Gander

Lake Ontario and the geese with Nasim

The geese grazed back and forth on the carpet of grass between the lake and the bench where we sat. A couple may have had too much magnesium, the way black slurry shot out from their backside like it was nothing. I considered the way they worked in groups, their beaks covering every inch of grass and I wondered what they might be eating. Nasim suggested worms and I said they weren’t going that deep. 

The human eye creates a frame, and in this perception of image a thought takes place, the way these geese moved in groups, the way the swans on the water gathered further apart, the way the laughing gulls bunched up in a scrum like rugby players about to go on a mission. You wonder if the body size determines their proximity. You wonder how the image might be captured. You realize these geese are kicking up bugs with their beaks, an ancient way of vacuuming, and then you remember.

There is symbiosis happening all the time. Maybe this is all that there is. Maybe with the intellect, we choose to try to find a reason and a reason behind that, and in this search for reason we attempt to separate the union of what is happening between all of life, between these birds by the lake. Their movement settled me, for I was sure their movement was what was meant to happen. I did not question this.

I remembered a story somebody told about watermelon fields and slugs, how geese could be employed to rid plants of the aforementioned offenders. And in the moment I considered the flying bugs that maybe the geese could not reach, how these bugs work at higher levels of the stem. 

At this moment, I think of the resentment I sometimes get when people ask about how to control this bug or that bug and I want to tell them to plant more, to serve more, to support rather than try to control. And this, too, is an effort to control.

My friend Jack talks about how he thought that if he could nail down God to a concept that he could put God in a box, that he could control God and essentially become God. This is what I see sometimes in my want and need for things that grow to turn out a certain way. 

There is a happy medium between wild and manicured, between control and support between holding tight and letting go of what I know as personality. I wrote about my own uncertainties of alchemy yesterday and then read to learn. 

There is a sense of going to ashes, of letting go to be born again into something new, into something better, so that the shedding of a snake skin serves not only the growth of the snake, but everything that lives and will begin to live where the skin falls.

I know that love and God and the present moment are synonymous, and I know that in watching those geese I was watching the unfolding of eons, that beneath the lawns of that park, kept mowed by park workers, a great galaxy fell from the sky and created dirt. I know that sometimes it takes a bench and a lovely woman and moments of silence in order to know God. And I know that sometimes, most of the time really, words cannot serve to convey presence. Words cannot deliver what it feels like to be connected no matter what happens.