To the front of my abode is a water bowl for birds, and off to one side is a larger bowl for deer. Every day, in the hot weather several times a day, I refill the bowls. Often this includes washing the bowls because not everyone is tidy in their habits.
The birds have their bowl to themselves because it’s up on a plinth (rescued from an urban Zen Center), which only they can reach. The deer must share their water with the squirrels, the cat from next door, a fox who regularly passes by, roving coyotes, and goodness knows who else visiting while I sleep.
We’re told the Buddha taught that our human ability to experience ourselves as separate from That Which Animates involves “forgetting,” an ignoring (or ignorance) of our authentic nature. That ignorance results in a craving or thirst, in attachment to and desire for objects “outside” our self, things we’re told will fulfill us. But those attachments and desires can never be fulfilled so we live in a perpetual state of what he termed greed, hate, and delusion, a permanent dissatisfaction we experience as suffering.
It didn’t take long for the birds and the deer to discover the water, and shortly after discovering came the claiming. In the age-old tradition of, “Ah, look what I found…it’s mine,” they began to fight over access.
It isn’t just that the woodpeckers fight with the jays or that the big ones run off the little guys and gals; they fight among themselves! Woodpeckers attacking woodpeckers, jays attacking jays. The other day two jays divebombed two deer until the deer abandoned their own water bowl. (It starts to feel so human!)
Now, of course, the truth of the matter is that the water doesn’t belong to any of them, and if I didn’t fill those bowls regularly, they wouldn’t have any water to drink and fight over. Which brings us to what seems like an important “truth” for humans: Nothing belongs to them and nothing belongs to us either. That water isn’t mine to play Lady Bountiful with. This became excruciatingly clear a couple of days ago when the pump quit, and the water along with it.
All of this is given, from the water to the ability of the body to move to the food we eat to the very air we breathe. All of it. “I earned that.” “That’s mine.” “Those belong to me.” No. No, I did not and no that isn’t and no those don’t. Every atom of all of it is given. One day it, and we, will be gone, and as the old saying points out, none of it is going with us.
From my vantage point as critter observer it’s clear there’s plenty for all. There’s no need to stress and fight and get frantic, which it surely appears they’re doing. And yet it’s what they do. And yet it’s what we do.
Perhaps this is a very strong indication that ours is indeed a non-separate reality. Creatures are creatures and when identified as a separate self we all live in an egocentric fear of loss and lack, in dread of a future deprivation born of the current focus on what’s wrong and what’s missing.
Accepting this premise could possibly assuage some of our guilt at being the unnatural-destroyers-of-the-natural-world, but maybe a greater opportunity for us would be to take advantage of our ability NOT to experience our self as separate, for us to choose instead the happiness that is our authentic nature, and from that fulfillment live the generosity and lovingkindness our hearts long for.
Perhaps?
In gasshō,
ch