Meeting An Unexpected Bird Called Life

Every year my friend/business partner and I go to a beautiful place together for a silent retreat. This year, we spent the week in an old farmhouse on Whidbey Island northwest of Seattle. This farmhouse sits on 80 acres in the middle of absolutely pristine nature. All week long, we could feel, see and hear the natural beings of the land, including rabbits, deer, frogs, old growth cedars and an array of birds. Everything we saw around us was in its natural, sacred state and we let it all in as we sat and walked in silence for most of the week.

One morning, I walked out of the house, through a gate and down a path to the stream that weaves itself through this property. I paused on the little bridge over the stream and simply let the forest fill me with its essence. All of a sudden, I noticed a chickadee flying around me and as I put my hand out, she softly landed. I was filled with pure delight! I could see she was looking for food so I went back to the house and, not having any bird seed, I put a dab of nut butter on my finger. She was waiting for me at the gate and I offered her my hand, but after a few pecks at the nut butter she flew off.  Evidently nut butter is not a chickadee delicacy!

Isn’t this what we truly long for, to be connected to Life, connected in a way that we actually experience it rather than just thinking about it?  When I returned to my home after the retreat, this quote by Jeff Foster, author of The Deepest Acceptance, was waiting for me – a quote that captures the essence of what happened during the unfolding of those precious moments with the chickadee. There was no past and no future, only Life being Life.

Unexpected Birds

And sometimes you are walking down a familiar path on a spring morning, and there are questions raging, questions that seem to demand immediate answers. What to do with this precious gift of a life? Where to go? What to say next? Which choice to make or not make? Which voice to listen to? How to make everything okay again? How to hold it all together? How to avoid falling apart?

And suddenly the questions cannot hold, they shatter into a million silences, because a tiny bird has perched itself on the path in front of you, perched in the here and now, not in the there and then in which you are seeking your answers. Your eyes meet hers, and you know that everything is okay with the universe. Questions will get answered, or not, and solutions will appear or not appear at the perfect time, because you will make yourself available to them, as you are available now to this tiny and unexpected bird.

Perhaps today is not a day for answers and unshakeable certainties, it is a day for birdsong and staying close to questions as they walk with you down familiar paths on spring mornings.  ~Jeff Foster

If you slow down enough, you will see that Life is giving you these unexpected moments all the time – moments when Life is saying, ‘Pssst, please be with me right now.’ Most people don’t notice because they are so busy thinking about Life. So the invitation is to cultivate what I call the pause that refreshes. As you stop and notice what is happening in this living moment of your life, like the songs of the birds or the taste of your morning coffee or the sight of a happy child, even if you only do this for just half a breath, you have come back to Life. And the more you listen to the ‘Psssts,’ the more you are in the here and now rather than the there and then that Jeff is referring to. For the here and now holds everything you long for and everything you truly are. This moment is your home!

Image of Chickadee by Andrea Lavery  http://www.laveryart.net

Article posted with permission by Sounds True  http://www.soundstrue.com