I bring him fresh-cut wild rose bushes as he comes over to greet me and daintily pulls at the green leaves between the thorns. I stroke his long, graceful neck, his smooth chestnut flanks, and admire the impossibly long lashes over huge liquid brown eyes, the soft browns and grays that follow the delicate curves of his face, the lovely shape of his ears, the impossibly slender legs. He twists his flexible neck to peer back intently into my face and arches it against me in companionship. His whole being is a wonder of grace and function, a wondrous creation. A little three-legged deer who can run like the wind. How can there be anything so lovely on this Earth?

He reminds me of how much beauty there is all around us. It is his very commonness that reminds me that it is everywhere. So often we are too rushed or numbed or worried to see it. If we could pause to notice, perhaps our stress would ease and our spirits lift. Our human brains tend to adapt and take for granted the familiar or the known elements in life; they are structured to primarily pay attention only to the new, unusual, or dangerous. We adults have to work to see our world with a child’s wonder. It is a loss we can overcome to restore enchantment to our experience of the world.

In Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue writes, “Without realizing it each day each one of us is visited by beauty, so quietly woven throughout ordinary days that we hardly notice ... it is made to seem naïve and romantic [but] much of the stress and emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty... the Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence and unity ... we feel most alive in its presence for it meets the needs of our soul.”

Because there are too many deer in our area doesn’t change the loveliness of any individual deer. Our idea of what is beautiful often changes depending on whether an animal is an inconvenience to us. But there is a deeper, less fickle standard that would serve us better. Each one of the eight billion or so of we humans on our planet is not ordinary either, and even though there are “too many” of us, each and every one possesses the potential for an incandescent presence.

When they met this young, three-legged deer, people seemed stunned. There was something about him...in addition to his physical loveliness, he was positively luminous. He seemed to glow with an inner light, and visitors also seemed to glow in his presence, as if an arc of energy had been created between them.

Many have felt drawn to linger in his presence. Those who have been here for long visits would spend hours simply sitting with him. Sometimes they would read poetry to him, a human way of connecting, and he would attend, each species doing their best to connect with one another in their own way. The mutual intent of care and intimacy seemed to be understood. What is it that this deer emanates? Rescued from the side of a highway with two broken front legs, his umbilical cord still attached, all he has ever known is humans. Is he offering an innocent, puzzled, heart-rending invitation? Expressing a longing for a herd—a longing that somehow opens his energies to humans? The innate need for belonging with a herd occurred for Bluebell the buffalo, who opened herself to humans when she lost her herd. Something changed in her.

An energy healer commented upon meeting Bluebell, “All I felt was this heart, this huge heart that wanted to be met.” Perhaps these animals are showing us what it is like to be in a herd of deer, of buffalo, where dozens of hearts are intermingling, bathed in each other’s fields. Maybe they can help us become more aware of the flow of love within the human family, our hearts speaking to one another. Brilliant scientific research shows that the magnetic field of our hearts is more than 100 times greater than the one generated by our brains. It radiates outside the body in all directions and can be detected several feet away. It carries information that affects other people, and our pets as well.

Perhaps the heart field of that little deer was intermingling with our human heart fields, and that is what he was transmitting, simply and purely. I have cared for other deer and buffalo and know this energy can change as hormones rage, but underneath that level of behavior lies a urge for communion that can evoke a glowing response.

As we enter into any aspect of Nature, the wonders we see just increase. I could have easily written about other animals: Teton Totem the grizzly bear in his prime, my golden mustang, a splendid white wolf...and I ask myself again: How can there be anything so wondrous on this earth? Nature and all of its inhabitants are always there, waiting for us to see and appreciate it, be healed by it and allow it to illuminate our lives. We would all be healed then: humans, animals and our Earth. What we do not attend to cannot affect us. That little deer called us to attend.

In the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," Thomas Gray writes:

...Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air…

So many animals have been born to “blush unseen,” their wonder never witnessed by human eyes. But Runs-Like-the-Wind was not unseen. His sweetness was not wasted, but has nourished many human souls.

“…low-frequency oscillations generated by the heart and body in the form of afferent neural, hormonal and electrical patterns are the carriers of emotional information...We have proposed that these same rhythmic patterns also can transmit emotional information via the electromagnetic field into the environment, which can be detected by others and processed in the same manner as internally generated signals.” (emphasis mine). Karl Pribram in “Biological Encoding of Information,” HeartMath.org