7twentynine2thousand21

Last night, about an hour before sunset, I walked down the road to a piece of wetland on the neighboring farm and watched a blue heron hunt frogs for about twenty minutes before it finally detected me and flew away. Herons are very skittish, so I approached slowly, careful to conceal myself behind the trees and shrubs that line the road and listening for any change in the birdsong or frog chorus that might alert the bird to my presence. At the first clearing, I didn’t see anything, and I thought perhaps it was the wrong time of day. I’d seen the bird feeding in the same area every morning and afternoon for a week as I drove back and forth to the farm, sometimes several times a day, but I rarely travel the same road in the evenings, so I didn’t know if it would still be around. But as I took another step forward, I realized that part of a shrub had been blocking my view of a whole other portion of the wetland, and there was the heron, knee deep in the water with its back to me, tilting its head to one side to better view its prey with its dominant eye. Then it very slowly lowered its body, curled its neck, and struck!

I stood still for as long as I could, only moving six inches at a time when necessary to adjust my view. The heron would take a step and then freeze. Ten seconds later, it would take another step. Tilt its head. Freeze. Five seconds later, it would lower its body. Curl its neck. Freeze.

Observing at a heron’s pace cultivates a special clarity of mind, a space free of the virtual reality of language. The heron is not a concept. The sunlight on the water, the frogs booming, the shadows in the grass are all simple, blatant reality. The damp air coats my skin and the inside of my nostrils and lungs as I breath. Everything is here, and time doesn’t exist. And, for a little while, neither do I.

It’s easy to see how contemporary culture distracts us from these kinds of experiences, cutting us off from a more visceral experience of reality, but what may be less obvious is that this is not, in fact, a new problem for humans. Advanced technology has given us unlimited access to distractions of every kind, but the Internet and my iPhone aren’t really the problem; the problem is my mind. Since the moment of my birth, I’ve been scanning the world via hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell, downloading as much information about the environment as I could to maintain security and survival. As a human, the most important information turns out to be anything that helps me navigate the abstract world of society, and all of my initial experience here comes from family. Through my father and mother and sister and cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents, I’m exposed to a multitude of political, religious, and philosophical concepts with which to build my personal worldview. And this mostly happens unconsciously, until, perhaps, teenage years, when I more deliberately attempt to construct an identity separate from all that. I meet friends, read books, discover new kinds of music and art, absorbing and rejecting ideas along the way. As an adult, my opinions begin to congeal. They become a filter through which all my experiences are interpreted: this is good, that’s bad; those people are idiots.

But then, I begin to perceive that my particular worldview doesn’t fully overlap even with those of the people I admire and consider my friends. It might start with something as simple as a disagreement over the inherent quality of a musical genre or a movie or TV show, but even people of the same religion or political affiliation often disagree on the details. Sometimes a tragic misunderstanding between friends hinges entirely on the personal interpretation of a single word. Shared language doesn’t guarantee shared meaning, so we spend most of our time analyzing and qualifying the gaps between our virtual realities. This is the challenge of all human relationships, the source of all conflict.

A few egrets have arrived on the wetland without my noticing until, finally distracted by my monkey mind, I startle the heron with my movement, and it flies silently away. I watch the egrets stalking the frogs for a while, but the moment is lost, and I start to walk home.

The afterglow of the experience stays with me, though, even as I begin thinking of other things, inviting the virtual problems back into my mind, and I stop briefly to visit a walnut tree or watch a sparrow or butterfly, but I’m lost in thought, again, by the time I get home.

I think a lot about people and the state of the world and how we each live in a conceptual bubble of our own manufacture; so fragile and insecure, we’re willing to defend it with violence or, at minimum, fierce hatred, and I wonder if it makes more sense, rather than blaming each other, or trying to find places our illusions overlap, to focus, instead, on dismantling the illusions at their root, in our own minds, and then we can come back together and ask ourselves, where on the Venn diagram of you and me is reality?