The Doe at the Turning Point

Wake-up feel: 6. Up at 5:25.

Fruit day. Moon in Virgo. On a Fruit day the life force concentrates
in seed — what has been developing holds still and waits to be
carried forward. The Constellation closed yesterday at noon. The room
is empty. The waves are still running.

Four days of unceasing north/northeast wind. Four days of white caps
on the Bodden. This morning the winding road was a different road.
The lagoon flat. The reed fields quiet between the shore and the path.
Not a bird. Not a duck.

The rapeseed to the right, the Bodden to the left, the sun rising
ahead and to the right. This is the geography of the winding road —
flat, open, the Baltic held behind the lagoon, the sky taking up most
of what there is.

I could smell the reeds. Dry — the shore carrying something the wind
had kept from me all week. The nose is the only sense that routes
directly to the limbic system, without passing through the thinking
mind. The smell arrives already known. I stopped without deciding
to stop.

Halfway. Deep in thought. The Rehbock called from the rapeseed field —
sudden, close, sharp. Startled. The body turned before the mind named
what it was. He was already in the air, jumping and calling and running.

In April the roe bucks are establishing their territories. The bark
is their primary instrument — designed specifically to make whatever
is watching reveal itself. Force the threat into the open. He read me
before I read him.

At the turning point, a doe. She did not bolt. Stood and looked.
I stood and looked.

In virtually every tradition, the doe who does not flee stands at the
threshold — between wild and tame, between the visible world and
whatever lies behind it.

The roe deer's flight distance is ordinarily thirty metres or more.
In late April a doe may be carrying fawns close to term, hidden
somewhere nearby in the field.

A minute. Maybe two. I said goodbye and went on my way.

The sentence that is still forming: sovereign and open — not one or
the other.

Day 32. Phase 5 — Smell — Heart — Sapphire.
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast, Germany.
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | CC BY-SA 4.0 | stewardship@ubec.network