ISBC 44 - Go Until No
Chapter 44 of Hope: A User's Manual
This doe amazes me.
I have written about her several different times here - going back at least five years. It is the same doe with the same limp on her front right leg that is clearly broken and yet year after year we keep seeing her and we keep seeing her having more fawns including these two little ones. This year, we have seen them a lot in our and in our neighbors’ back yard. She has found our yards to be a safe spot for her and her little ones, especially that shady area in the back of our neighbors’ yard.
She amazes me. She just keeps going, keeps walking, keeps having babies, keeps living. She is an example of “go until no.” One might think that whenever her leg was broken she could have or should have given up but she has kept going. There’s no “no” in her it seems. I love MaryAnn’s reflection on “go until no”
“Go until No” requires you to believe that your intuition will tell you what you need to know even if it hasn’t yet. It requires you to have trust in the future—not that things will work out the way you hope, but that the future will provide the clarity you need to either keep going, change direction, or turn back.
But sometimes we don’t get the full picture until we commit ourselves and take a step forward. As has been attributed to St. Augustine, “solvitur ambulando”: it is solved by walking. “Go until No” requires you to believe that your intuition will tell you.1
Obviously this is more than just about a deer making her way through our neighborhood. This is about anyone who has had to keep pushing through health circumstances, through financial challenges, through painful relationships, through physical issues, through doubts and fears, through things beyond their control, who keep fighting against oppression, who stand up to speak that which others are afraid to say, and the list can go on. And like I reflected upon a few weeks ago about “writing fiction”, we don’t always know what others are facing. Yes there are times when the challenges we have are obvious to everyone, but many times they are not.
But to you who just keeps going, keeps living, keeps working for change, keeps pushing through... props to you. Keep going, keep going until you come to a place of no. But in the midst, I pray you have a space like this deer family to stop, to rest, to renew, to restore.
In this I hear both the call that God gives us to have courage (“Be strong and courageous…”) but also the call to find places to rest and restore (“Remember the sabbath…Jesus went off by himself to pray…”). Both are needed.
To close, I want to share a beautiful poem that I encountered while waiting to write this. I envisioned this courageous doe and all others trying to live in this hopeful sense of go until no. Author Jack Ridl has given me permission to share it in full.
The Yearling with the Broken Leg
We watch her, right leg collapsing
with each step, she leaning down,
hobbling onto her knee. Lying
behind the snow-covered
woodpile, the mother, her head
high, her eyes wide, her tail
white-flagging in the flakes.
In this winter—the most snow-filledin half a century—the deer paw
into the drifts, chew what the books
say deer will never eat. They tear
the leaves from rhododendrons,
shear the grasses along the walk,
pull the ivy down in strings from
the beeches and maples, off the pock-
marked bricks on the south-side wall.Our cats lie along the windowsill,
watch, tails twitching. Our dog
runs howling through the dog door
out into his acre where he leaps
against the chain links. The deer
look up, but stay. Are they
too hungry to be frightened? We
don’t know what to do. We don’tknow what to say, something
dumb and sentimental. Does
the yearling know her leg
is shattered? When she lifts
her good leg, the other hoof
gives way in the soft snow,
her knee settling into a drift—
this now her own hideous walkwithin the world. Is this a kind
of love we cannot know, the deer
spared our ignorant pity? She
stumbles to another bush, the dog
barking, the cats’ tails twitching,
our words dumb, lost without
a sentence to make sense in.2
Do you hear in there the courage to keep going - the deer eating the things that people say they’d never eat, the yearling continuing to put one hoof down in front of the other, and the courage to ignore the barking dog. But it starts not with them going but with them at rest - lying behind the woodpile. A beautiful and hope-full poem.
Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed
Book links:
Hope: A User’s Manual by MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Practicing to Walk Like a Heron by Jack Ridl
McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (p. 183). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
Ridl, Jack. Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Made in Michigan Writers Series) (pp. 158-159). Wayne State University Press. Kindle Edition.
This was a very timely and meaningful message for me, Ed! Thank you! And I remember especially loving this chapter in MaryAnn's book.
"Go until No" makes perfect sense to me. What else is there to do? Give up? Nope. Never. I gave up crawling to walk when I was one year old. Now its time to give up walking and learn to fly or crawl again. Some days its either one or the other, but I can learn from both. Looking closely or getting the larger view.