The big waiting - Deer stands

Waiting as an Act of Contemplation — A Chance, Not an Agony

The deer stand becomes a symbol of patient anticipation — a structure devoted to the discipline of waiting.

Perhaps it shelters a hunter, attuned to the quiet promise of movement. Or perhaps it holds a photographer, suspended above the landscape, trusting that a rare and elusive creature will appear — a moment of solitude, luminous and enduring.

Yet even in less picturesque places — beside a telegraph pole, along a highway, at the edge of an industrial zone — waiting carries its own possibility. One may still merge with the environment: with the scent and texture of damp meadows, the hush of dawn, the cautious step of a stag in the first light, or the faint trickle of rain at dusk in late autumn. In these intervals, time itself seems to stretch, to soften, to reveal its quiet presence.

To wait is to encounter oneself — to inhabit the span between expectation and arrival, where attention becomes a form of being.