Tag Archives: conscious awareness

improvisation

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New Delhi: Mall architecture in Asia, concrete and steel shrines to maya (illusion) –they even named a shopping mall ‘MAYA’ in Chiang Mai. The population is presented with the idea; step into the illusion… a lightweight upbeat city culture, air-conditioned, bright and colourful. Something hopelessly inevitable about it all careering towards the Western consumer culture – except that in the East, people are more likely to be careful about the money in their purse. Cultural tradition, awareness and inherited spirituality; besides, everybody here knows that if somebody is in the market trying to sell you something, it means you have the option to negotiate a fair price… not so in the mall, and that’s why the population are unwilling to engage with it.

Here in India, the Mall culture affects only a small percentage of the population (sounds like a virus) and, I have to say I’m sometimes part of that minority; the need for essential things for devices, bookshops and a good baker. To get to our shopping mall we have to drive out of town and the three-building complex is situated in an undeveloped area – there’s a fourth building going up at the time of writing. Construction site workers’ community nearby, chickens and goats in a hot dry, dusty landscape. Come off the highway, through a great winding turn of rough unsurfaced road, potholes and puddles of water and into the short entry, manned by security – car examined, mirrors held underneath, look in the trunk, the engine. More security at the entrance, metal detector and security guards carry out a full body search before you get in the door.

It’s as if the whole concept of consumerism is subject to scrutiny; not as easy as it is in the West to simply be pulled into the mall and disinclined to escape from the illusion. The fact is, for many people there’s no way out, situated at the end of the consumerist food chain, as they are, and trapped in that predicament. No alternative, we have to purchase the product because we can’t create it ourselves – so far away from doing things ourselves. People believe they can’t improvise… forgetting that the whole thing is improvised… language is improvised, life itself is improvised. All the systems that are in place were improvised to start with, and even though we may be subject to skilful marketing strategies, there’s still the innate ability to be creative, to improvise, to invent, to innovate, to find a way out of the illusion. The carnivorous marketing creatures have to be gently pushed into the background in order to bring what’s really meaningful in life into focus.  First published September 5, 2015

‘The real is not something, it’s not anything. It’s not a phenomenon. You can’t think about it, you can’t create an image of it. So we say unconditioned, unborn, uncreated, unformed. Anatta (not-self), nirodha (cessation), nibbana (liberation). If you try to think about these words, you don’t get anywhere. Your mind stops; it’s like nothing. … if we’re expecting something from the meditation practice, some kind of Enlightenment, bright lights and world-trembling experiences, then we’re disappointed because expecting is another kind of desire, isn’t it?’ [The End of the World is Here, Ajahn Sumedho]

stowaway

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New Delhi: For a few days now, my bag has been lying on the bed while I search around for the clothes I’m taking with me on the trip to Thailand. The lid is hinged back, wide open like the beak of a baby bird in the nest. When the bag is filled to capacity (cases are always filled to capacity) it’ll close its mouth turn over on to its upright position and be wheeled away to the car, off to the airport, the check-in desk and into the cargo of the plane… a capacity inside a capacity.

At this time though, the case is still unpacked and maybe I should not leave the cover of it open like this in case there are small creatures in the air that decide to fly into the bag and come with me to Thailand – like the time we were living in Switzerland and Jiab came back from a long trip to South America and the last stop was Peru. From Jorge Chávez Airport in Lima, she had three connecting flights, many delays and more than 24 hours travelling before she was back in Switzerland in the evening. Totally exhausted, she opened her in-flight bag to take a few things out and went to sleep immediately. I didn’t move the bag, left there lying open and went to sleep too – if I had closed the bag, then the stowaway wouldn’t have escaped into the room, or when it did, there’s a chance we’d have seen it….

In the morning, I woke up to this blat-blat-blat sound coming from the mezzanine upstairs, so I went up to have a look. Step by step and cautiously, there was a table light that had been on all night. Something was inside the shade – a very strange winged insect banging itself against the light bulb. When it stopped and lay resting on the inside of the shade I could see it was a hard-shelled beetle-like creature that folded its wings up inside its shell… hmmm this thing didn’t come from Europe, I’d seen something like it in India. I went down to the kitchen and found an empty glass jar with a screw lid and came back upstairs; it was flying at the light bulb again, blat-blat-blat. When it stopped for a rest, I manouvered it into the jar, got the lid on and took it downstairs. A kind of greenish square-shaped thing with a pointy end, about three quarters of an inch in size and sort of flat, like a spade.

