Yesterday, I walked Loki, our little dog, out of the house in the country where we are spending Thanksgiving.

It was a grey, blustery November day. The turning of time was manifest around us. Our neighbor had hunted and killed a beautiful stag. The animal was hung upside down, for processing, on a cross-bar that our neighbor has erected on his property for just this purpose. The creature looked both majestic and sacrificial, as Loki and I passed by.

A few minutes later, on the road, we paused. Seven gorgeous brown-orange deer, with white tails, leaped across our path. They bounded in perfect time, like music. They paid no attention to us: Loki stared in wonder. On our way back, we saw a lone deer standing still, in a high field. The animal hovered against the yellow-grey of the meadow, its outline visible above the roofline of a white colonial house, as archetypal as a cave drawing.

I felt that the deer — or its universal essence —would still be here in a thousand years, long after the colonial house will have fallen into ruins. Did that living deer know that one of its tribe had been caught up in human plans and was now dead? Did it mourn?

Or was something larger than all of us at work in a rhythm I could not quite trace?

We were all, human and animal, just passing through, in our physical forms; but something eternal and larger than each of us, a rhythm, a plan, was also at work — in our spirits, in our world.

The last time I wrote a Thanksgiving essay, "Thankful", a year ago exactly, Loki had been just a puppy.

I vowed then always to try to react to the blessings of this world, the same way that puppy Loki greeted the morning; leaping out into piles of autumn leaves each time, as if every day was an unimaginable, astounding miracle.