Last week I wrote about the meditation on interdependence. I told you I was going to try it at the river and let you know what happened.
The mountain was immense and the river was tremendous. I started thinking about the water in the river being the same water rushing in my blood. I looked out from my perch on the bridge, witnessing this entity I’ve been taught to label “nature” or the “earth” as if I am not nature, not the earth.
I can tell you that some time after that I did have a moment of perception. I can tell you that the mountain entered my breastbone and I felt it. It was a shock.
The shock threw me out of the moment and back into thinking and my own emotional state. I felt surprise, and then a feeling that doesn’t have words, and then I started noticing and thinking about noticing. The thought was: if I could know in my everyday perception that I am interdependent with all beings, then when this mountain was threatened, or this river was polluted, I wouldn’t be asking myself if I had time to do something about it.
When I was on that bridge I didn’t see any evidence of separation, except in the houses on the banks of the river that were built and fortified, with walls and hedges and property limits. I could see the rest as one entity, one system, an integration of everything there, except me, the watcher. I took a picture, feeling stupid for doing so. I don’t know if I saw the scene as a whole because we are told “nature” is a thing, and a house is a thing, and a person is a thing. I hope I saw the whole because it is a whole, and what is an illusion is the fact that I can tell myself I am watching when in fact I am in the scene.
