feeding the geese

There's a big old cemetery in my neighborhood that has a couple of large ponds on its grounds. Over the years the ponds have attracted quite a population of water fowl and since people tend to feed them, they've stuck around. There are a few different varieties of loud, fat domestic geese and during the summer there are flocks of shy, elegant Canada geese as well. And of course ducks and seagulls. It's a very noisy, boisterous crew.

My husband and I have always liked to go walking in this particular cemetery and eventually we began to also enjoy going to watch the geese, which led to occasionally bringing some leftover bread to feed to them, which led to the somewhat embarrassing fifty-pound sack of cracked corn we now keep in the trunk of the car, should we get a sudden urge to "go feed the geese."

A few months ago I began to notice that when I'm watching the geese I can easily call up what it means to have no agenda—to be perfectly okay with whatever is happening. It's a childhood summer vacation, no-adults-interfering kind of a feeling. It's an existence without self-reflection.

I like the Buddhist idea of "no reference point." Geese have no reference point. They are just what they are. They are bare awareness in a goose-wrapper, having the goose experience. As such, they are able to align and harmonize themselves with the moment point, without self-reflection, as it is.

We, on the other hand, have something additional going on. We have verbal thought. Verbal thought initiates the internal dialogue and once we begin talking to ourselves as children, we never stop. Everything that happens in the course of our daily lives is eaten and processed, commented upon and analyzed by the internal dialogue. It draws conclusions (which may or may not be true) and it creates concepts (ditto).

We have a primitive relationship with thoughts. I believe that our relationship with thought is so unexamined that it's something on the order of believing that the earth is located on the back of an infinite number of stacked turtles.

Using the internal dialogue (judgment) we create an endless number of false reference points to get us through the day with our misleading sense of self-reflection intact. We create concepts out of thin air by stringing words together and then enslave ourselves to the concepts. In this way we keep our world stable and static and because of this we experience that familiar stifling sense of undefined limitation, or, "is this all there is"-ness.

All you need to do is notice. Awareness itself can frame this whole experience of being-mesmerized-by-concepts and in doing so, create freedom. Awareness is pre-thought, post-thought, in-between thought. Like air, it is ever-present. It is what you are, and maybe what everything is. To rest in that... to just come to the edge of that without creating any more concepts—to go inwardly silent and cease to self-protect—is the key.

Another way is to realize the limitations of thought. Thought can't take you there, although it will try to convince you that it can. It can't take you there because there is here. Not some other here, but this here. And as you may have noticed, this here present moment is like teflon. Thought can't stick to it. So it's quiet and empty feeling.

We have a fear of that emptiness, but that's not our fear, it's thought's fear. Eventually, what feels empty and frightening will begin to feel spacious and welcoming.

Comments

[Leslie]

Hi Marian,
Thank you for another brilliant post. They are like your cards...the imagery is absolutely beautiful and draws you into the (your)experience. I especially like "...I began to notice that when I'm watching the geese I can easily call up what it means to have no agenda—to be perfectly okay with whatever is happening. It's a childhood summer vacation, no-adults-interfering kind of a feeling. It's an existence without self-reflection." Sometimes that rest feels more naturally 'there' in plain old life than I sometimes feel in seated meditation.
XOXO
-Leslie

[marian]

Hi Leslie... thanks.