The catbird keeps checking the bird feeder every few minutes to see if the seeds have arrived. A cool breeze wanders through the yard and all the leaves and plants around the pond dance, their movements sending ripples across the water of the pond. Green leaves are falling as the trees thin themselves to bear the dry days of summer that have all too quickly arrived.
Last night a regular at the Wednesday yoga/meditation session and I talked for an hour about the question that begins the Great Search of the spiritual path: “Who am I?” Here is the primary thought that breaks the night like a laser beam of light and shakes the universe with its revolutionary cry. Like the little bird in some children’s tale I remember, who fell out of his nest and went looking for his mother, the spiritual journey is a path of negation. Looking at the steamroller, the little bird said, “This is not my mother.” And so he traveled through the book eliminating one false mother after another, until finally he and his mother were reunited. “This is my mother,” he happily exclaimed.
Just so we begin our search for our true identity with the surgeon’s scalpel of meditation that cuts away at all our attachments, all our false identities and idols, all the boundaries that we had arbitrarily framed ourselves. When spoken by the soul in the face of infinite darkness, this question is the dawning light of our freedom. Only those who follow it’s beacon to the end—being both pulled and pushed by this light of awareness—come to the world shattering conclusion to the Great Search.
When the great tree of illusion has been felled and the ground is littered with all one’s fears and hopes, one just looks up….and the catbird is back, and while he was gone I had filled the feeder with seeds, and he stays on the perch, satisfied. A breeze sends the wind chimes into a spontaneous song that floats its notes across the pond where fish make with their mouths rings upon rings of silent ripples that break the surface of this awesome stillness.
Posted under General Observations
This post was written by ed on June 28, 2007
