Tag: birds

Clear the Fear!

I’ve become increasingly aware of how fear rules the airwaves and the collective mindset these days. So many people are terrified of “others,” as well as all that they can’t control in their lives. The media (both programming and advertising) feeds on and amplifies those fears. The mainstream news focuses on war, shootings, political fighting, disasters. Crime-solving drama series, filled with violence and gun battles, proliferate. Drug companies advertise medications to treat various conditions (including anxiety and depression), at the same time listing dangerous potential drug side effects (stroke, suicidal thoughts…). Interspersed among all the rest are promos for films with horror or terror themes. The ads alone can give you nightmares! 

These frightening images and stories stick to our brains and fill us with fear and hopelessness. Isn’t it time to turn our backs on this noisy onslaught of negativity and look to our own hearts for a more positive way to live life? Turn off the TV and computer, put down your cell phone, and take a walk outside in a park or nature sanctuary. Find your inner balance among the trees and flowers. Listen to birdsong and the sweet silence that surrounds you. Look at the sky, morning, noon, or night, for inspiration and a deep sense of something greater guiding the universe. 

What if the cosmos unfolds independently of our longing for control? What if it’s on its own trajectory? A vast, constantly changing kaleidoscope of colors and light, an infinite matrix within which our souls live diverse human lives on Earth. What if everything we see and experience is part of a divinely orchestrated pattern that we have yet to fully perceive? Human life may be our entry point to wisdom and awareness as we pass through fear, recognizing it for the illusion it is, and step into the “peace beyond understanding” described by the great sages throughout time. Perhaps we are on exactly the right path to finally see the love and light that has always lived within all of us.

Granted these are intense times with many challenges, including public and private tragedies, but don’t let fear freeze you and make you incapable of standing up for the integrity of your own life and life itself. Remember that ancient wise teachers have foreseen this era of tumultuous transition and rebirth. We are not here to destroy ourselves or one another. We are here to recognize fully the blessing that each of us is—and the blessing that our Earth home is. Feel connection with your neighbors. Beneath the surface of all the turmoil and headlines that seem to crowd our daily lives, something else is occurring: the emergence of love instead of hate, cohesion instead of friction, open hands instead of closed fists. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s closer than you think.

This afternoon I turned away from my computer and walked outdoors just as the sun was slipping toward the horizon. I paused as a dragonfly landed on my foot and moved its wings silently, reflecting the light. In a tree nearby, a chickadee was calling “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” as it made its way through the branches. Bluejays flew from oak tree to oak tree, gathering acorns for the winter. Moments like these center my heart in the spacious stillness of all Being everywhere. Any lingering fears of the day fall away, and I am reminded once again that Life is bringing me, and every one of us, Home. Free and clear.

Infinite Intelligence

I like the term “Infinite Intelligence” as an alternative to “God,” which some people find too religious.* I appreciate the expansiveness of those two words, seeming to cover everything visible and invisible in the universe, and not associated with any one spiritual tradition. There is an overarching inclusiveness within them. To me, Infinite Intelligence can be used to describe everything: the stars and planets; humans and animals; bees and birds; stones and flowers. If we could see every living being and every so-called “inanimate object” as part of an intricate fabric of intelligence and light, maybe we would drop many of our preconceptions and assumptions.

About animals, for instance. Until recently, most humans did not give them credit for any intelligence. Their behavior was all based in “instinct.” Yet, if we look and listen closely, we will recognize great intelligence among these creatures who do not speak our language but very clearly communicate, with one another and with us. They live their lives with both intelligence and profound awareness, which is the basis of their relationship to the world. They move within it in a kind of intuitive flow, as if they are responding to highly developed directional cues that are invisible and inaudible to humans.

Throughout my life, I have experienced animal intelligence, love, playfulness, and humor. My dog Pepper was my constant childhood companion, and we invented countless imaginative games to play together outdoors. When I was an adult, my cats Edward and Lily repeatedly displayed their cleverness and sense of humor. Edward would remind me it was time for his breakfast by making chewing noises next to me as I slept. Lily would make me laugh if I was sad or upset by hiding behind the window shade and reaching around with her paw to ring the wind chimes. She often did yoga with my partner, Anne, and me, teaching us the best “cat poses”!

