The Meadow, The Stem, The Flower, The Hawk

Close your eyes.

Find your breath.

Find your lungs.

Those humble whales inside your chest.

Feel their rhythm.

Feel their rise.

Their fall.

Their eternal nature.

Feel.

And imagine a scene, a scene of life not yet organized. Imagine all the raw materials for all the natural wonder in all the cosmos. Imagine it all swirling about in a slow and gentle chaos.

See nebulas and sideways walking crabs. See granite and green and grebe feathers. See aquifers upset and firmaments unfurled. See sun-stars and sea-stars and all the ancient ones from nears and fars.

Not quite day. Not quite night. Not quite land. Not quite sea. Some kind of inky in-between.

Keep breathing.

And watch as coherence begins to form in front of you. See out of the inky in-between a horizon. Your first. The first.

See earth emerging up from below and forming land, Terra Firma.

See the gentle chaos of the cosmos recede into a summer’s sunny day.

See and feel and become the weather. The waters. Suspended, hovering and assembled in the heavens to move and rove and rain and grow the green earth underneath.

See and feel and become the soft ground made softer by the falling rain.

See and feel and become the seeds shaking and quaking and starting as babies once again.

See and feel and become the sun’s rays invigorating the damp earth, and shaking, and quaking those seed-babies.

See and feel and become the landscape, a meadow. A meadow. A meadow. Trees lining the edges. Grasses filling the expanse.

See and feel and become all of it. The sun. The rain. The earth. The seed. The growth. The invigoration. The life-forces moving and humming through it all.

See and feel and become. All of it.

Keep breathing

And see and feel and become one single green stem in the ocean of green and growing of this great and grand meadow.

See and feel and become this one green stem. Feel the earth around your roots. The sun pulling you impossibly out of yourself. The wild expansion unbridled and at the mercy of.

See and feel and become this one green growing stem.

Feel the wind move you.

Feel the delight you take in it.

Feel the brush of the meadow mouse’s coat as he scurries by.

And feel the delight in it.

Feel the stars overhead showering you with impossible falling light.

Feel the ancient mountains crumbled that somehow feed you from down below.

Feel the waters finding your roots from the impossible depths of ancient aquifers.

Feel the moon wheeling around the sky.

Feel the sun continuing to pull you inside out, up and up and up into more of yourself.

Feel the more of yourself.

The total lack of control that you have.

And delight in it.

Feel the sun and rain and earth meeting in multidirectional miracle culminating in you.

And delight in it.

And now feel something, something almost new.

Something that feels like a whisper of a memory.

Feel a shift in your growth.

Feel a shift in the upward, inside out expansion.

Feel a change.

Feel the top of you beginning to swell.

Beginning to grow bulbous.

Beginning to mount.

Beginning to tighten.

Beginning to push.

To swell.

To bulge.

To press against yourself

To press against Your understanding

Your remembering

Your comfort

Your sense of ease

Your knowing

And feel

The bud begin to break

The stem of you transforming

Without consent

Without a manual

Without consideration

And feel the feelings of being yet again out of control

But this time

You are breaking open

Wide and wider

Impossibly wide

And no longer are you green and stemmy

But now you are also pink

A color only ever seen in the hours before the sun would rise

Now you are the color of heaven

And now you are no longer the strong green stem you once were

But now you are the softest most delicate thing you’ve ever felt.

And the very top of you, the highest, most exposed part of you

Is now the softest, most beautiful thing you’ve ever been.

And then it happens.

You hear the sound of wings

You feel the weight of a body

You feel the probing mouthparts of

a moth.

Then another, this one a fly.

Another, a bee.

Another, a hummingbird.

Another, a butterfly.

Another, an ant.

Another, a yellowjacket.

All visiting you, basking in you, feeding on you, so enamored with you that they must gather parts of you and carry them away to make food from you to feed their young.

You look around.

All green around you.

All stems.

You go into relaxing into the infinite bliss of being so soft, so attractive, so vulnerable, so out of control, so at the mercy of some great unfolding

Then. A wave of fear and panic and desperation to control.

To try and pack the petals back in to be green again.

Be stemmy again.

Be like everything else again.

And luckily, a butterfly

Lands gently, unrolls its tongue and tickles you so sweetly.

So sweetly that you are back.

Back in delight.

Back in sensation.

Back in experience.

Back into the infinite expanse of now.

When all of the sudden you hear a sound you’d never heard before.

The wind.

But this time the wind being riven in two.

The foiling of the wind by something great and powerful.

Above you, and to the north, the branch still gently bouncing in the red maple.

A sharp-shinned hawk.

Your breath

Gone.

Your heart

Racing.

Your mind

Searching

To understand.

And out of the long held patterns of your mind arises

the first logical conclusion.

This hawk is here because I’ve done something wrong.

The hawk is here to punish me.

This hawk is here because I was enjoying my softness too much.

This hawk is here to humble me.

This hawk is here to show me I am not the only thing in existence.

The hawk is here to shame me for enjoying being so beautiful, so fragrant, so attractive, so enjoyable.

This hawk is here to instill in me the fear, proper and wise, to have in this life.

The hawk

Sits.

Yellow Talons bent around the branch

Striped tail showing black and white and gray

The hawk sits

The hawk watches

The hawk rests

The hawk watches

The hawk hawks

Majestically, unselfconsciously and without regard

And in time you realize there is more than just fear emerging, shame emerging, meaning-making emerging in you.

There is wonder.

There is awe.

There is great respect.

There is still fear.

But along with so much else.

There is gratitude.

There is reverence.

There is joy.

There is attraction.

There is a sense of family.

There is a sense of oneness.

There is a moment of grief for welcoming the hawk into the meadow with so much fear and story, guilt and shame.

Those moments of not seeing the hawk, but seeing all the past layered over the hawk. Missing those moments of unparalleled presence lost forever.

And yet there is sweetness for yourself.

Your soft self.

Your self who doesn’t really remember that you’ve done this before

You’ve flowered before

You’ve made this mythical morphos over and over again actually

Since the inky in-between times of gentle chaos

And, when you’re still and quiet enough, can remember the inky darkness just before the break of the seed and the first bit of green tenderness shot up into the sky

And that when you get even more still, and even more quiet, you can remember back to an earlier flowering

An earlier moment of budbreak.

An earlier moment, like a memory, of opening and expanding and becoming with exhilaration and delight

And back you go

Deeper and deeper and deeper

Into all your many flowerings

All your many Meadows

All your many Hawks

Until you hear the air foiling overhead

The maple branch bouncing

But this time

The black and white and gray

Is but a feather

Falling to the ground

and caressing you on its way to the earth

On its way back

On its way back in

On it way back into

All things

All the inky in-between things