Last week, my wife and I were walking down our rural road when we noticed a large bird enter the space above our heads and circle lazily. Then a second arrived, and a third. Probably Turkey Vultures, magnificent in flight. And suddenly, all three were just gone. We didn’t see where they went.
At first, we felt the sky as empty, emptied of birds, lacking. But as we looked more fully, what before was merely background became something else, something more. We saw in full clarity the deep blue beauty of the clear afternoon sky. Not only the sky had cleared, but our minds.
The great poet and translator, David Hinton, in his book Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, said when we open our eyes, we open the sky inside us. We feel this empty space the size of the universe.
A Chinese poem, says Hinton, is not a metaphor seen or conjured from inside a spirit or identity center, or a self-separated from the universe, but the mind of the poet at that moment. Hinton quotes an early Chinese Ch’an (Zen) poet, Hsieh Ling-yun, as saying mind is “a tranquil mirror, all mystery and shadow.”
The sky mirrors our conscious awareness coming awake in, or more accurately, as the world. We often think of the sky as that blue or cloud filled something far off in the distance. But it’s also what we breathe in and out right here; what we move though each moment of our lives. We see and breathe in the world and the world sees and breathes in us.
And then the birds were back; first one, then the other two. They circled gracefully into the area above us. One went to sit on the ridgeline of a barn next to the road. The other two soon joined the first, but at the other end. And the first raised its wings, held them out to the side as it would do if it meant to take off. But it stayed in place, in a different sort of flight.
Was this a sort of dance? Was it saluting the sky, the emptiness, the medium in which it flew, and we all lived? Was it bowing? For us, we might bow by first bringing our open hands together; for the vulture, it bowed by opening its wings out. Hinton says the ancient Chinese characters for bow means hand-whispers, or maybe hand as the silence of mountain peaks, or clear minds. Maybe by opening its wings thusly it became the sky itself, the light, the silence.
We watched to see what the vulture would do next, but it just held the position. The three birds, my wife and I, the barn, the universe. And we walked on. The opening through which the universe was aware of itself walked on. Wow. Another sort of dance?
Hinton says this is the ultimate miracle, that something exists, that this exists at all, this presence, this something rather than nothing. Why is there this something at all has been a question for philosophers, saints, and scientists⎼ for humans throughout time. Why is there this awareness instead of no awareness? This something rather than — what? Can we even conceive of a universe so empty?
And in our own way, don’t we do this sometimes? Don’t we fill the universe, or at least our minds, or try to do so, with dust, darkness⎼ or what? We evoke words and images; fears and joys; plans and memories which take to the sky and fill it like gigantic flocks of birds. And instead of bowing, we pay attention to the darkness of such birds instead of the light that surrounds and animates us. Or we invent distractions from seeing. Hearing. Touching. Tasting. Smelling. Thinking as sky. We lose sight of the sky opening in or as us. And we hurt.
Hinton points out that the Chinese character for Chan, or meditation, is the universe keeping itself company, and seeing itself.
Life is so difficult sometimes, many times, maybe too often. And maybe the most destructive part of pain and suffering is that it can vacuum us, vacuum the whole universe, into itself. Or so it can seem. It can become a hand used to cover our eyes, so we see only the back of what blinds us.
But maybe we can turn over that hand and see the sky.
Thank you, David. I so enjoyed walking Hunger Mountain⎼ you and my wife, and everything.
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