My Local Deer Park
23 May 2012 § Leave a Comment
When I was in Varanasi and visited Sarnath we all fed the deer in the now fenced off deer park and it all felt very special. But apart from the fact Buddha taught there, the deer park itself wasn’t unique. We have one at the end of our road here in leafy Tempelhof and I go there quite often. Well, I pass through on my way to Kreuzberg (I walk—my concession to this body’s desperate need for constant attention) or when I’m trying to dump tsok offerings auspiciously. I’m sure someone will catch me one day—in Germany it’s not a spiritual act but a criminal one: littering.
There’s a large pond in the middle of the fenced off enclosure (not quite such anti-human fencing in Berlin as in Sarnath, I must say), and in March the deer were all so bloated with hormone activity they were racing around their enclosure as if their tails were on fire. Maybe that’s why their tails are black? Every photo I tried to take ended up being of a green and emphatically deer-less space. It didn’t occur to me to video it (I still haven’t go used the my camera yet), I’m afraid. But I did manage a photo a few days ago, now they’ve calmed down a bit. And a short video, which I’m too lazy to upload. Be grateful, I think it’s one of those little movies that you could only really enjoy if you’d been there… like births and kids brithday parties and such.
