Many years ago, i was listening to an experienced meditation teacher counseling a student about her practice. The student complained that every time she sat to meditate an owl started to hood outside her window. She seemed frustrated and lamented that this owl was disturbing her meditation.
I remmeber thinking,“ah , so perfect.” this owl is a gift. You get to preactice letting the owl be what it is. You can let the hooting happen and gently bring your awareness back to the breath.
I was shocked when the teacher recommended that the student buy a pair of ear defenders to shut out the sound of the owl. I couldn’t believe it; i was incredulous. I actually felt a little angry.
This morning, as we sat down to meditate, C and I discussed the owl scenario, and we brainstormed for solutions. She suggested,”how about putting hte ear defenders on the owl?” this idea sent me into a round of belly laughing that knocked me off my meditation cushion. There is something perfect about that solution to the problem, and something impssible about the challenge it represents. The next time it happens, go put ear defenders on the owl.
I can see that owl in my mind’s eye, sitting there on the branch, with feathers ruffled from a struggle. It has a pair of bright-red ear defenders perched on its head. All it has to say is,”whoo”
Increasingly, my perspective on this owl issue has shifted. Now it doesn’t seem so much that the hooting of the iwl is a challenge to the ability to focus, but rather that the hooting is actually the point of the meditation. You sit down to meditate and waht is happening is he hooting of an owl that hooting is silence hooting. It’s ironic to me now that the very thing that was being searched for by the meditation student was, in fact, the hoot of the owl. Yet the student rejected what she sought when it arrived. Worse still, the teacher recommended a way to shut the truth out if it came again in the future.
C often says meow to me. I don’t fully know why. I often sing silly songs to her and about her, such as, C Dinh, C Dind, everybody’s talking about C Din, and she will respond to me with meow meow... . Sometimes, i ask her a question, and she simply responds with meow. This can be a little frustrating. When we’re apart, and we have not communicated for a while, she will sometimes text me, meow.
After C’s best friend died when she was a teenager, she went through a period of selective mutism, a time when she didn’t talk at all. She still doesn’t talk very much. On the other hand, i talk a lot; i talk about everything. In the wild, cats don’t meow to each other, cats have learned to meow only in response to hunmans. Meowing is the sound of cats trying to talk. I imagine that C’s meowing is a way for the mute part of her to respond to the humand sounds that i make.
After all that meowing, C recently she said woof to me, and it broke my mind. I think it’s because i’ve been really listening to each hing, trying to hear nothing and everthing in it. For some reason taht soud of C saying woof is overwhelming to me. The overwhelm doesn’t even happen to me; it happens to nobody. I also don’t know where it’s happening. It seems like it’s happening everywhere at once. Somewhere, something happens, and that something makes me buckle over and start laughing out loud. I can;t grasp hold ot if and keep it, unless it shows up again as a memory. It’s just there for a moment and then it’s gone. I wouldn’t even really want to keep it. Who wants to hold on to being hit by a bus?
It’s like an easter egg hidden inside me. It’s right there, about to happen at any moment, and when it does my whole wolrd turns upside down. It’s like a bug in the matrix. When C says woof, the screen on the picture of reality seems to fuzz and glitch. I can;t stop her from saying woof. It happens when it happens, and when it does it seems to shatter my world, stripping the seams out of reality.
Perhaps, one day, i will notice that everything and nothing is woofing, even the owl, and even the meditation eacher recommending ear defeners.
Duncan Rianch, Ph.D. - Medium
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