Kissed by a Deer. 2006
While in California in 2004 I underwent a mandala workshop entitled `creating a power animal` -according to the facilitator `this could be the most significant mandala you ever do`. The image I received was a deer but for some reason I rejected this thinking that it couldn’t be right and that I had become confused between the image in my mind and the animals I had seen in the forest.
I was to find out I was wrong. The image of the deer was to become very real for me. At the end of the workshop, after I had wrestled with myself and the mandala that I was creating for many hours, I walked outside to come face to face with a deer:
Its gentleness a relief to the conflict I had experienced within he creative process.
I then travel to Costa Rica and while walking along the beach in San Antonio national park I ventured up towards the bushes to change into my swim suit when a deer came out of the scrub and stared walking towards me- I fell on to my knees on the sand and the animal walked directly up to me and kissed me on the cheek-the people in the group I was with where amazed to witness this; as I was to experience it.
A year later as I stood at the Gompa high up in the Himalayas at Lamayuru monastery in Ladduk I looked in front of me and there were the two deer and the Dharma wheel emblem, memories of being kissed by a deer came back to me. I began to consider the journey I had been on. The wheel and the deer design are the standard emblem of an establishment where the Buddha`s teachings are transmitted, and where the wheel of the dharma continues to turn but for me the whole of Ladduk was sacred and full of teachings not just the temples and monasteries.
In the 42nd Psalm, David makes the deer a symbol of the soul's longing for God. He says, "As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God" (Ps. 42:2). Because of this passage, the deer has become the symbol of purity, hermitage, and the solitary pursuit of union with God. In Tibetan Buddhism the gentleness and grace of the deer represent the qualities of the true renunicate, as does its lifestyle as a homeless wander never resting in the same place.