Bird Droppings November 5, 2026
The Deer Don’t Wear Watches, and Neither Does the Journey
It was a gloomy morning in northeast Georgia. The clouds hung low, rain threatened, and I tried to finish my morning routine before the weather changed. I had dictated my daily Bird Droppings and stopped at one of my familiar places along the road to upload it. Nothing particularly unusual about that. I have stopped there hundreds of times. But this morning was different.
A doe and her three youngsters stood beside the road, quietly grazing. I suspect they were the same four deer I had encountered earlier in the spring, when the little ones were considerably smaller. Here they were again, months later, going about their morning without the slightest concern for my schedule. The doe noticed me and began to move. I stopped completely. No sudden movements, no effort to get closer, no attempt to interfere. I simply watched. For a few moments, our world overlapped.
The light was terrible for photography. The delayed exposure made it hard to capture a clear image, but I managed to get all four deer in one photograph. It wasn’t a perfect picture, but it was a perfect moment. I have written before that the deer don’t wear watches. They don’t concern themselves with appointments, deadlines, or the thousand little obligations we humans construct to organize our lives. They live within the rhythms of the natural world. I sometimes wonder whether we have become so concerned with managing our time that we have forgotten how to experience it.
Carl Jung wrote about synchronicity, those meaningful coincidences that seem to connect events in ways that go beyond ordinary cause and effect. I have been thinking about Jung quite a bit lately. Perhaps these encounters are simply coincidences. Perhaps the deer were grazing where deer have always grazed, and I happened to arrive at precisely the right moment. But does explaining an encounter diminish its meaning? I don’t think so.
Over fifty years of teaching, I have found that some of the most important moments in a classroom happened when I stopped trying to control everything. A student would ask an unexpected question. A conversation would wander away from the lesson plan. A child who had remained silent for weeks would suddenly offer an observation that changed the direction of our discussion. Those moments rarely appeared in the curriculum guide.
John Dewey understood that experience was central to learning. Learning was not simply transferring information from one person to another. It emerged through interaction, reflection, and engagement with the world around us.
I have often described three kinds of teachers: parasitic, symbiotic, and osmotic. The osmotic teacher doesn’t merely deliver information but participates in the learning experience, allowing ideas and understanding to move in both directions. Perhaps watching deer requires something of the same disposition. If I had moved toward the doe, she might have taken her youngsters into the woods. If I had insisted on getting the perfect photograph, I might have lost the experience entirely. Instead, I stopped and allowed the moment to unfold.
I think about the children I have taught who needed precisely that kind of patience. Children whose behavior challenged conventional expectations, whose learning did not follow the prescribed sequence, whose trust could not be demanded but had to be earned. Sometimes the doorway was there all along. We adults simply kept knocking on the wrong door.
I travel a gravel road regularly, winding through trees that change with the seasons. In the spring, the woods awaken with new growth. Summer brings deep green shadows. Autumn scatters leaves across the gravel, and winter opens views that remain hidden during the warmer months. It is the same road, yet it is never quite the same journey. Perhaps that is true of education. Perhaps it is true to grow older.
At seventy-seven, I am still a student, still taking graduate courses, still considering opportunities to teach, and still trying to understand the pieces of a puzzle I have been assembling for most of my life. Just this morning, I was thinking about an application I submitted to teach an online undergraduate special education course. A long shot, perhaps. But then again, I have never been particularly good at deciding that the journey is finished. There is always another possibility, another question, another road to explore. And sometimes, when we least expect it, a doe and her three youngsters are waiting beside that road. I have been thinking about how much of life we spend looking for answers when perhaps we should be paying more attention to the questions. How much time we spend searching for meaningful experiences when meaning may already be standing quietly beside us.
The deer were not there for my benefit. They were simply living their lives. Yet their presence changed my morning. The clouds were still there. The rain was still coming. My obligations had not disappeared. But something had shifted. I drove away feeling better than I had when I arrived. Maybe that is enough. Sometimes observation is participation enough. And sometimes the most important lesson of the morning comes not from a book, a classroom, or a carefully prepared lesson plan, but from four deer grazing quietly beside a country road. The deer don’t wear watches. Perhaps, every now and then, we shouldn’t either. Peace, my friends, please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and please always give thanks, namaste.
My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
docbird
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