This Little Sparrow...

… keeps attacking my windows with a fierce vigor. I hear its beak-meets-pane-pecking and wonder at its insistence and if it ever feels like it has achieved its end or made any measurable progress.

So I explained this to my retired veterinarian brother as this is a new development in my home of the last 25 years. He suggested that it is Spring and mating time and this fury of feathers might just be that he is warding off other males encroaching on his territory.

I try to imagine how frustrating this small foul must feel in the face of such an equal adversary … who attacks him and meets him in the middle, blow per blow with perfect precision to every counter? To wit, this enemy NEVER GIVES UP, never surrenders a beak’s width of boundary space to his nemesis. My exhausted bird, I’m afraid, has truly met his match.

So this is happening here.

And in endless ways everywhere in the wingspan of our collective psyche. How we see from our fear and that gnawing sense of scarcity and then “enemy-ize” the other. As Walt Kelly, the creator of the creator of the Pogo comic strip, famously quipped "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

So it’s not so much what we see … but where we see from.

“What we resist… persists” its been said. Trite AND true. It’s all a slight of hand, a card game, a reflection and resonance … but this damnable cycle we can find ourselves in … can also be a doorway into a deeper seeing … an invitation, like the song of the first bird at dawn.

"Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-two brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment."

(-Thich Nhat Hahn)

I recall a story where Dad was sharing about a preacher who gave a seminar/retreat to a gathered group of seekers. After one of his carefully prepared talks he told the attendees, “I think we can let go of our schedule and take our break now.”

At the end of the day, this same man was greeting people as they left and a woman came up to him with tears and make-up awash in the rivulets of her cheeks, “What … you said … has changed my life!” she sputtered. The preacher was struck by the impact his words had on this soul. Curious, he leaned into her and asked, “What did I say that so moved you?” She paused, caught her breath and sighed, “When you said … ‘let go.’”

We hear what we need to hear … when we are ready to. We can not hear it before that. Or see it before we first see through the reflection, the “enemy,” to see our deeper selves right within “the other.” Thomas Merton saw this vision at the heart of everything and was changed. He wrote …

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our Son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Yep… Everywhere. Here. To see with the eyes of hearts ….

*Bird Image from: https://www.ochranaptaku.cz/en/eine-bedrohung-fur-vogel/flying-into-windows/

**Merton called this “le pointe verge” or the “the virgin point.” Even despite the exclusive language, he knew the meaning demanded a feminine image/energy.