Deer pressure

Is she not so pretty?

But, of course, the muntjacs do eat all there is to eat and limit the opportunities for anyone else to inhabit the wood. What does the land think? I don't know, but here's a thought: we humans have screwed up so many relationships in the more than human world, that maybe diplomacy is required of us? Or marriage counseling? Performed with tact and respect, not dominion. And it requires knowledge... so then, I wonder, how do we gain knowledge? I like these quotes taken from an essay by Tim Ingold.

Knowledge of the world is gained by moving about in it, exploring it, attending to it, ever alert to the signs by which it is revealed. Learning to see, then, is a matter not of acquiring schemata for mentally constructing the environment but of acquiring the skills for direct perceptual engagement with its constituents, human and non-human, animate and inanimate.

New knowledge comes from creative acts of discovery rather than imagining, from attending more closely to the environment rather than reassembling one’s picture of it along new conceptual lines.

[Land] has both transparency and depth: transparency, because one can see into it; depth, because the more one looks the further one sees. Far from dressing up a plain reality with layers of metaphor, or representing it, map-like, in the imagination, songs, stories and designs serve to conduct the attention of performers into the world, deeper and deeper, as one proceeds from outward appearances to an ever more intense poetic involvement. At its most intense, the boundaries between person and place, or between the self and the landscape, dissolve altogether. It is at this point that, as the people say, they become their ancestors, and discover the real meaning of things.

Spend time with the land, get to know it. Try things and see what happens. Explore. Attend deeply. take time. Be cautious, yet courageous. Be creative. Listen. Let the land be your guide.