The week in wildlife – in pictures

Stag deers in London’s Richmond Park, elks in east China, and Bactrian deer in central Asia are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

These kinds of experiences show us how powerful silence can be when we’re unable to control it. When we are confronted with it we can take note of our own response and learn from that. In a brief moment, the absence of expected noise can cut through all of our assumptions about the way our world works and throw everything into doubt. Perhaps this is because in the back of our minds we know that silence has some kind of association with the bigger aspects of life. Silence heralds transcendence, the dissolution of the ego and, ultimately, death. Learning to accept those ideas is no small task.

In a refugee camp in Calais last year, I played football with a young teenage boy from Syria. We had no common language, but we had a laugh as we played. Afterwards I wondered what he had seen in his life so far.