I tried to get Jiab to wake up to look at it, but she was not interested in that, totally asleep and it wasn’t easy. A very bleary-eyed, jetlagged look at what I held up in the jar for her to see brought only puzzled silence. After some consideration she said: Insects should not be in the house, and collapsed back on the pillow. So that was it, much later we discussed how it could have got here and decided it must have come in through an open window on her last day in the hotel in Lima and landed on the contents of the open bag. She closed the lid on it unknowingly, went to the airport and thus it stowed away on the flight to Europe.

I studied the insect in the jar for a while then took it to the balcony, unscrewed the lid and gave it its freedom in the warm spring air. Watched it fly off down to the bushes and grass below. Who knows? Maybe it found distant members of a species once related, twice removed, reproduced and now there’s a hybrid genus developing in that part of Europe waiting to be discovered. First published September 30, 2015

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” [Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss]

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Photo by M, showing her bag (upper left, light blue with pattern) being loaded on a domestic flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok

somewhere to be

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New Delhi: We’re looking for a place to rent in South Delhi, and right now I’m being driven around at high speed by the agent. We’ve been looking at houses, buildings, one after another which all seem to be part of the same interconnected vast network of habitations with interconnecting rooms that bring you back to where you’ve just been. Arrive at another street, in front of another door, get out of the car, go inside, there’s a staircase, corridors and empty rooms, nothing here. Stare at the wall… a painted flat surface. Can I see us here? Not impossible, try to estimate ceiling heights… birdsong enters the empty house in an irregular chord of strangely related notes… walk over to the window. Look at what’s out there; the agent talking about this and that, and all I can think of is what Hipmonkey said: there is no ‘out-there’ out there that’s separate from what’s in ‘here’.

Outside invades inside, I’m back in the agent’s car and we’re off to the next place, slooshing and splooshing through the crowded streets at breakneck speed, talking as we’re going (she does this driving thing for a living), her livelihood is set in this river of noisy, crazy traffic that’s consistently doing unexpected things. The urgency of it all going past too fast… I can’t look, it’s too much, avert my gaze to the side window instead, and see out there, the reflection of myself in the glass shop windows as we’re going by; focus on the shadowy face looking back at me from one window to the next, somehow staying in the same position – it’s the world that’s rushing by, not me.

I’ll consider the Buddhist term: sati-sampajañña, clear comprehension, the absolute clarity of understanding in this context… stumbling over all indistinct, half-seen, misunderstood truths, and eventually I realize it means the clear comprehension of everything, including the confusion; the mistake, the mix-up, the puzzleheadedness. Okay so, don’t ‘do’ anything with it… the experience of total confusion – random things just seem to fit, the recognition that all related parts and everything come together, anyway, according to their circumstances; related patterns link parts of the story together with a kind of inevitability.

It’s an all-inclusive world, the ‘self’ is optional, comes with the software. I’m playing a role integrated with one whole consciousness – dimensions within dimensions – acting the part; being this person living in these rooms, being that person in those rooms, finding my way through this curious illusion, looking for words to describe that it’s a construct through and through. No way out, I know because I stopped looking for the way out a long time ago. In the 30 years of learning how to get along here in Asian society, I think I’ve let go of that remembered fiction about where I come from – migrants from Europe have experienced this in North America since the 17th Century. Long ago I learned, involuntarily at first, to be at home with other people’s preferences and relinquish my own choices, in time forgetting how I figured out how to be comfortable with it. So, when there’s an opportunity to have a place of my own, I return to the old default, surprised to see it’s still there, and how shall I do this? Let’s see, the bed goes here, the table there, and my chair… First published November 7, 2015

‘… we have no way of knowing from within the waking state, whether or not it is a dream, just as we have no way of knowing from within the dream itself, whether or not the dream is real. However, we are not in the waking state any more than we are in a dream. We are Awareness and the waking state appears in us as does the dream state.’ [Rupert Spira]]

Even the word ‘gone’ is gone

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New Delhi: Sitting in the garden these cool days, and the world, as it’s seen, suddenly falls into an enhanced version of what it is. Alice in Wonderland says things are not what they appear to be. The presence of my cup and book, my phone and a pen, just lying there on the garden table, extensions and extrapolations of the environment I’m in – the ‘self’ that I am, at this time. Everything I see becomes unfamiliar, yet known – uncanny recognition of every-day things, strangely out of context here, but also fits quite well in these surroundings of birds, sunlight shining through the trees and a pattern of moving shadows through layers of leaves.

