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

assumed identity

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Chiang Mai: Arrived in the early evening and out through the exit tunnel into the airport corridors. Turn the first corner and we’re looking back through a large window at our plane with passenger bridge attached. M says, in her 9-year-old voice: take a photo of it… put in your blog Toong-Ting (she calls me that). There’ll be a time when M takes a direct editorial role in this blog… so I take the photo and here it is now. A passenger aircraft that has a painted face, while a large reptilian mouth is sucking out the contents of the plane.

M is silent for a moment as she considers the elasticity of this strange stretched metaphor. Then we continue along the corridors to get our bags from the luggage belt. I put everything on the trolley with M sitting on top, push the wheels through the glass doors, opening as we approach and we’re in Arrivals. Her mum is waiting for us, pleased to have M back.

Bags in the car and we’re off. Heavy traffic on the way into town and M, still silent, looking out at it all considering, maybe, how one thing can become another, tells me that cars have gender: boy-car and girl-car. It’s the look of the ‘face’ of the car – that kind of ‘grin’ created by the front bumper and radiator grille. She sees it as the face of a boy or a girl or, if she can’t decide which it is, it must be a katoey, effeminate gay male, trans-gender, or whatever – she giggles a bit, it’s okay to talk about that in Thailand. I ask her to identify a boy-car for me, just to see if I can recognise its ‘maleness’ – although I’ve always thought of a car as male being male. She points at one: that’s a boy-car Toong-Ting. I want to say… how d’you know that? But this kind of challenge to her reasoning might be too much, so I’m just going along with it.

She asks if I can identify the gender: you tell me, Toong-Ting, it’s a boy-car or girl-car, okay? I have a feeling I’m going to get this wrong… let’s see, there’s one that’s got really male characteristics, I point to it and say that one is a boy-car. No, Toong-Ting it’s a girl-car… looking at me like, how come you can’t see something as obvious as that, hmm?

M spends a lot of time on the road, going to and from her school, a long way from her house. I think she probably knows the brands of all kinds of cars now, maybe not the names, just a familiarity with their appearance and long ago decided some were boy-cars, some were girl-cars, and those in-betweens were katoeys. As we’re going along, I take a photo of the back of a car and show it to her so she can study it in detail: boy or girl?  She says she can’t really tell looking at the back of it, can’t see its face, but thinks maybe it’s a girl-car, because she remembers that she decided at some earlier time, that particular make of car was a girl. It’s a case of remembering which is what (or what is which?) or what she had already decided it was when she first saw that make of car.

There’s intelligence in her playfulness, a reality in her personifications that challenges my usual insisting there is no ‘self’, the Buddha’s Teaching on anatta: ‘self’ is an illusion arising from the 5 Khandas. I feel I’m holding on to something I should let go of, with M going around happily applying the attributes of ‘self’ and gender to all kinds of things. She can create an identity and let it go, because it’s one among many. She can escape the entanglements of ‘self’ because she plays with a multitude of ‘selves’, like waves in the ocean and an ocean in all the oceans of the world. Everything in the universe is Self. The ‘self’ I believe to be ‘me’ is an assumed identity – there is no ‘self’, everything I see is ‘me’. First posted March 29. 2014. Check it out for additional gender photos taken by M.

‘Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. Lila indicates a spontaneous sportive activity of Brahman as distinguished from a self-conscious volitional effort. The concept of Lila signifies freedom as distinguished from necessity.’ [Ram Shanker Misra, The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo]

25/26

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The Buddha’s Words on Loving Kindness:

This is what should be done

         By one who is skilled in goodness,

And who knows the path of peace:

         Let them be able and upright,

Straightforward and gentle in speech,

         Humble and not conceited,

Contented and easily satisfied,

         Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.

Peaceful and calm and wise and skillful,

         Not proud or demanding in nature.

Let them not do the slightest thing

         That the wise would later reprove.

Wishing: In gladness and in safety,

         May all beings be at ease.

Whatever living beings there may be;

         Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,

The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,

         The seen and the unseen,

Those living near and far away,

         Those born and to-be-born —

May all beings be at ease!

Let none deceive another,

         Or despise any being in any state.

Let none through anger or ill-will

         Wish harm upon another.

Even as a mother protects with her life

         Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

         Should one cherish all living beings;

Radiating kindness over the entire world:

         Spreading upwards to the skies,

And downwards to the depths;

         Outwards and unbounded,

Freed from hatred and ill-will.

         Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down

Free from drowsiness,

         One should sustain this recollection.

This is said to be the sublime abiding.

         By not holding to fixed views,

The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,

         Being freed from all sense desires,

Is not born again into this world.

now here & nowhere

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Chiang Mai:Going home in a tuk-tuk with M, nine years old, sitting beside me, small body-mass pressed against my side. The urgency of speed, kinda scary, canvas roof, no walls and immense sound of 2-stroke engine fills our space. Impossible to hear what she’s saying, M indicates that she wants to borrow my phone. I pull it out of my pocket, hesitate. Is it okay to play with a slippery glass-like instrument like this in a speeding tuk-tuk?  It might fly away into the great-rushing-past-outside world, anicca, necessity of mindfulness – she should hold it tight. Small face looks at me silently… don’t make a thing out of this Toong-Ting. I press it into her small hands. Hot, prehensile fingers grab, grasp and clasp the phone. Go to settings, clear away unwanted windows with the swipe of a tiny finger and launch multiplayer Minecraft.

So fast! I’m kinda surprised she’s managing to get Internet, 5G signal reaching us here in a tuk-tuk racing through the streets of Chiang Mai – more like we’re in it in the same way fish are in an ocean of water. Everything out-there passing by in a blur, feels like a totally crazy speed, why all this rush? I can see over the driver’s shoulder, through his windscreen and it’s like travelling through a wormhole in space-time; the actual here-and-now – everything outside of this is in a different reality. Everything on the ‘in’ side of it locked down tight, my arm around the slight presence of M, taking up such a small amount of the space on the seat, legs sticking out, and Minecraft’s digitally created landscapes of mountains and seascapes appear in the little window of the phone in her hands. She’s now in player-hosted servers with visiting players from all countries in the world. How do you say this Toong-Ting? She spells out: G-A-V-I-N. I tell her it’s a boy’s name, ‘Gavin’, probably English (who’s this Gavin guy, I wonder). I see name labels moving around the landscapes, Japanese and Italian names; Spanish, German, Norwegian – players I assume are about the same age as M. I see boy’s names and girl’s names, all here at this very moment – and, where is ‘here’? Good question: now here and nowhere (anagram), depends on the context… spatial and temporal qualities. Space and time are not separate; I read in a post recently. This is (always) where we are at.

Looking down at the top of her head, hair combed from a parting in the middle, pulled out in two separate directions, woven into tight plaits on either side, and it’s as if she knows I’m looking at her: Remember this number Toong-Ting: 19122, she says. I consciously remember the number, repeating it to myself… In a moment she asks me what the number was. I tell her, 19122 and ask what it was for, by the way, but she doesn’t answer… having to have things explained to me by a 9-year-old girl who speaks English as a second language – must be a password or username. Sad really, these days there’s not the dialogue there used to be, ‘I’ am not here, anatta, a suspended state, waiting for the next question. What’s this mean, Toong-Ting? M spells out: B-R-O-S and I tell her, Brothers it’s a boy’s server, he’s American probably, he’s black and I think she knew the word ’bro’ already. Obviously interested in this and next thing she’s in with the BROS, their mountains and volcanic lava, burning fires.

Then there’s a little wail – she gets disconnected. It feels to me like a catastrophe, but for M it’s no big deal, she changes to a different player-hosted server with new players – or maybe some of them are the same ones who just got here from the same sites we were all in earlier. And while that’s loading, a quick glance at the blur of what’s out there rushing by us, then she starts to sing a song from the movie: Frozen: ‘Let it go, let it go….’ I join her in the song. We sing together, Tuk-tuk driver laughing with his eyes in the rear-view mirror…. First posted April 25. 2015

“As wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,
Always, for ever and new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed.”
[Ovid, Metamorphoses]

blessings fill the room

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Chiang Mai: 07.00 hours: The alarm rings…. it takes a moment to recognize I’m in Chiang Mai, arrived last night. Heavy curtains over the window; a darkness I’m not used to. It’s quiet here, the sound of monks chanting anumodana on the edge of hearing. A motorbike whizzes by in the distance, nothing else. Senses are alert, listening, feeling, searching for a way to ‘become’ something that will establish ‘me’ in this place and time but I can’t, I’m distracted by these new surroundings and keep returning to the narrative associated with interesting objects.

