the gullet craves, the tremor fragile.

“Every time there is love when we look at someone and someone looks at us, it’s eternal.” Francis Lucille.

From the parched earth the helpless call of a song bird flutters upward. A baby yet. Gray fluff shaped like a soft cotton ball. Tiny feathery wings. Too mature for certain death. Too young to survive alone. There is no water. No chewed morsel of food. So you sit down at a distance and listen. Wind plays its melodies with the trees. Other birds chant their gladness to be alive. But not this chick nor its parents. The drought has been brutal. A mongoose skitters by ready to kill.

You lift the chick into hollowed bark, carry it home. Now what? The internet delivers guidelines. Thank you for “rehabbers,” a new word you learn. Yes, a syringe, papaya purée, an egg, a mush of kibbles that we could borrow from our cats, the irony of this. The bird is ravenous. Glad to be alive. By nightfall a voracious call fills the living room but its message is unclear. It sleeps through the night. Wakes up. And falls over dead. So very quickly its tiny soft body shrinks into itself. So very quickly you feel a deep grief. ‘The heartbreak for soft things,’ as John Roedel recently wrote, for innocence.

You’ll never know what happened. If you should have left it where it was. But there is no should in the here and now that is life. Life is showing itself what it is. Dancing energy and stillness and nowhere a separate me that should or could and only a listening, living. We try to do the right thing, do our best. If there is an illusion, an ignorance of the truth, then this is the beautiful game we must play. Life shows itself as it is. Life simply loves life.

We cannot help this loving. We are that. And so we rescue birds, babies, roses, trees. We appreciate water, rice, yes even the laziness of dust motes lingering in early morning light. We pick up stones, bones, memories, desires, and regrets, and everywhere we encounter birth and death. If there is an awakening to the truth, if there is a learning to be glimpsed, whatever this may be, this is a path we must walk. A path to the undead, the unborn.

Here are the miracles of our ordinary days. Blossoms, sonnets, peaches. The stories we tell that give rise to quarrels, glances, meaning, lack. Lovers, language, possibility. Eventually, yes, you see this. It’s all just happening by itself and it’s really amazing. Even the overwhelming waves of grief.

To feel this love that is life at all! To feel it fully!

And slowly you begin to see, there is no “me” in there. There is no personal caring. No separate identity with an agenda. Just this, life showing itself and showing itself the way. Impersonal. What we call caring is intuitively wired into us and has no need for a doer, an outcome, attachment. The non-dual teacher Ruper Spira writes: “Every appearance is an impersonal act of creation. Seeing this clearly, relieves us of any sense of personal guilt, blame, judgement or responsibility. This understanding does not lead to irresponsible or unloving behavior. On the contrary, it enables the mind and body to function on behalf of impersonal love and intelligence, rather than representing the fears and demands of a non-existent self.” Yes. It’s that.

The death of the one who cares. This too happens without you. So you can fully inhabit your humanness, in which everything is infinitely sacred. We intuit - so deeply, so painfully, so slowly sometimes - our essential irrevocable annihilating and frightfully liberating - quiddity.

Everything belongs and is hungry. Everything is alive. Everything dances with change. There is no thing that does not point to beauty or love and you call it God or grace. Life cares for life and you are life and, God, yes, you want to live and you think you fear death. But here is the birth of the bud and the bird and it’s spring and you cannot yet see that all things die and are, in fact, hungry for death - for this too is the beauty of life. You cannot yet see. But life shows itself.

The gullet craves and the tremor so fragile. The bullet close and what’s still tender veiled. We give food to the dying, unwilling to let go. It’s the only thing you knew, a pattern. And here it is, the story of the chick that keels over and the fullness of grief, of love. Truth unveiled teaches to stand under its own knowing and be what life is. Everything belongs. And longs. God is in the longing. Life is ever fulfilled in this mystery. Was never not fulfilled.

credit for photo: jon sailer | unsplash