Chiang Mai: The silence of the morning is interrupted by a koel bird on a branch of the huge tree near us: ko-el, ko-el, ko-el – two syllables getting louder and louder, reaching its peak and the bird stops for a moment. It starts again quietly then working up to the same high volume, the ko-el sound echoes with the quality of hard surfaces of branches and the layers of foliage. All around inside the room: ko-el, ko-el. The end of the sound –el collides with the beginning of the next sound in the sequence: ko- and for a moment it becomes more like: el-ko-el-ko-el-ko, smoothly presented in a form the bird insists on, so well and I’m just discovering it.
The perception of the sound shifts back to ko-el, ko-el, contained in this space – and in the space contained in all the other rooms in this building. Also the corridors and passageways, in the elevator shaft, the front lobby as I go down to street level to get something from 7/11. The ko-el sound can be heard everywhere in the building. I know, of course, it just seems like the ko-el sound is in the building, in fact the ko-el sound and the whole building are contained in consciousness, which holds all, no boundaries, no beginning, no end. The ko-el sound can be heard all along the street too.
Back upstairs again and I am in this space, the space is in me. I can say ‘I’ am here, meaning the ‘self’ arising from the mechanisms that filter conscious experience through the senses. And the ko-el sound reaching my ear convinces me that if there is sound, there must be somebody in here hearing it – and that’s ‘me.’
The belief in self is backed up by sensory data input through ear, eye, nose, mouth, the sense of touch, and mind. I can let go of this belief that I am ‘me’ because there’s really nobody here – it’s a figure of speech. The emphasis on it being the same as the object of comparison pushes the whole thing over the edge and the metaphor ‘becomes’ both subject and object.
Thoughts think themselves, dependent on conditions, that are dependent on other conditions; peeling back the layers of onion to discover there’s nothing in the center, the what-ever-ness.
The ko-el sound shifts to some other location; the bird has flown to a different tree. Later in the day, I hear it again coming from some distant place, and after a while I don’t hear it any more. First posted June 1, 2018
“There exists only the present instant… a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.” [Meister Eckhart 1260 – 1328]
dhamma footsteps 
Dear Tiramit, How the natural can encourage a sense of presence, not just within ourselves, but extending out through our senses into the physical world around us! I am reminded of Aldous Huxley’s book Island where the parrots were trained to call out “here & now boys, here & now”, and the tucans to call “karuna” (compassion). A recent youtube video by Charles Eisenstein also referenced the sound of geese flying over as a reminder of our connectedness to the wider world. To be more mindful & open to these inter-species communications helps to challenge the human propensity for separation. Tristan
Hi Tristan, sorry am late, have been away from my desk for nine days. Thanks for this, it’s exactly what I was thinking but unable to consider it all at the time of writing Am grateful for you providing these examples now, I must look into Charles Einstein soon thanks. It strikes me now that so much depends on how we interpret or perceive, in different contexts, the meaning of these bird calls. The Koel bird was so noticeable and loud, I had to google it and it is a cuckoo type that is, the female lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, mostly crows’. I had mixed feelings on discovering that. There are others I’ve noticed, a pigeon type, much smaller and maybe it’s a dove it makes the sound soo-reo, soo-reo which is the name of a monk we used to know, Ajahn Suriyo. Another is a kind of a sparrow and its sound is ji-ab, ji-ab which is my wife’s name Jiab. Anyway there’s a lot that could be said about this, but I’m mostly interested in what you’re saying about ‘presence’.