What is happiness? Or anxiety? Fear?

Blue morning sky like a whale, crisp with the scent of stars. Outside, the brick steps lead up to a small bird - a finch, I think - calling out. Little packets of tune escape into the cold air, finding homes in living ears.

Is the bird the song, any more than I am happiness?

Two things exist: the World, and the Great Mind. Together, they spin into one, depending and leaning on each other like galaxies clashing. No use in one without the other. They dance and whirl. Patterns emerge and cling together and we call these the 10,000 Things. We divide space up into States, separate out the Tree from the Ground at its Roots, decide the split second when Food becomes Us. Carve the patterns up and give them names.

What is 'Happiness'? 'Fear'? 'Anxiety'? Nothing real, just states of being. Patterns, filling the gap between the Great Mind within us, and the Great World outside. If raindrops got frozen, suspended in the air above us, collectable using stilts and wooden buckets - would it still be rain?

States of being. Better to say 'I am happy'. Better still to say 'I am being happy'. As the words shift, our own understanding of them - after we have said them - alters and shudders, racing to catch up. I am being anxious, I am being afraid.

"I" am being all these things. The I is these things. The Great MInd - sacred awareness - has no use for them. There to protect the body, but the Great Mind comes before before.

The finch finishes its song and flies off. It is no longer singing, no longer 'being song' or 'having a song'. The song was never its possession. It never wrote down the song or wondered how to improve it or collect fees. The finch was singing and then it wasn't. The tune, caught up in leaves, rings only in my ears, all that is left of memory, packaged up into a Thing, just for me.

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Grey Pebbles, an intermittent mail out tracing a path back home. Subscribe here.