BODY

He carries a silence within him, and is moved to offer it to a higher power, which he can not grasp and can not name, perceiving it only as Absence, vast beyond imagining.

He recognizes the patterning of his mind: incessant thought, feeling, image, so much of it trivial and repetitive. But too, there is a more deeply felt sense of his body, a solid, silent realm of living possibilities, empty and waiting. And welling up from this, in a cycle of appearance independent of time's passage, hints, images, directives; a flow of intelligence entering his awareness from a dimension folded into the everyday, akin to dreams.

He wonders what he would experience if that intelligence would flow without the resistance of the habitual mind, and drops quietly into contemplation.

His focus on this internal body space, he tracks in his loins a downward flowing opening into dynamic emptiness, as if one would synchronize with that and be taken anywhere, do anything, like the sounding of a deep bass drum pulsing, expanding beyond measure.

He perceives shimmering in an empty space in the region of his throat and jaws, its core in the notch above his breast bone, expanding and pulsing with that same dynamism, a sense of outward movement permeating space with its essential vibration.

In his belly, the booming of the drum comes from above. He feels invited to open a door, and enters a heaving cataclysm, ten thousand voices in the language of dreams, a repository of all that he has ever known or could know, a sense of belonging to all that is or ever could be.

An expanding light field opens in his mind, the light taking all experience into itself, into its infinite possibilities, reclaiming and recycling and renewing and recombining it, infusing it with its own star-like essence; all of this in silence; all with a feeling of surrender into love, acceptance of everything, profound empathy in the heart.

When he had mused like this for perhaps half an hour, the sound of a thrasher calling from his yard intervened. He marvels at this down-to-earth intrusion, and at the other-worldly dream time imagery that seems to have included it.
He thinks of the bird, and of the millions of years during which his kind has heard them, delighting in them, coveting them, waking to their pre-dawn chatter, all represented to him in this moment as an intimate messenger from his own being.

Curve billed thrasher, Toxostoma curvirostre