So-called “wild” animals also have intelligence and playful humor. A squirrel and I once had a “disagreement” when he removed a plastic flower from the hummingbird feeder and carried it to the top of a tree. As I scolded him, he looked directly down at me, licked the sugar off the flower methodically, and then dropped it at my feet. I had to laugh at this mischievous response. One summer, a family of raccoons nightly took turns jumping into our neighbors’ hammock and swinging back and forth. It was clearly a shared game that they enjoyed. 

Robins can become daily backyard companions with their cheery singing presence. One used to sit on a tree branch above my garden each morning and call to me insistently if I hadn’t refilled the birdbath with water soon enough. As I watered my flowers, I would often see a bumblebee “sleeping” there, nestled in the petals. One day, I leaned over to say “good morning.” The bee raised its front leg as if in answer. When I repeated my greeting, it repeated its response. A bee-to-human conversation!

Among themselves, birds and animals constantly communicate, both audibly and visually. I’ve heard two crows carrying on a “conversation” as they flew side by side high overhead. In a nearby park, I watched two dogs excitedly run to greet each other like old friends and immediately begin to play and chase each other as if in an improvisational skit. I’ve also seen wild dolphins playing and swimming together in perfect synchronicity in the ocean, often including me and other nearby humans in their water dances. It was like being immersed  in an amazing nonverbal connection arising from eye contact and shared thought/feeling transmission.

Moments like these, in my own backyard or beyond, reinforce my belief in the intelligence of all beings in this world. If we are open to it, we will see it. Infinite Intelligence is everywhere, within each of us and within the farthest reaches of the multiverse. Ultimately there really is no inner and outer, just a vast miraculous infinity that includes us all, heart to heart.
———
*Thank you to Carol Bedrosian for our conversation about this.

Spring Stillness and Sound

One sunny day this past April, I spent several hours walking among the trees, flowers, dells, and ponds of my favorite nature sanctuary, Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Spring is pure paradise at Mt. Auburn: Leave your physical form at the front gate and become one with the spirit of seasonal rebirth all around you! There is an underlying stillness that fills the air. Even the birdsong and wind through the trees seem to arise from that stillness.

I could feel it in my own heart as I listened to the trilling of hundreds of American toads at Halcyon Lake and sat next to the sunning turtles at Willow Pond. My eyes closed, I sensed both the life-force energy and the profound silence within the sounds of spring. All motivation for movement of any kind fell away. I stopped taking the occasional nature photo—it felt like a distraction. 

I was reminded of visiting the Hopi mesas in Arizona, where the indigenous people there ask that visitors not use cameras or take pictures. I can remember a sense of relief and letting go into the immediacy of the experience. No striving to record what was happening, just a release into Presence, fully connected, heart and soul. The Hopi in their wisdom know that this is the essence of daily life, being fully present. This memory filled my awareness as I opened my eyes and saw the turtles with their heads raised to the warmth and light of the sun. In sitting with them, I too was fully present.

Temples, spiritual sanctuaries, and libraries usually request that visitors observe silence while there. Cemeteries too ask for quiet, in respect for those who have passed and those who may be grieving. I feel that Mother Nature asks this of us as well in all natural settings. When the noise of traffic, machinery, and human voices falls away, there is just silence, the essential stillness of the human soul—where we come home and know fully that we and Nature are one.

In springtime, at a place like Mt. Auburn, where life visibly renews itself in the flowers and trees and the migrating birds, I experience this most profoundly. My inner spirit is also renewed listening to the infinitely varied voices of Nature all around me, which are somehow part of the silence. As I walk, eyes, ears, and heart fully open, any residue of mental separation disappears: no subject or object; no this and that. Stillness and sound are One, within me and everywhere else.

The Miracle of Murmuration

There is a wonderful video online that shows thousands and thousands of starlings flying in synchronized sweeping movements through the skies of the Netherlands. It is a fantastical aerial dance, the birds moving as one across the entire sky. This spectacular sight has a name: murmuration, which refers to the sound of the birds’ wings. The term is applied specifically to starlings, and it doesn’t only occur in Europe. I have seen hundreds of starlings in Massachusetts flying like this, swooping and changing directions repeatedly, high overhead, moving as one mind, one avian soul. An astonishing sight. 

