The Moment Everything Turned

Some years ago my daughter and I were wading along in a small wood. I used to take her there so that we could enjoy the peace and quiet that natural beings gift us with. I remember clearly, as I feverishly looked after her from a safe distance, as a father does lest his beloved 'gets hurt', the spirit called my gaze away from my fears as a clear chirping sound came from right above me. I instinctively looked up, looking for what my thought-mind could only conceive of as a bird perching on a tree, chirping his lungs away.

But the bird was not there. There was no bird.

A tiny bit rattled, I fixed my gaze more intensely on the area wherefrom I had heard the sound coming, still searching for this clever and tricky bird. The chirping came again, and again, but my ears contradicted my eyes. Then I noticed that two branches of the old wise tree were rubbing against each other in the soft breeze, just barely noticeable, creating the exact sound of the chirping of a little bird.

It was at that moment that something like a knowing surged as a distinct sensation in my body, from the Solar Plexus upwards, posing a question that was filled with a surprising and life-changing answer:

What if it is the tree that created the space in which the bird had to come about, the emptiness that called the bird into being? What if the tree and the wind, colluding in creating a song of such beauty, made it so that there had to be a being specifically equipped to evolve and develop that song, and therefore made the bird necessary? What if the song created the bird, and not the other way round?

This was one of the important moments in my life, one of those that one easily sweeps under the rug of memory as a 'quasi-mystical experience'. Indeed, it was the moment in which, for me, everything turned around, a moment of transition wherefrom I would be swept up by a stream of consciousness by which I would gradually learn to see the world from the inside out.

It changes everything.

Ro-Wan