Running on the common, listening to Jay Garfield talk about Buddhism – dependent arising, the four noble truths – I hear beyond the audio the jays calling and I switch off the podcast. Stop. They are somewhere there between the meadow and the church.
I see magpies, I see starlings fly south and pigeons fly north west. The jays stop. It seems silent until I do that thing, change the focus of my hearing from centred to peripheral – like when you defocus your eyes to absorb the whole panorama – and then I hear the birds and the cars and a dog somewhere across the fields.
Going on, I leave the audio off and decide to visit the monster poplar, whose trunk, were it a table, could comfortably seat six. I sit in the embrace of two buttresses and lean against the remarkable wood. A whole world of canyons and gorges, arroyos and ridges, streaked upward so high.
The tree informs me about its leaves, which have fallen gold across the scrappy scrub and between the aspens. As they decompose they give off a scent, that poplar scent that first attracted me. A sweetness and freshness despite the litter that is spread around and the human faeces just twenty metres away. Though trees take back the nutrients from their leaves before they drop them, they cannot take all the goodness out. This is returned to the soil. As the leaves decompose, broken up by dentritivores and dragged into burrows by worms, they cede their sweetness to the growing world.
The tree tells me to take leaves home and put them on the soil around my baby poplars. I oblige. Thank the giant, depart, switching Jay back on.
And he’s talking of how we, all that is, are interconnected (intraconnected?); the web of causal links; the dependencies. He talks of how letting go of the fixation on self (this one autonomous independent separate self – this myth), one lets go of suffering. One no longer sees the self and its suffering as the centre of the universe. One is with all that is.
I think of how my own life is not just not the most important thing in the world to the world, but it’s not the most important thing in the world to a me that has let go of the myth of me… if you follow. Let me try again: if I can feel into a view where I am part of this whole wonderful unlikely living planet, then I no longer feel that my existence is ultimate. What is ultimate is the flourishing of the whole. If my little person is not beneficial, if it is harmful, I can embrace the acceptance of an ending.
Please, though, may it be painless. And… not just yet!
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