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awakening
September 2007 
Life & Death - The Hawkness Of The Hawk.
Posted on May 25th, 2007
by 
JewelMountain
JewelMountain
So Basho asked after a visit to the zoo,
"They were a society of flightless creatures, content, secure,
well fed and well taken care of. But were they pink flamingos?" Good question!
The cosmologist Brian Swimme points out that the comfort path for we human beings is a secret misery. The comfort path looks so easy and sells so well that the entire earth and most of its species have been placed in great precariousness.
Swimme asks "what is the quality of hawkness?"
The "hawkness of the hawk" depends on the extraordinary speed of mice. Its bloody hard to be a hawk and stay alive. If it were easy to catch mice, if mice were fatter and slower, and tended to wander leisurely past hawks, then gradually hawks would become fatter and slower. Their eyesight would grow less keen and they might even need spectacles after a while. Their ability to lurch toward a passing mouse as if their very life depended on it would gradually diminish. They would become bereft of the deepest part of their own strength until one day we'd look at them and ask "where is the quality of hawkness?"
It would have gone, disappeared into the secret misery of comfort.
This can teach us a lot about living, about life and death.
Life is an endless cycle of giving and receiving. Human life itself is granted as an extraordinary gift, as far as we know one of the rarest gifts in the Universe!
Do we really appreciate that in the way we live our life, in how we live and appreciate this very moment? Or are we drifting along comfortably in our own little stories?
Everything on from the Big Bang through eons of pure energy, then through eons of matter, then through eons of life coming into being, life after life after life, has yielded to open the way to you and to this very moment.
Everything that has ever lived is laying down its life all the way, like a great royal road leading exactly to this life, this consciousness, and this rarest of human chances.
What a gift! If you look into a newborn baby's eyes you can see the gift there still so clearly, the planets and the stars still turning in the baby's eyes.
Everything is given, where it comes from nobody knows.
When you open yourself to the falling away of a life, theres the other revelation of the true nature of the Universe, that everything is also asked.
The gift is passed on entirely. It leaves our hands and goes back around the corner into the dark. We don't know where it goes or need to know.
This wild animal body that we walk about in is simple and ultimately fearless in how it meets suffering. It is here for all kinds of suffering and all kinds of joy.
It doesn't hold back. It knows how to do it: how to be born; how to continue to be born deeper and deeper into life; more and more richly layered by experience.
And then, it knows how to let go, to give way and disappear back into that dark.
But something blocks us from truly knowing what the body knows. Something balks in us and says 'no not me, i've been granted an exception!'
This is the comfort path of secret misery, which has little true curiousity, or real creativity, or lasting joy. "Where is the quality of hawkness?"
The roar that wakes us and saves us from all our doubts is complete intimacy with life, inseperable from intimacy with death. It might be the Buddha's glimpse of the morning star, the fleeting sight of a plum tree in blossom, or a twig breaking underfoot.
The great teachers spoke of realisation, of seeing into the core of our own being, which is the core of the Universe, as the Great Death. It is an intimation of death, cessation, stopping, that opens up our Great Life.
Dogen Zenji's teacher shouted "Body and Mind dropped away".
The old Hebrew prophets sang of it, "For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace, the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."
The mystery at the heart of each blade of grass, pebble, cloud, dream, and human body is intimate with death, lit by death, flooded by life. Right now!
It is said that until you've wept deeply, you haven't meditated.
Tears can be the first sign of grace.
The stubborn human heart must break open completely so that everything may be here, fully itself, just as it is, at last.
"They were a society of flightless creatures, content, secure,
well fed and well taken care of. But were they pink flamingos?" Good question!
The cosmologist Brian Swimme points out that the comfort path for we human beings is a secret misery. The comfort path looks so easy and sells so well that the entire earth and most of its species have been placed in great precariousness.
Swimme asks "what is the quality of hawkness?"
The "hawkness of the hawk" depends on the extraordinary speed of mice. Its bloody hard to be a hawk and stay alive. If it were easy to catch mice, if mice were fatter and slower, and tended to wander leisurely past hawks, then gradually hawks would become fatter and slower. Their eyesight would grow less keen and they might even need spectacles after a while. Their ability to lurch toward a passing mouse as if their very life depended on it would gradually diminish. They would become bereft of the deepest part of their own strength until one day we'd look at them and ask "where is the quality of hawkness?"
It would have gone, disappeared into the secret misery of comfort.
This can teach us a lot about living, about life and death.
Life is an endless cycle of giving and receiving. Human life itself is granted as an extraordinary gift, as far as we know one of the rarest gifts in the Universe!
Do we really appreciate that in the way we live our life, in how we live and appreciate this very moment? Or are we drifting along comfortably in our own little stories?
Everything on from the Big Bang through eons of pure energy, then through eons of matter, then through eons of life coming into being, life after life after life, has yielded to open the way to you and to this very moment.
Everything that has ever lived is laying down its life all the way, like a great royal road leading exactly to this life, this consciousness, and this rarest of human chances.
What a gift! If you look into a newborn baby's eyes you can see the gift there still so clearly, the planets and the stars still turning in the baby's eyes.
Everything is given, where it comes from nobody knows.
When you open yourself to the falling away of a life, theres the other revelation of the true nature of the Universe, that everything is also asked.
The gift is passed on entirely. It leaves our hands and goes back around the corner into the dark. We don't know where it goes or need to know.
This wild animal body that we walk about in is simple and ultimately fearless in how it meets suffering. It is here for all kinds of suffering and all kinds of joy.
It doesn't hold back. It knows how to do it: how to be born; how to continue to be born deeper and deeper into life; more and more richly layered by experience.
And then, it knows how to let go, to give way and disappear back into that dark.
But something blocks us from truly knowing what the body knows. Something balks in us and says 'no not me, i've been granted an exception!'
This is the comfort path of secret misery, which has little true curiousity, or real creativity, or lasting joy. "Where is the quality of hawkness?"
The roar that wakes us and saves us from all our doubts is complete intimacy with life, inseperable from intimacy with death. It might be the Buddha's glimpse of the morning star, the fleeting sight of a plum tree in blossom, or a twig breaking underfoot.
The great teachers spoke of realisation, of seeing into the core of our own being, which is the core of the Universe, as the Great Death. It is an intimation of death, cessation, stopping, that opens up our Great Life.
Dogen Zenji's teacher shouted "Body and Mind dropped away".
The old Hebrew prophets sang of it, "For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace, the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."
The mystery at the heart of each blade of grass, pebble, cloud, dream, and human body is intimate with death, lit by death, flooded by life. Right now!
It is said that until you've wept deeply, you haven't meditated.
Tears can be the first sign of grace.
The stubborn human heart must break open completely so that everything may be here, fully itself, just as it is, at last.
Access: PublicTagged with: zen, buddhism, life, death, living, meaning, comfort, brian swimme, hawkness, susan murphy, upside down zen, awakening, enlightenment, realisation, realization, dogen, hebrew, mystery, suffering, freedom, heart, tears
anything added to this post would be 'gilding the lily'
but ignoring the obvious here is a bit of 'gilding' :)
“…To find out actually what takes place when you die you must die.
This isn't a joke. You must die - not physically but psychologically,
inwardly, die to the things you have cherished and to the things you are
bitter about. If you have died to one of your pleasures, the smallest or
the greatest, naturally, without any enforcement or argument, then you
will know what it means to die. To die is to have a mind that is
completely empty of itself…” j.k.