What the Hummingbird Told Me

Trochilid-Trillium Triangle, Scratchboard by Bob Hare © 1977

Dear Friends, I've been attempting to write a one-pager summarizing my philosophy of life if you will and was having difficulty doing it. A hummingbird in my garden told me what to write...so I quickly came inside and put it down. If you're interested read what the hummingbird told me to say...

My philosophy is this Anna’s hummingbird hovering like a fantastic jeweled dream before my eyes. My religion is this tender kiwi leaflet emerging next to the skeletal veil of last years’ leafings. I often get lost in the maze of words and ideas about this world but the astonishing ever-renewing miracle of nature always brings me back into the Garden.

In this Garden I don’t notice myself anymore. I am stilled, quiet, freed from worry and doubt. The past falls away. I have no future. I come to my senses. This ruby-flashing bejeweled and winged miracle dipping its beak into the scarlet trumpets of my just-flowered sage bush and my sentient body are who we are together. I’m trying to convey a subtle but striking difference in perception and being. Most of the time I’m not in the Garden; I look at things and people, I judge them and compare myself to them, I’m outside, separate, alone. I’m too often in my head alienated from my body, breath, senses and nature. The world looks flat, a mere stage where I live out my personal drama of desires and fears—too often a mundane monotony punctuated by challenges to my will. But then a hovering hummingbird shatters this madness and opens a window onto the Infinite. I exit this contracting personal perspective and am ushered quietly into the panoramic view of transpersonal awareness. This transition is always humbling but silently joyful. It is truly coming Home--back to where I know I belong.

The leading edge of the 13.8 billion year-old evolving story of this universe is hovering right here before my eyes. These human eyes and ears taking in the flash and hum of hummingbird eyes and whirring wings are coevolved with the hummingbird’s. We are relations relating. We belong together. We live together—leaf, flower, rain, soil, sun, bird, human. Separate and related. The many and the One.

It is this One that we all come from, are sustained by and return back into to leaf out once again in a new form. It is the Grace of this Great Mystery—this Nameless Ever-Renewing but Never-Changing One—that reveals itself as and in and through all relations: hummingbird-sageflower-human. Seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling—knowing this we are in the Garden walking and talking softly with the One in the cool of the evening. We were never expelled from the Garden except by the development of our mental ego that thinks it is separate. We can have both. We can take our very useful conceptualizing ego into the Garden but it can no longer be in charge of our awareness. Something far greater and more miraculous is in charge.