A momentary easing… the ‘beholder’ sees beauty through the glass of eyes to the world out there and the self, as ‘me’ in here, disappears completely – a flow of words just tumbling out and I’ve got to get it all written down… if not, it will vanish. It’s the writing of it that gives it life (of course), the quickening. Words snatch at a direction, fractals of the original instance. Too huge, I cannot see the whole pattern, only what is here and now.

Then, it all falls into a vortex of shattered ends and beginnings as the focus shifts to headache mode – It’s part of me these days… take meds, wait for it to pass, allow healing, nurturing.

And now it is later. Fragments of imagery of the story appear in the mind so fast I can’t keep up with it. Scribbling it down on scraps of paper, and rewritten on the back of till receipts found in wallet, pockets. The back of my boarding pass… reduce the size of handwriting to get it all in the space, then take a photo of it and zoom in to see. A flow of utterance, stumbling incoherent urgency, activates extensions, developments, and completions… and I arrive at an ending. It changes the beginning (I thought it might), and there, it’s done. Refined, defined, in the form it takes, chunks of language jigsaw together, trim the edges and placed.

Extreme minimalism… the story contained is edited out. The Absolute is in all things, omnipresent and there’s nothing that it’s not a part of. I have to ponder this for a moment; where is it not? There’s no ‘nothing’ and no ‘thing’. Gone is… even the word ‘gone’ is gone. [First posted June 16, 2017 titled “More than words”]

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. [Meister Eckhart 1260 – 1328]

the sense of coming home

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Bangkok – New Delhi: The early evening flight, leaving Bangkok at 7pm, arrives at Delhi 9.30pm local time; a four-hour journey swiftly moving into the darkness of an evening already turned to night. How many times have I been on this flight? Must be at least thirty times; travelling back the 1½ hours to India Standard Time as if it were an unseen future event just arrived in the space where it hasn’t happened yet. Now it’s almost the end of all the there-and-back-again years, we pull up our roots and return to Thailand in six weeks, after nearly 7 years away. Looking forward to getting back… yes, when we get there, it’ll all just seem like yesterday…

Now it’s later, the descent into Delhi and attention focused on this last arrival. Directionality of Plane-Rush to hit Runway where it is expected to be, where wheels touch earth, first the left side then the right… deep sink-down lurch, take the weight, waiting for the bounce-back tipping point – contemplation of death, and disaster averted, we have arrived. The last Delhi flight I’ll be on, last chance to feel the sense of coming home, taxiing over bumpy ground towards the lights of Indira Gandhi Airport in the distance.

This is how it must be, wandering from one life to another with no direction or purpose other than Jiab’s office, and to go on doing it – but I came around to seeing how it works; how fleetingly one life passes and another arises in circumstances that suit the event as it’s looking for some reason to “be”, seeking name and form in waves of samsaric yearning. That’s how long the thought of it lasts before the letting-go-of-it intention comes to mind, and the whole thing is let-go-of in a shavingth of a slice of time.

Everything else remains to be seen. Passengers de-plane; step into the great halls of Arrivals and Moving Walkways for nearly a mile, then stand in line, passport stamp, thump! Get bags and out into the Delhi night – into ‘severe-level’ air pollution, visibility 200 meters, over 20 flights delayed. It smells of dung fires, red diesel and something like fried eggs? Why do I need to be here? That tenuous awareness is all that’s attached to a wholesome direction in this pattern of peaks and troughs. Every now then mindfulness cuts in and I remember again, to let it all go. Hold on and let go – hold on to the intention to let go.

Thus everywhere I look there’s a sense of ‘self’ searching for the opportunity to ‘become’… anything’ll do, whatever. I see it’s what holds beings in the cycle of rebirth – finding that reference in so many words, again and again these days. Breaking out of the cycle is by non-becoming. Allowing it to ‘become’ without becoming it.

