Cowbirds, Storm & ME
COWBIRDS, STORM, & ME

Looking from the rock hut's door, I'm vividly aware that I am a focus of consciousness within the utterly impersonal and mysterious One Thing.

The intensity and color of my focus of consciousness is different from that of the Bronzed Cowbirds in front of the stone hut, yet those birds also are alive, conscious, and vividly alert to their context. Our two consciousnesses are two points of feeling and thinking in an immeasurable matrix occupied with a near infinity of other such points, all with varying degrees and colors of focused consciousness. And the matrix itself is suffused with its own sense of being, for also it is stuff of the One Thing.

The afternoon thunderhead building to the south and headed this way draws the cowbirds and me into its updrafts of energy, matter and -- surely on one level or another -- feeling, by inviting our attention to itself. In terms of shared consciousness, we mingle, we three points of being, this storm, the cowbirds and myself, as the storm's onrushing low cloud-curdles and thunder are preceded by strong winds.

The cowbirds fly into a dead tree and perch keeping their heads into the wind, until the wind invites them to rise into it, to soar without going anyplace, and I stand in the door watching it, laughing, laughing with the wind, laughing with the cowbirds fearlessly enjoying themselves, laughing at myself laughing.

Within this wild, joyous theater, a thought arises: When I was younger, such moments as this were accompanied by my pious urge to fall onto my knees, declare thankfulness to the Creator for the majesty around me, and to ask for strength to submit to the laws of the Kingdom of God. But now, in my graybeard days, with all us creations being manifestations within the One Thing Herself, those earlier impulses seem anemic, and to miss the point, with regard to what's going on here.

And yet, I do feel compelled to react to all this. And that reaction is my standing in the stone hut's door laughing with the storm and the cowbirds.

This is all a communal event -- a communion -- all a multilevel, multidimensional, evolving consciousness/mentality/feeling spontaneous happening, and my laughter and the birds' soaring and the storm's blowing and raining is a tiny tone in a sacred Song Unto Myself always being sung everywhere by the One Thing.