A close encounter

Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come,
some shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree —
they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.

Mary Oliver (from Why I Wake Early)

Where Does the Encounter Begin, Where Does It End?

And yesterday, walking my morning walk,
looking at the dawn of a new day,
the world did come a little closer

in the form of a wedge tail eagle
(wing span 2 meters/6’6″).

Several times it swooped passed.

If not the eagle’s feathers,
than surely the draft from its wings is what
I felt upon the nap of my neck
when I bent my head to the side
as it flew by.

An extended arm could easily have
grabbed a talon had one
or both
been distended.

Twice it landed upon the hillside above
around 15 meters/ 50 feet away.

Twice I walked to eagle as Mary Oliver
would ask of us:
“Reach out with your arms open.”

I am not professing that a great spiritual encounter
came with this engagement.
In eagle’s eyes, I might
only have been a possible breakfast.

But the knowing that fills me,
is that being “present” every waking
hour here at Windgrove is transformative.

By walking and looking, by swimming and looking,
by constantly “reaching out”,
I am slowly dissolving into earth;
into earth’s cycles of life and death.

Peter Adams

The eagle I encountered today was not afraid of my human form. In eagle’s eyes was my body on offer to feed him/her yet? Happily for me, no.

Will my body be on offer in the future? Happily for me, yes.

I have taken from the earth all these years to sustain myself. It will be an honour to give back what flesh is left on my old bones.

This solstice eve, I give thanks that, although the dark is at its longest, the light that comes into our lives on even the shortest of days can be staggering.