On being special

Of course the raven is special.

Every raven. Every bird. Every being. Every life form. Every rock and river.

All have been billions of years in the making.

We see now, in this moment, the products of the big bang - or whatever it was. Everything started then. Everything traces back to then. Everything that exists in this moment, now, is the result of that original nanosecond carried forward through the long, long, always changing past. And everything from that now, that moment I just acknowledged, has changed and will never stop changing.

There is no dust mote that is not special in this sense. No blade of grass or grain of sand. Everything is enchanted.

What would it be like to live that awareness?

There is a school of meditation called the Headless Way. Douglas Harding was in the Himalayas and he looked out at a spectacular view. Then he realised that all that existed was what he could see - the view, his legs, his hands - but not his head. He felt that what he was, then, at that moment, was mountains and sky. Nothing else. That was the start.

I read his book. It lost me a bit. But I have something similar to that experience with trees, in woods, crawling under hedges, watching creatures, listening to birds (all I am is all I can hear - the singing, the singing).

In those moments, when what I am is world - not a load of thoughts and feelings in a bag of skin - all that world is in my wide map of mattering. Its harm is my harm.

And yet I still don't know for sure it's a meeting. It's more like a recognition of being always and already entangled. Everything has its own unique specialness and otherness... and yet everything is always already bound up with me. Or I am bound up with all. Here dualities cease. Not in a meeting - that is like two circles overlapping - two atomised things that come together for a moment of experience. No. It's more like a webbed belonging... for which there is no visual image... we want the points and nodes - there! That's me! - but maybe we are not nodes. Maybe we are an aspect of processes, a part of a grand action, inextricable from the whole. Maybe we need to let go of that nodes concept and see ourselves as tendencies of flow within a vast ocean.

It is not a separate part of sea that makes a wave; it is the entire ocean.