The Mockingbird

This is a repost from a couple yearss ago in honor of the Mockingbird who returns to our neighborhood every year at this time and sings from morning to night.

Let’s say, for instance, that you are me, and I am you. Let’s say that we are not separate beings. Let’s say we are the same thing, no me, no you. Therefore, what I discover, you discover. And let’s say, for instance, that this morning, while the mockingbird sings in the old Live Oak that shades our house, we find out together that there is no such thing as an inside or an outside of me/you.

We are nothing and everything at once. We are the homeless guy begging for change in LA (or Chicago, or Nashville, or anyplace else in the world). We are the Guatemalan mother who lost her children at the border. We are the political prisoner in a squalid cell in Syria, the expectant mother standing at the window in Brooklyn, or the old, blind neighbor calling for her cat. And yes, we are even Donald Trump and associates, in their astounding ignorance and blind greed. We are them, and they are us. We are a murder of crows flapping and diving on a windy day, a baseball team taking the field on a summer evening, or a tired checkout lady at the end of her shift at Walmart.

Because we are nothing at all, we contain the earth and its oceans, deserts, and forests. We contain whales, parrots, termites, gorillas, giraffes, and all the countless, myriad creatures of the earth. We contain the moon, the sun, clouds, stars, and the solar system. In fact, the whole boundless expanding universe with its billions of solar systems is but a small part of what we are. The truth is, there is nothing outside of us.

This is not a product of imagination. It is a knowable, observable truth, available to all, and professed by sages throughout history. Anyone willing to investigate can discover that, in the end, it is the only reality.

To come upon the truth that we are a vast, seamless whole is to come to the end of suffering. It is the end of the insecurity that comes with the illusion of being a little ‘me.’ It is the end of the constant struggle to manipulate life to our liking. When the ‘me’ dies, we are free.

Do you hear the Mockingbird singing in the old Live Oak? Is there a ‘someone’ listening? Is there an inside or an outside of the listening?

Is there any listener at all?

Who is it?