Counting Deer

I’ve been thinking about Kent Haruf a lot lately.  I only met him a couple times, the last in 2009 when I went to Colorado to interview him.  I never did place the interview, but something I was talking about w/ my class reminded me of this part of it:

My routine is to sit down at my desk. The first thing I do is write in my journal for a while.  All I’m doing is probably maybe two or three paragraphs.  It’s nothing fancy.  I’m not trying to make a literary journal out of it.  I start with saying how many deer I’ve seen that morning. I always walk the dogs every morning and there are very few mornings, particularly in fall winter and spring, that I don’t see deer.  

So I make a point of paying attention to all the deer I’ve seen and it’s a way of concentrating, a way of teaching yourself to pay attention.  If you’re trying to count deer.