BLACKBIRD and THE TAO OF HEAVEN

Namaste,

I hope you are all enjoying the journey we call “life”, as challenging as it may be sometimes.

It is very easy to get swept away in a moment of frustration or fury. Yet, when most of us look back at our lives, we find that there are far moments of joy and pleasure than the other.

Because our nervous system is programmed to remember threats with far greater acuity than pleasure (because pleasure usually doesn’t threaten our lives), without realizing it, we also remember, and tend to reenact the behaviors associate with the memories that are often triggering events for us.

When challenging moments arise, I find it helpful to ask myself, “do I want to act the same way I did last time? Will acting the same way this time produce a different result than last time?

Vidya took this photo of me last night as I was doing my evening sun meditation.

If you look to the left, you can see a blackbird perched atop of one of my rock stacks. This is a decoy that was just given to me by one of my faculty and a very dear friend to me, Suzi Nevell. Suzi lives in New Zealand and her clinic is called:

Movement Inc Ltd.

1/401 Great North Road
Grey Lynn
Auckland, New Zealand

If any of you living in Auckland need help, Suzi is easily one of the most skilled physical therapists I’ve ever worked with.

Thanks for the lovely blackbird Suzi. It was fun watching how the blackbirds coming home to roost reacted to it last night!

I could see them looking down at it and making noises. It was as though they were waiting for it to say something back. Quite cute really.

I’ve had many stacks knocked over by birds but only get to see that happen on rare occasions because they won’t commonly land on the stacks when I’m working in the garden, particularly not blackbirds because they are more stand-offish than most birds.

A funny story about this issue. Just a day or two after Suzi sent me an email asking me what my experience of blackbirds and/or ravens was, I was working out in my garden and one of the neighbors who walks her dogs past my place and says hello to me most days stopped and told me something unprovoked.

She said, “I was walking by your house the other day and noticed that you’d made some changes to your rock stacks. I looked over and the four biggest stacks all had black rocks on top of them. But then I realized, they were not rocks. Every one of your four tallest stacks has a blackbird perched on top.”

I thought that was pretty interesting serendipity because I’ve never seen a blackbird on my stacks while I was there in the garden. They sit high in the surrounding trees and chatter away like a bunch of old ladies at a bridge club, but they don’t usually get to close to humans.

The road is about 40 feet from the stacks she was referring to and she said they stayed there as she looked at them. They must have felt comfortable with her standing there holding onto her dog leashes.

There is a huge African honeysuckle tree in my garden and it has beautiful red-orange flowers. It is home to somewhere between 60 and 100 humming birds.

When they come home at night, shortly before sunset, they often come all at once. The sound of that many humming birds flying together is very loud and interesting.

The first time it happened, I was standing about 10 feet from their nesting tree and they came from behind me.

I literally thought a helicopter was about to land in my front yard and turned around in a state of shock and wonder at what on earth was happening.

There were so many of them that the sky went dark as they approached, much like it does when bees swarm.

I’ve seen it many times now, but it’s most fun when a friend is over and they come home. It really blows people’s minds to see and hear so many humming birds at once.

They are so good at hiding their nests, even when I climb inside the foliage, I can’t see a single nest, but I can assure you, they are there.

THE TAO OF HEAVEN

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I let my inner-self (soul) guide me to a card from my Tao Te Ching card set each morning.

I particularly liked the card I pulled this morning and thought I’d share it with you.: #47 – The Tao of Heaven

Without going outside
one can know the whole world.
Without looking out of the window
one can see the Tao of Heaven.

The further one goes, the less one knows.

Therefore the sage
without walking, knows everything,
without seeing, identifies everything,
without doing, accomplishes everything.

Enjoy your day!

Love and chi,

Paul Chek