This little girl is just two or three years old. She loves animals and one deer in particular. She lives in a place where her backyard runs out towards woodland and deer have sometimes come visiting. The deer she especially loves is about the same age as her and the bond between them is strong. She has seen the deer. It is visited. It seems attracted to her. But mostly they commune the distance. What is happening is a meeting of minds – literally.

For most animals the human mind is an inexplicable and alarming place. Our cogitation feels to an animal pointless, obscuring as it does the ability to respond directly and honestly with the world.

But the deer people, like some of the other animals, recognise that something is changing, that there are humans who are waking up and reaching out in friendship. They recognise too that they also are part of this change and so soul agreements like this one are forming: for these two agreed to work together before either of them was born.

These two beings, the deer and the girl, are reaching out to explore each other’s minds. The girl lets her mind be very still so that the deer may enter and explore, as if venturing into a garden. Because it trusts her the deer lets the girl visit its mind, showing her secrets of the deer people, their understanding of the earth, their comprehension of its beauty and mystery.

Instead of a harsh and forbidding boundary between the worlds of human and creature, these two are feathering the edge where they meet, softening it as they flow into each other’s world.

When this girl is adult she will work with animals, creating safe havens for them and telling our world what she has understood of theirs.