Bags in car and we’re off in a tunnel of light surrounded by darkness and other’s tunnels of light. Nothing can change it – only the mind, of course… but that would mean starting up the engines again… seeing it from one moment to the next. And moments do not lead to other moments as I used to think, it’s only one moment, one long, extended moment, beginningless and without end. First posted November 15, 2017

‘You are the one witness of everything and are always completely free. The cause of your bondage is that you see the witness as something other than this.’ [Ashtavakra Gita 1.7

the space where it hasn’t happened yet

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Amsterdam – Delhi flight: KLM passenger jet, Boeing 777-200, rapidly moving into the darkness of an evening already turned to night. No view from the cabin window, it’s a nocturnal blackness from here on. I try to picture it, high above the clouds, a sliver of waxing crescent moon reflected in the silver streak of thinning atmosphere – too fast for the human eye to follow. The tarot pack Fool contemplating the sum total of everything as nothingness or ‘somethingness’. Up here there’s nothing to compare with the speed of the aircraft, we see only what is inside our bubble of contained ‘here-and-now,’ and inside that, our ‘there-and-then’ in a past or future time, awareness of how it is, simply that.

Laptop fits exactly on the small fold down table. Wi-Fi on board and I’m focused on the relative speeds of this aircraft travelling West to East at a speed of approx: 500mph in the same direction of the Earth’s rotation which is approx: 700 mph, West to East. The aircraft can never catch up with the speed of rotation of the earth but their speeds are close enough, and if we could see the land below, there would be the sense of it all being almost stationary, a phenomenon I have noticed in relative speeds of aircraft and their surroundings.

Words appear in the mind and tumble out onto the page in structures which only need a little rearranging – the mechanism of transferring thought into syntactical forms which one can normally trust just happens by itself. But in the time that it takes to write it down, everything has moved on. Not possible to describe it… language doesn’t stretch that far – it seems as if the world is an illusion. It’s not what it appears to be, no, nothing is what I think it is…if it’s not that, then, what is it? Make a list of what it’s not, and everything on the other side of that must be what it is. A feeling that’s wordless and indefinable, or one could quite easily say God is the sum total of everything that exists.

Thought as stories of past and future created in the mind. Knowing this brings it all to a standstill for a moment… awareness of how it is, simply that. Then something triggers thought again and the narrative requires me to ‘believe’ in it before it begins. I’m teetering on the brink of what it could be, still contained inside that little space that’s neither here nor there… do I want to get swept away by this story, when I’m quite comfortable being here? It’s telling me I have to engage with it, become it… yes, but I’m also able to stay here in the space where it hasn’t happened yet.

Mindfulness of non-becoming. See how that feels, here with the hummm of the engines, and air pressure white-noise, shooshing sound and everything is always in present time. Passengers are lost in movies, transfixed by headphones and screen, sound & color, or asleep, seatbelts fastened in the shadowy gloom as we fall through the latitudes and on towards Delhi and home – thinking about things in the here-and-now, located in the there-and-then, which refer to events taking place somewhere out there in the thin air. First posted June 2, 2017

‘Only by liberating oneself from the thralldom of the senses and the thinking function – both of them servants and not masters – by withdrawing attention from “things seen” to give it to things “unseen” can this awakening be accomplished.” [E. F. Schumacher, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, p.79]

koel

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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]

a future un-lived in

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New Delhi: Sunday morning, early, everyone deeply asleep. A dog barks, forming a single sound isolated in the quietness like the frog haiku: “The old pond, A frog jumps in: Plop!” The echo reflected off the walls, window glass, ting! For a moment I feel like I’m not here, invisible. This is how it’ll be after we move away from here and the house is to be demolished as soon as we leave, the house agent says. A new apartment building will take its place. How does this feel? Hovering at the edge of vision, large men with jack-hammers, iron picks and shovels, restless, waiting for us to go.

There are huge profits to be made renting out apartments in this area. Our old house is wasted real estate. For us, the tenants, of course we suffer the loss. The entire space we inhabit right now will disappear completely, only the Frangipani tree remaining; leaves covered in masonry dust until the monsoon winds blow, then the rains come and wash the leaves clean again. I try to picture it; we move out and the same day demolition begins; roof is off before lunchtime, walls come down in the afternoon, trucks drive away with all the rubble and there’s nothing but empty space… birds fly through.

