Deer stand on the trail above the gamboling coyote pups in the valley, a mother and yearling deer maybe. The deer look down at the source of noise and motion and leave the trail to head for it! They twist through the brush, negotiating openings and turning to go right into the middle of the bare spot where the coyotes play!
The pups scatter!
The deer head back up to the trail, the coyotes return to the opening. The deer again focus their attention below the trail, again come down, the larger lead deer with its head down, moving with intent into the coyote area! The coyotes again disappear but regroup in an adjacent opening in the brush. The lead deer swings below the coyotes, then doubles back up the slope to where a few remain!
Finally, the pair of deer head back up the slope to the trail.
The coyote family has regrouped a little further south in a different red dirt opening. The deer now look in that direction, and now return down the slope to the new gathering spot, taking yet another pass at their canine neighbors, again breaking up the group!
Is this play?...or curiosity?.....or preemptive defense?......or establishing dominance to make a first impression in hopes of warding off later threat from the grown coyotes?
The deer return to their course on which they were travelling before the detour. Puppy play resumes. Running and chasing and spinning and boxing and running and running and running, flashing into view across the red soil in the gaps between the junipers across the valley, groups chasing this way then turning the tables and becoming the chased, cutting tight racing curves around the bases of the trees, pawing at their quarry as they catch it, full speed for the entire hour, so alive, so youthful, tails extended out in health and joy.
Finally puppy play winds down, and beautiful coyotes pose majestically in sunlit open patches of bare soil, lying beside each other, lying next to each other, rolling over, mouthing, sitting so prettily, fur glowing white and red in morning sun.
Days later: Coyote ridge, sunrise. No little coyote family. I look and look to no avail. I knew this day would come…...but what’s that sound? From the mini-slot canyon, it just might be….I cannot imagine anything else making that sound.
Little coyotes gone? It had to be someday. I will worry about them.
Presence of Spirit, connection of essence of Spirit, deep sharing of Life - such is the gift offered by Nature and its children. Therein is the essence of life, a connection needing no extrapolation or interpretation, the other’s need and desire and joy become my need and desire and joy.
Coyote yelp! No question! Sounds like it is just beyond the dam. Looking for family? Announcing capture of a treasure?
The universe of our conscious experience is an expanding universe - for it, time is nothing more than the expansion of conscious experience. It is always growing, always incorporating, even if fragile physical synaptic structures give the illusion of “past” and “forgotten” as connections break and decay.
These universes of conscious experience, interfacing and bumping up against each other, colliding and conflicting, and on exquisitely rare and beautiful occasions, overlapping.
We expanding universes of consciousness and awareness - reluctantly incorporating the intersections of others’ experiences while craving sharing of our experiences, always prompt to take the opportunity to inject our conscious experience into the experience of the other, always resistant to having the other’s conscious experience absorbed into our own.
But in rare moments, in the scruffing of a kitty’s ear as it rubs its head against your hand, in the wordless communication that captures the ineffable bond between child and parent, in watching puppies play and joust and race, the overlap of the universes of conscious experience is shared and mutually experienced, not in mere communication and interaction at the edges of those expanding universes of consciousness, but in actual overlap of the experience, mutually shared essence of experience. In such wordless moments we finally know what it is to not be alone.