When I first moved to Maine, five years ago this week, I got the shock of my life when – looking out the kitchen window – I saw four guys with shotguns walking by the end of our dirt road. I had just been initiated into my first Maine hunting season and I wasn’t happy about it.
Up until then, I’d mostly visited Maine in early autumn. I thought the hideous orange clothing in the stores in October was for Halloween. Turns out “blaze orange” is what you wear during hunting season so you don’t get accidentally shot. Talk about a culture shock!
I love when deer (and other wild animals) visit us. We live in a quiet wooded area and see deer around here every so often, mostly at dusk or in winter when they are out looking for food. But I don’t love hunting season and have my own personal protest in November when I’m here.
Along with putting up “No Hunting” signs on our land, I have a tradition of singing to the deer every morning this time of year.
I learned from watching Duck Dynasty that it’s harder to hunt when there is a lot of noise, as animals have sensitive hearing. So I decided to make a racket.
At first, I stood outside our front door ringing an old handbell. I was committed, so I rang that bell every hour during daylight hours, because hunting is not permitted once the sun sets.
Then, when I thought I was going to break that old bell, I decided to sing instead.
After trying a bunch of different songs, I settled on the chorus of one of my favourite songs by Mark Stanton Welch called Angel.
I’ve loved it ever since I heard Mark perform at a Hay House event in London back in 2003 (the same Hay House event I won tickets to using the Charmed Life Formula).
I use it as a prayer whenever I feel unsafe or freaked out, like the first time I had to drive myself into Portland. I learned to drive on a small Scottish island, so city driving is way out of my comfort zone. I sang for two whole hours – there and back – on that first solo drive. I was so scared!
Anyway, I figured the Angel song was perfect for keeping the deer around us safe. It wasn’t until last year – when talking to Nantene about my prayer book – did I come to think of it as a prayer. You can read about that moment of realisation here.
Now that it’s November again, I open the front door each morning and sing it for the deer. Who knows if it works. I like to think it does.
Just last month I read in the Portland Press Herald that the threat of chronic wasting disease entering Maine from Canada has turned some hunters off, and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has had to employ a full-time recruiter – for the first time ever! – in order to keep sales of hunting licenses from declining.
No trace of the disease has been found in Maine, which I’m thankful for, but I’ll be keeping an eye on those statistics for a long time, while also doing what I can to keep my animal friends safe.
If you’d like to sing this prayer for your own life situations – such as your own personal protest, animal protection effort, or freaked-out-city-driving, for example – then you can find the song here.
As an aside, after years of singing this to myself, and then to the deer, I realised I’d misheard a word. Here’s my accidental version of the chorus:
Angel, circle around, circle around my life.
Show me, whisper the words, bathe me in pure light.
Louise x
