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invitation

During this mornings hike up Green Mountain, my ears were greeted by the exquisite cacophony of insect and bird song, a symphony in the early hours just after daybreak.  I walked the trail alone, save my eager four-legged companion, amidst an array of wildflowers bending gracefully in an early dance with the breeze, and thought "What a strange gift it is to be human".  We who look out through a pin-hole of perception, imagining ourselves separate from the tapestry of life, like some strand hovering above the surface, unwoven in warp or weft.
The irony is apparent the instant our consciousness takes a vertical leap and we exercise our capacity to see, without looking, the mysterious splendor of life witnessing life.
This being human. This self identity so fully rooted in body, mind and emotion, rarely asking the important questions: "How can I be both subject and object?" "How can I be aware of a sensory perception, if that is what I am?"  "If I am an emotion or a series of thoughts, how can I have the perspective to witness them?"  We grasp, cling, claw and avert.  We suffer at the alter of our own limited perspective.
Yet each moment-NOW- is an invitation.  An invitation to drop the pretense at smallness, the tiny fragment, lost and drifting on a violent sea.  An invitation.  All concepts are vanities, all words, soundless offerings.
What would happen if "I" dropped the strings and props, the shields and barricades.  What does it feel like when the full weight of life crashes through a heart and the tiny murmured "ta-thump, ta-thump" breaks under the weight of so much beauty.
The Buddha once said the biggest problem man faces is the belief that there is time.
Looking through the clear morning at a world so radiant the only response is silence, I am reminded that this moment, and this moment, and this moment and this, is the only moment there is.  An invitation.

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