Monday, September 30, 2013

As I lay in bed this morning in that halfway state between sleeping and waking, listening to the orchestra of birdsong, I became aware of my breathing.  How many breaths do I take during the night while I sleep?  How fortunate I don't have to worry about it, that breathing is automatic.  Yet, when I want to change my breath, within limits, I can.  What a miracle breathing is.  The basis from which all life flows. 

How easy it is to take everything for granted.  I do.  All the time.  Yet life is a miracle.  The very act of being alive.  I know I've written of this before but it doesn't hurt to remind myself.  Wish I could remind others.   How lightly we view life.  How cheaply we toss it away or maim it beyond recognition.  (Unfortunately read and viewed images about a new drug called Krocodil which destroys flesh so that bone is exposed.  After using it one's life expectancy averages about three years). 

What were the users thinking?

What are we as a species thinking?  We seem hell bent on destroying ourselves and taking every living thing with us.  It's so sad and so unnecessary.  We've forgotten the miracle of the breath.  With it, everything is possible.  Without it.  Nothing.  The door closes so firmly that even the door no longer exists.



Sunday, September 22, 2013

Feather Plucking and a dose of reality


Didn't have an epiphany the other day.  How unusual.  Days, weeks, months go by without an epiphany so this isn't 'news just in'.  However, I did have an idea.   No, more of an understanding.  The idea has been around for centuries.  Like most things I can understand it logically but *knowing* is another matter entirely.  So, the understanding was just this - that life is a distraction from reality.  While living is an adventure, a wonder, an enchantment, an education and a damned hard one sometimes, it isn't real.  Or the living of it distracts us from what is real and the realness is to be divined not through living or thinking, planning or remembering but by BEING HERE NOW. 

Realized I spend most of my time in distractions whether it's here on the computer, reading a book, watching tv, even listening to music.  What is so hard about being here now?  Why do I find it so difficult?  It's as though I must continually tempt my mind away from its own reality.  Even while meditating (and I use the term in an offhand manner as my meditations are studies in trying not to try not to think), when I do touch upon that other reality (and I only say other because it's so foreign as to qualify for another dimension), I retract from it like a hand from a hot stovetop.  It's almost as though there's a vortex yawning before me, willing to suck me away if I will only yield and the desire to yield is why I meditate and my ego the gate of fear which keeps me stranded. 

Some housekeeping:  Richard is in the States. I suspect he's homesick but that's just a feeling I had while lying in bed listening to the morning melodies.   Mallory has a little green friend.  It's spring and I hear baby birds everywhere; some mickey birds in the big gums to the east of the horse yards, some lorikeets in the blooming silky oaks.  Bittersweet to see him being courted by a bird when there is no possibility of their being mates.  She even followed him to the deck late yesterday afternoon.  Have to put him into a cage and bring him in every night as his aviary isn't snakeproof.  She perched on the top and sang sweet songs while he made goo goo eyes at her - and peered around the edge of the drape to plead with me.  Wish I could be a buddy and help him out.

The biggest bird news is the sudden decision to feather pluck by Obama.  He's always been a very nervous bird.  He's the one that screams the most, that exhibits neurotic cage behaviours like weaving, that is the most frightened of me and the one that panics first when anything unusual happens.  Had noticed a few pink feathers on the bottom of the aviary but didn't think anything of it except that the birds were starting to moult.  Then went out on Tuesday afternoon and there were drifts of pink feathers everywhere and a poor denuded Obama.  He's plucked all the outer pink feathers from his breast including his legs, his shoulders and the grey scapular and median covert feathers.  Why after 5 years he's decided to pluck now is a mystery.  I've separated him and his mate Fern into the other half of the aviary.  Every other day I'm putting in fresh branches to chew and every other day they are allowed out for morning pick.  Can't have all of them out at the same time as it would be too difficult (read stressful) to try and return them to their correct aviary.

Don't think he's picked much since the changes so I am hopeful.  He really had only 2 days of determined picking so am trying to discourage the behaviour  before it becomes a habit. 

Richard is in the States.  I suspect he's homesick but that's just a feeling I had while lying in bed listening to