Deer – and especially stags – have always had a special place in my personal spiritual landscape. Even as a small child being raised in a fundamentalist family, the site of deer in the woods made me breathless with a sense of mystery, though deer were plentiful in the forests of Northern Michigan. And watching Robin of Sherwood at an impressionable age, with frequent appearances from Herne the Hunter, just added to my inarticulate, and often confusing, feelings about the magic of the stag. (Side note: that show really doesn’t hold up well. Consider yourself warned.)

The stag has appeared at many of the most significant spiritual moments of my life, often simply a figure in the distance as I moved through the Otherworld in altered states. Then one stormy January weekend, more than a decade ago, I took a solo trip to the Oregon coast and stayed by myself in a little cabin overlooking the ocean. I divided my weekend between getting soaked by a winter storm while exploring the beach, and doing trance work by candlelight in my cabin. While the details of that experience are too personal to share, I can tell you the weekend was intensely transformative, and that transformation shaped my religious life going forward. And once again, stags featured prominently in my journeying.

I think of that time as one of those spontaneous, spirit-led initiations I wrote about in this week’s Monday Inspiration post. So when “initiation” came up as the creative prompt, I knew a stag had to be at the center. 

I began this piece with a vintage illustration of a stag skull and antlers I found on line. I transferred a silhouette of the illustration to fabric for stitching.

The piece uses thrifted green fabric in a natural fiber (I’m not sure WHICH natural fiber, I just know it takes a hot iron without flinching), a remnant of shot-woven silk from an old sewing project, and amber beads and brass leaves from broken jewelry. 

I spent hours stitching the curving green lines, and unraveling the edges of the fabric. Creating this piece brought me back to all those sacred moments in which the stag appeared, and it now hangs over one of my household shrines. 

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