Long after this, maybe we forget our old house has been deleted from memory files, and try to remember what it was like being here… unsupported imaginings, totally gone, no evidence here of the building we used to call home – nothing to back it up. Is death like this? This is the end; a future un-lived in, present time has no materiality. I see myself here in an almost invisible house, standing on the second floor with vestiges of walls, floor crumbling away, and I’m just floating up there.

The vanishing of it also somehow associated with darkness, I can’t see anything; for example, entering a darkened room, and have to search for the light switch on the wall, at the door frame b by practiced palm and fingertip reaching over the cool wall until it gets to the switch click. In the other rooms it’s more difficult to find the switch and I’m often stuck there groping in the darkness but no light switch to be found. I close my eyes as if that might help, trying again and again. How can this be? Am I comfortable with the thought I don’t know, and knowing I don’t know? Yes, it was there, but it’s not there now.

No resting place, all is movement, a composition of joined-up pieces which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle makes a picture, then broken up into pieces and back in the box, lid closed. Next time it’s opened and put together, a different picture appears and different players. Transition of moving parts everything has changed again. Not ‘here’ for long enough to say much, just passing through. Sorry, can’t stay, got to go now. But wait, not yet… we’re here until the end of September. This short time we’re in right now is only one moment in countless tiny instances, citta moments, and in larger chunks of time, a sequence of images form movement like the ‘stills’ creating continuity in the old 35 mm celluloid film shown in the cinema, the Moving Picture Show.  First posted August 27, 2017

Anicca (Impermanence), a core Buddhist doctrine stating all conditioned things (physical/mental) are transient, constantly changing, and subject to decay, arising and passing away moment by moment, a fundamental truth revealing the unstable, unsatisfactory nature of existence and the absence of a permanent self, leading to liberation (Nirvana) when truly understood.

an evening flight

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Bangkok/New Delhi flight: My frequent flyer card gets me an upgrade thus I carry my head pain with mindfulness and step behind the curtain folds where the grass is always greener. Glasses of champagne on silvered trays among the apple juices and orange juices – I don’t indulge, impossible, these days of heavy-duty neural pain killers. Look out at the sky, strange flesh-coloured clouds above a dark horizon I don’t recognize. It could be a different planet. Sounds so shrill and pointy-ended I have to wear earplugs squashed into the contours of the auditory passage and pressed in by fingertips. Members of the public seem alien, sentient beings but complex individuals; somehow, I can’t identify with them; I just never noticed how weird things were before…

There was the transformation, something else existed before I found I was in a low gravity world, a pharmaceutical weightlessness that allows me from time to time to contemplate the intrusive pain growing inside me like a tree, branches and twiglets with buds opening; it’s there but I can’t feel it – there was a time when I didn’t have this condition (PHN)… hard to believe. Sensory impingement, even through dark glasses, light hurts as the last of the sun’s rays enter cabin windows, sweep around the interior in the steep ascent of the aircraft and the course setting for Northwest.

A child is crying, front-left. I’m in an aisle seat, the sound piercing through insulation of the meds like a medical probe penetrating internal organs, deeper and deeper. I try tilting my head in small increments to alter the directional frequency of received sound but it’s not working – inconsolable. Fighting against it creates a narrative, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” trying to open to the experience, extending, retracting… then the hum of the aircraft engine sends the child to sleep.

Dinner served and earplugs removed, I’m watching my video (Tomorrowland), good quality earphones and about three of a total four hours flying time remaining – then it happens. In the glimmer of video screens and forever trays of drinks offered by slim shadows of airline staff, a fairly large group of people block the passageway on my left. They’re flying together, look like the same family, all are tall have large physiques, bearded men, women wide at the bottom end, and they’re ordering items from duty-free with handfuls of US currency sprouting like leaves on a tree with many limbs. They can’t count out the amounts correctly because it’s too dark. I feel my irritation flare up in all the disorder and stewardesses’ strobe-like torch flashings. Then a mistake in the change, or something goes wrong, so all the items that were purchased and placed in overhead lockers have to be taken out and checked again.

