You have driven to the store in the pouring rain, the wipers maxed out. It is coming down as it can only in Southern California when it finally decides to rain. You arrive at the store, turn off the ignition, and sit for a moment, listening to the thrumming on the metal roof.
The weather has kept folks at home, and the parking lot is almost empty. As you sit there, a big crow appears out of the mist, circles, lands nearby, and struts around the wet asphalt in search of, you assume, dropped scraps from customers. He circumnavigates for a while and then stops, shakes his feathers, flaps his wings, and hops up to the top of a yellow post directly in front of your car. He preens under his wings, shakes himself off, gives a loud, ‘yawk!’, flies away, and disappears intothe grayness.
You are wonderfully alone now with the sound of the rain, and there is a growing sense of a deeper aloness, a relaxing into what you are beyond the noise of the world, the noise of the mind. It is a beautiful nothing, this aloness. It is, you realize, the end of the line, the end of seeking, and the end of fear. In this aloness, there is nothing to get hurt. It is the end of desire and an opening to the realization that there is nothing to hold onto. What we are, what we really are, is beyond the mind, and, in essence, we are completely free.
