Message from a Fawn at Dawn

Moving from Manhattan to the no-cell-service, summit of a foothill north of Boulder, Colorado was quite a jump. It was a transition from sprinting home at night to make sure no dangerous human was following me, to hurrying up the dog walks in case a mountain lion was watching me. It was sirens and street chatter to deep gusts of mountain winds or the soft falling of snow. It was waking up every morning and looking out the window to my right, to see the same old coffee shop with the same, expansive lines winding around the street corner, versus waking up in the morning, looking to my right, and seeing, well, this - the unexpected.

It was a jump in that it meant getting used to a whole new way of life and whole new context, overnight. But it wasn't a jump in that I'm just as much a city gal as I am a mountain recluse. So, as objectively big of a move as it seemed, I felt immediately right at home.

Yet, I didn't look it immediately to passerby's; I started out my first few months in that A-frame in the foothills locking the windows in case bears were to open them, crawl in and eat me in the night. I learned the hard way about driving down mountain roads with front-wheel drive. I wore a bathing suit on the porch when it was above 60 degrees F, dreaming of the ocean.

If I was being honest with myself, I missed NY for a quite a long time - my first 6 months, for sure. I missed the hustle, the bustle, the energy and movement. The noise, the opportunities, the constantly going nature of that entire island of 1.6 million people. Hell, I missed the pizza rats and the subway, the lights and the humidity. The chaos had inspired me.

But one morning, on my 6th month and 1st day living in Colorado I woke my butt up at sunrise for the first time since living in NY. I rolled over, made my bed with one eye open, hair in a birds nest sitting lopsided on the right side of my head. The bed was barely made. And then, I raised my head, looked up and then out. And there, staring back at me, perfectly framed in my window which was vignetted with fog, I saw this little perfect fawn blinking back at me. The way the light hit its baby fur and oversized ears made it look majestical, like it was from a fairytale. And I blinked back for a while, breathing in. Everything was quiet. Time felt like it had stopped. And it was just me, and this being, separated by one pane of glass, connecting in this moment of stillness.

I got my camera, took a photo, and then sat on my bed, staring at the fawn until it eventually raised up onto its stick-figure legs, and hobbled away into the distant forest.

And that was the moment I realized the immense inspiration found in stillness. In what was not manmade, but what exists because it's meant to, naturally. In connections that don't have to be made over beers and greasy 1/2 off burgers at 5pm. That was the moment I felt in my bones that I had been transplanted to somewhere extremely special. That nature is - above all - the most sacred thing that we should aim to integrate into our lives, as much as possible, without being too intrusive.

I so appreciated that fawn's visit. It was almost as if it came to tell me, "Seize the day! Wake up early! Walk in nature. Breath in the mountain air. Feel the constant Colorado sunshine on your skin that you love so much. How dare you miss those sirens, you weirdo."

It's as if it told me - and I believed it, "You are exactly where you are meant to be."