Back in the Game

Here’s a repost from several years ago; it always bears fruit:

Today, on the radio, I heard two famous scientists discussing consciousness in clinical terms, and brain research, which was in many ways fascinating.

One, a nobel laureate, said: “Awareness is a form of consciousness.”

While this assessment might sound correct, I would disagree. Awareness is a form of art. You can raise your awareness, but not consciousness. You can’t have a form of consciousness; it is already whole and not open to divisions or categories.

As the Buddha observed: “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”

What did you learn today?

El Coyote staking out the situation

About six weeks ago I had an unexpected visitor show up at my doorstep: Baby Aldo, a young parakeet who is not indigenous to the harsh and unforgiving climate in the high desert.

Aldo is like the man who came to dinner; he has become part of the family here, along with Sweetie Boy, the cockatiel.

Late this afternoon, I opened the main door to my cabin. There in front of me stood a coyote. He looked at me, and I looked back. Although he didn’t run off, he was on high alert. Every now and then in the middle of the night, I would hear the distinctive and plaintive howls of coyote packs way back in the vast mesa beyond the cabin.

This coyote had put fear behind him and had ventured down near the humans, the most dangerous of predators. I slowly closed the door, grabbed my camera, and took this photo through the kitchen window. After a while, it became clear why he came here: the fruit trees. He sniffed about, looking here and there, and behind him. Then, he began eating the pears that had dropped off the tree. Coyotes will eat what’s available, which is their ace in the hole when it come to adaptation and survival.

After eating his fill, which took about twenty minutes, he dashed off, up the steep hill, and back to the mesa.

Our mindless encroachment into the wilderness is unsustainable. Putting people first, regardless of costs, will eventually unravel the beauty of balance and evolution. Whatever happened to zero population growth? It’s a touchy subject that, if ignored, will come back to haunt us into oblivion. 

We don’t need more consumers who fuel the engine of disaster; we do need more evolved people who will steward the earth—and I can think of no better dharma.

He said it thousands of years ago. Ignorance is the enemy of man. There is no doubt that the Buddha was clear on this point. Test this observation by looking at the world around you.

There is another trap we can call complacency—as we move through our finite days, taking things for granted in an ever-changing and temporal existence. Look around again and see what you can do to overcome the insidious trap and smugness of self-satisfaction and the inertia that it manifests.

Without an awareness of complacency, the artist becomes a hack, a murky cowardly reflection of what could have been. 

Today would have been my dear late mother’s eighty-fourth birthday.

I think of her daily and dream of her often. Adele had enough compassion for the whole world. She was brave and always willing to lend a helping hand. She spoke up when necessary; her compassion did not make her a fool.

She would say to me: “Giving up on your art is like tossing your baby away.”

So, dear Adele darling, who is now free from pain, be well in that place beyond.

It’s been about two weeks since Aldo, the parakeet, landed at my front door. No one has claimed him. He’s doing very well and is content.

Since he had flown onto my finger outside, I thought he was at least partially tame. However, when I tried getting him to step up onto my finger inside his cage, he refused. This means that he and I are in for clicker training—a form of positive reinforcement training that requires patience.

It turns out that despite being wild, Aldo perceived me as a port in the storm, flying over and landing on my finger. He overcame his fear of humans (who can blame him) for relief from the harsh desert and its predators. This gives new meaning to an outdated and erroneous concept: birdbrain. 

So, we can say that little Aldo worked me, and we are both the richer for it.