, us and our animal counterparts, side by side, the twin souls of the city.