Oh my DEER!

Dear Complaint Department,

The deer in my neighborhood are a menace. They saunter across the street right when I am late to work. Whole families of them in NO HURRY WHATSOEVER. They stare straight at me through the windshield whilst taking their sweet time just to “get to the other side”, as it were. I must have lost half a lifetime waiting on them over the years and don’t get me started on how they knock over the rocks on my retaining wall as they waltz through my yard setting off my Ring doorbell 20 times a day. I mean, why can’t they hang out in the forest like they are supposed to?

Dear Deer,

Perhaps the better question is why can’t we and why can’t you hang out in the forest like we are supposed to? We too are animal and we too were meant to live in community with deep-rooted trees who have been around for centuries and who can teach us how to live. We were meant to learn to love from all the wildness of the oaks and the dirt and the coyotes and the fungi who survive and thrive and take the time to create and recreate the world time and time again.

So it’s all wrong.

The deer who peer back at you are animal lives you were meant to live. It’s annoying. It’s like bumping into an ex who has somehow done better and gotten more free and attractive since you left them. It’s pain. It’s a living and embodied regret of all the missed canopies of trees we were meant to dream under.

In losing half a lifetime locked eye to eye with the wildness of your own mirror self, you might have found a portal to your own true animal.

But yes, of course, so annoying too. Things can always be both.

To the forest we go.

—with so much love for what annoys you and calls you to wildness

The Complaint Department