Almost every evening here in Oregon, a family of deer appears in my front yard. I watch them out my living room windows. “Deer TV”. Recently two fawns have joined the full-grown deer, trailing happily behind their mothers.

I was walking from the house through the woods to my yurt studio one morning, and on the path was one of the fawns. Its stomach was missing. A coyote or mountain lion had gotten it. Unwilling to drag it off the path, I went back to the house. The next morning, animals had eaten more of it, and dragged the rest of it away. My dog, Atlas, giddily picked up the rib cage and pranced around like a giddy conqueror. Afraid the sharp edges would hurt his throat, I grabbed it from him and threw it up in a bunch of trees surrounded by brush.

That night I had a dream.

It was primitive. Shamanic. I was told to use the rib cage. In my art. I was shown bark and bones and jewels decorating both, a sort of primitive animalistic piece of art. 

Now to get my head around it.

The dead deer was my childhood. Deer hunting season. Twelve point bucks. Blood, guts, butchering. Deer hanging upside down from a tree that you could see from the dining room as you ate your eggs.

In Earth, my first novel, I write about the time I was asked at age 8 to hold the ankle of a gutted deer on the kitchen counter as my dad used a hacksaw to saw through a joint. A slime of blood on the counter meant the carcass slid wildly as we worked. I clung to the ankle as I  thrown here and there by the sawing motion. 

And now at age 59, here was my childhood in all it’s blood and guts staring me in the face. I had to try to come to terms with the dream. I’m vegan. I’m an animal activist. It meant touching bones covered in flesh. 

Another dream I used to have often centered around all of the squirrels we butchered and ate in rural Missouri. Do you know how many squirrels it takes to feed a family of 9? In London when I was a journalist at the Independent, there was some sort of news event about squirrels and mad cow disease. I can’t remember the gist of it now. A friend who knew my backstory — few did — told the managing editor about me, and I was asked to write a column about how my dad liked squirrel brains. We all knew to save the heads for him. How he’d suck the squirrel brains out, and leave a line of tiny skulls on the table next to his plate.

I wrote it. It was published. I didn’t save it.

I didn’t want my past. I wasn’t that dirty, sweaty farm child. I was a hip and cool international journalist.

Here’s the problem, though. Once you go down the path of finding and living your authentic creative voice, the past will come back. It will ask you to get deep and dirty and real. The past we avoid holds the creative power we seek.

Back to the dream about the squirrels. I’d dream of their pelts, of taking their pelts and filling them with jewels and sewing their bellies loosely back together, letting the gems spill out, guts that now glitter.

Meanwhile, back at the yurt, I go looking for the fawn’s rib cage. (If you would have told me 15 years ago, that one day I’d be searching for a deer’s rib cage in the brush in rural Oregon, I would’ve thought you were mad.) The brambles and blackberry thorns are too much. I can’t even see where the ribcage landed, let alone retrieve it. Meanwhile, Atlas saunters up with another section of the fawn’s ribcage clasped in his conqueror’s teeth.

“Thanks, Mr. Fly!” I say, as I take it from him. “Good boy!”

What follows is a week of boiling and soaking in hydrogen peroxide and using tweezers to pick the meat out of every nook and cranny. The smell and slivers of meat bring back visceral memories. I gag. Air out the kitchen. Can only manage it for a few minutes each day. Of course, I question, “Do I really want to do this? Why am I doing this?” 

Should I adorn the bones with jewels?

Shall I turn the bones and bark into a shamanic mask? 

Was this some kind of atonement? Or did I want to reconnect to my wild, primitive self? Was I trying to re-animate the soul of the dead creature? If so, why? 

I’m still exploring the bone art as I write this.

I just wanted to share this because I want to tell others. If you’ve made a soul’s contract this lifetime to find your creative voice, don’t avoid the past. Don’t box it up and hide it on a back shelf. Don’t cringe at it.

Go toward it. Open your arms.

Bring that little girl home!

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