I’m holding an unbelievable pain/stress crisis from exploding. The squeezing-past-each-other in crowded aisle means I get pushed by large rear-ends of women who feel they’re small and invisible. Then the little girl starts to cry again and I see the cute child, mouth a round black hole, arms and legs extended, a miniature version of the FAT PEOPLE who are her immediate family. The wail of distress breaks the sound barrier; child is carried up and down the aisle by different uncles, aunties, then a very harassed mommy, upper body kinda jogging up and down the aisle gets the child to sleep. Every time mommy turns around, I receive a buttock shove in the head. The silent pressure that’s inside my head, asylum-straight-jacketed, cannot be contained anymore… it goes, restraints bursts wide open – nothing said nobody harmed, just the measured giving way to it. The relief is huge… large out-breath. How did I do that? Time stretches out of shape, vertigo, where are we now? Good question, flying at 600 mph. Pressure returns, in defence, I attempt to recreate the climax of what just happened and do it again but… the mind forgets, it goes on and things settle down towards the end. We arrive in Delhi, nice landing and a few minutes early. First posted October 24, 2015

‘Surrender is the most difficult thing in the world while you are doing it and the easiest when it is done.’ [Bhai Sahib]

birds on the balcony 4

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GVA Switzerland: It’s a really windy day up here on the 7th floor. The birds on the balcony [check out: birds on the balcony 3], huddled and sheltering on perches made from bamboo canes bound with string I fixed on the wall and held with duct tape. These pigeons are getting tugged at by the wind, pushed from side to side but their claws are anchored firmly to the perch. This strange high wind comes at you from any direction, very gusty, buffets the birds around because of feathers designed to catch the slightest up-draught of air and a weightless skeletal structure. It’s a problem sitting on the perch on a day like this, but they do have these extremely long toenails to hold on with. The wind can’t snatch them away.

This is how it is. If you’re a pigeon, a life-form evolved from the causes and conditions of air and wind currents, there’s the danger of getting whisked away in the wind at any moment. Necessary to quickly find shelter and, for young birds, sometimes it does go wrong. Yesterday I was downtown waiting at the bus stop; it was windy like this and suddenly a bird drops straight down from above and soft-lands on the street, feathers sticking out at all angles showing white undersides. People waiting at the bus stop go: wooooo! in unison. It was a young pigeon. The bird corrects itself and walks around in circles, dazed, a car swerves to avoid it. The young bird walks in a zigzag fashion across the road jumps up on the pavement; wide-eyed with its sense of danger and takes refuge in a doorway behind the bus stop.

The dangers of an exceptionally windy day. It’s the mistral winds at this time of year, coming from the Mediterranean and North Africa; sudden gusts of wind come at you in a kind of anarchy of directions, very intense for a day or two then it’s gone. The pigeons are so actively engaged with the mechanism of flight, it’s as if the movements of their wings and the movement of the air are one and the same thing. I see them caught in hectic flight movement; a stationary moment in the air, suspended in time and space, then the audible flap of wingtip and fluttering away – adjusting wing positions in response to complex changes in wind direction.

Each air current has a quality that results in the corresponding wing tilt and flip, extend and hold. If you’re a bird, ground level is not the reference point; ‘up’ is not necessarily up and neither is down. Bird flight is an expression of the air movement itself, sudden and unpredictable; birds in flight and the sky – the space where the flying takes place; it’s about non-duality: ‘self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are the poles of a single process1 ‘The flying bird and the air are not different, there’s no separation, no division between them.

‘… an ever-present no-boundary awareness wherein the subject and the object, the seer and the seen, the experiencer and the experienced form a single continuum.2‘

A wind like this is energy to the birds; it’s a dance. All their skills and everything they are is in readiness, alert. They have the ability to do all of it. Flying and the wind are in unison. But they need to find a place to shelter and these birds come into the balcony space here, grab on to a perch, clamp down on the landing gear, and claws lock into place. Held like this until the wind has gone quiet. Eyes glaze over; they’re in a state of partial sleep, head sunk into the body, feathers fluffed out. They’re just not concerned at all about the wind buffeting them around – or me, looking at them through the glass, or what goes on inside this terrestrial place, 7 floors up from ground level. It could be anywhere, just a place, like the branch of a tree, elevated as it is, to be a convenient stopover for birds of the air. First posted: September 13, 2012

‘I am infinite like space, and the natural world is like a jar/ I am like the ocean, and the multiplicity of objects is comparable to a wave/ I am like the mother of pearl, and the imagined world is like the silver/ Alternatively, I am in all beings, and all beings are in me. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.’ [Ashtavakra Gita 6.1 – 6.4]

1Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

2The Essential Ken Wilbur, page 21: The Real Self