Walking across the room, bare feet on cool floor tiles, flip flop, flip flop, a sense of empty rooms, as yet uninhabited; space/time occupied with the moving of its integral parts – chapters from a book about furniture being moved into a new apartment, the ending hasn’t been written yet and the beginning is a continuation of what happened before that. Future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, and ‘now’ becomes yesterday – here we are in the awareness of this moment, the means by which we arrive at this point in time is forever the mystery.

I go over to the window, slide open the curtain. A blaze of colour, five monks in varying shades of orange robes and a group of kneeling Thai tourists from the hotel opposite. (The original post is dated Christmas Day 2012.) In Thailand, 25th December is just an ordinary day, kids go to school, people go to work, government offices are open, mail gets delivered, transport systems are normal, it’s all open for business, same as usual. Yet there are Christmas decorations everywhere downtown, Christmas carols playing in all the malls and the season of goodwill has a place here even though the population are 95% Buddhist, 4% Moslem and only 1.2% Christian. It’s because Thai society is joyful; they like to share everything. They like playfulness – the word in Thai is sanuk (fun), everything has to be sanuk and if it’s not, it’s mai sanuk (seriously boring) and that’s very bad style.

 And there’s a lot I could say about consumerist schemes embedded in our lives in the West that has resulted in our losing so much of our inherited cultural traditions. The Christmas festival is layered over with the maya (illusion)of santaclausisms and it’s as if the essential part of our spiritual truth got forgotten along the way and consumerism came along in its place.

But this is getting too serious, not in accord with the principle of sanuk, so no more about that. Another important part of Thai culture is tamboon. It t refers to the act of giving. This is a core Buddhist practice involving good deeds like offering food to the monks, donating to temples, chanting, meditating.

So, Christmas Day fits perfectly with the Thai love gift-giving and festivals making any event fun. [Adapted from an original dated December 25, 2012]
Merry Christmas friends and fellow bloggers ~ December 25, 2025

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” [Allan Watts]

“The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn’t have without them.” [Suzanne Segal, Collision with the Infinite]

surfing on the edge of dawn

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New Delhi 05:00 hours: When I open the glass doors to the garden, the temperature outside is the same as it is inside. This is such a novelty for me, having recently returned from Northern Europe where there’s nearly always that early morning chill separating outer from inner. Over here, it’s all of a oneness. I want to drag my mattress and bedclothes through, spread them out on the paving stones in the garden and lie down with my pillow. Then I could gaze up at the tall trees in the early morning sky and listen to the birds. A birdsong extravaganza, surfing on the edge of dawn… why this wild party and glorious singing? What’s going on? Such an accumulation of voice – is this what we call God? …somehow, that doesn’t cover it… just a word, man-made. The actuality of it is as far as the eye can see, daylight spreading over the curvature of the planet and an immeasurable sense of sky.

Impossible to understand the totality of it, of course, the mind is a filter, selecting the data to suit the software, and this may be a sound-realm on a scale only birds are aware of. In the darkness they can hear the sound of the other birds over there on the other side of dawn, where it’s already light, and that’s the signal to engage in this shared event. It’s like a football stadium crowd performing “the wave.” A movement in time that’s always present in the here-and-now – same at every location. Light-colour-sound, daybreak and birdsong are inseparable. It fills the air for about 20 minutes then disappears. At the next place in time and space, the birds respond to it there; the Mother Ship – applause, celebration, rejoice, and it moves on. Incredible mystery… it’s the movement of the planet, I need to remind myself, the rotation of the Earth at more than 1000 miles per hour, and always happening like this, of course. The dawn chorus is always being experienced in some part of the world. Continuous birdsong since whenever birds first populated the planet…

From this location in North India, it’s shifting away Westerly, in the direction of the Middle East and on to the Mediterranean countries. The birdsong of Palestine, of Israel, Greece, then Florence, Portugal. Over the Atlantic Ocean, isolated flocks of gulls rise up from the water’s surface, calling and mewing in the golden sky. On from there to the Eastern Seaboard of the US, across the forests, rivers and mountains of the continent and out over the Pacific.  First posted August 12, 2014

One day the sun admitted,
I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you
The Infinite Incandescence (Tej)
That has cast my brilliant image!
I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The Astonishing Light
Of your own Being!
Landinsky on Hafez, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy