You want to talk about Buddha consciousness?
Check out birds. They live entirely in the moment.
Have to. Surviving in the natural world requires
constant vigilance. Get distracted and something
eats you or you fly into a window or a wave
crashes over you. Yet birds take time to meditate.
I see hawks just being here now all the time on
telephone polls and tree branches, and I see fat
little birds like jovial roly-poly Buddha statues
sitting perfectly still amidst anti-hawk anti-cat
branches grooving on the concept of nothingness
or who knows what? I suppose birds have to
deal with mind chatter when they meditate
just like we do. Food food gotta get food! When’s
that gopher gonna come out of his hole so I can swoop
down and tear him to shreds and eat my fill before I
take the bloody remains back to the shrieking hawklets?
When are those grasses gonna flower and when are
those flowers gonna make seeds so me and my gang
can get fat for the winter? And what about lust
and the ever nearness of death?
Oh maybe I’ve glorified birds because they can fly
and go from perfect stillness to blurring speed in
the blink of an eye. Maybe that’s why I think
birds are Buddhas. I do. I think when a person gets
fully hip to the lay of reality and is reflexively
kind to others, when she dies she doesn’t come
back human, not right away. First she is reborn
a bird and gets to fly around and contemplate
the earth from on high for a few lifetimes before
she has another go at being human. Why do
I think this? Because all the kindest people
I’ve ever known have at one time or another
expressed to me their desire to be reborn as
some kind of bird. Pelican, chickadee, grebe,
hummingbird, hawk. Now why would all the
kindest people want to come back as birds?
Gotta be a connection, right? I mean…
What kind of bird would you like to be?
One Fell Swoop piano solo by Todd