To me, murmuration is a perfect visual demonstration of how we live in a cosmically connected universe orchestrated by a greater Intelligence. There are no events or experiences that are not part of this infinite whole, which forms a kaleidoscopic tapestry of moving light and color. In our daily lives, we don’t usually notice how it all fits together, but occasionally something may make us stop and stare in wonder: a spectacular lightning storm; a lunar or solar eclipse; migrating Canada geese flying in a perfectly formed giant V. As we pause, we may speculate on the possible source of these phenomena (Spirit? Nature?), but whatever name we use for life’s magic and mysteries, the miracles on this Earth are beyond human language. We can only experience them in awe.

A number of years ago, I went on several trips to swim with wild dolphins and whales in the open ocean. Dolphins too engage in their own form of “murmuration.” They frequently move as one as they travel through the seas. “Dolphin mind” I’ve called it, and I’ve been part of it myself on more than one occasion. Once, as I swam at a distance from a pod of spinner dolphins in Hawaii, I found myself moving to the right at the exact same moment that they did. There was no conscious decision on my part. I was just suddenly swimming in synchronicity with them as they swam closer. I felt a part of whatever telepathy passed among them. It was an unforgettable feeling.

Such moments—whether watching birds or dolphins or trees moving as one with the wind—have filled my life with a deeper sense of connection to all things. And to a belief that the seemingly impassive and distant cosmos all around us is in truth within us as well. These connections, visible and invisible, are interwoven throughout the universe. Life on Earth and across the galaxies is perfectly related. The moon affects the ocean tides, as well as our inner fluidity. We are moved in every moment by something greater than even our own imagination: murmuration sweeping through all our senses. The heartbeat of the universe.
*Photograph above by Nicole Pearlstein 
Starlings in flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY

A Timeless Morning

We can find many entry points to Presence in the course of our lives. Presence: the experience of oneness with all things; timeless awareness; Spirit. It could arise unexpectedly in the midst of crisis or celebration, sound or silence, solitude or community. We each cross the threshold to Presence in our own way, in our own time. Yet, we all reach it at some point, and if we are fortunate, our hearts open wide enough to live there permanently.

For me, Nature is the eternal gateway to Presence in my life. In small glimpses or panoramic views. Green trees and blue skies outside my window. Distant snow-covered mountains seen from an airplane. Or, walking in a nature sanctuary as the seasons change throughout the year. I have often written about Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, which is my bird’s eye view to the natural world. And I mean that literally: the birds are always part of my walks there. But then, honestly, so is everything else: flowers, trees, ponds, hills, dells, butterfly gardens and native plantings. To me, it’s paradise on Earth. It renews my spirit and feeds my soul.

One morning this past August, I walked through Mt. Auburn’s gates and was immediately immersed in Presence. I could feel a powerful vibrancy of life everywhere I looked. The late summer flowers (hydrangea, Angelica gigas, Joe Pye weed, phlox, black-eyed susan) blooming in the Asa Gray Garden were stunning, and they were surrounded by dozens of bees dancing through the air, flying from one to another, collecting pollen. Tiger swallowtail and monarch butterflies floated by as well, as did dragonflies. I stood mesmerized by the beauty, the sun making everything around me sparkle with light.

As I walked farther, I heard familiar bird calls in the trees and bushes: catbird, white-breasted nuthatch, downy woodpecker, flicker, robin, cardinal. Bright yellow-and-black goldfinches were fleetingly visible, calling and swooping by like an avian Cirque du Soleil. The chirping and buzzing of crickets and locusts was also part of this symphony of natural sounds, as was the occasional scolding of a squirrel or chipmunk. At one point, I stopped and stood silently listening, eyes closed. When I did so, I realized that for more than an hour, I had been completely One with all I heard and saw, no separation; my mind had stepped aside entirely. Time was absent. It was a glorious feeling of sacred connection and complete alignment with the world around me and within me. Presence. Tears of gratitude and joy filled my eyes.

I have had similar moments before in Nature, but this particular expanse of timeless Presence seemed especially all-encompassing and beyond the realm of language. The closest I can come is to say that my individual “I” had disappeared into the eternal “I Am,” the center of all being in the cosmos. I was one with the music of the spheres as it played out everywhere around me. Later, I realized that from the soul’s view, this is what is occurring all the time for every one of us.