As you may have noticed, I’ve been slow to produce anything for this website in the past few weeks. That’s because Carol and I bought eight ducklings, a mere week from hatching. They were contented to live in a long, black bin sitting in the bathtub of the guest bedroom. Contented, that is, for a few days. And then they grew. Exponentially, they grew. The race was on for me to built a 10×10 mobile duck run for them to live in. The race ended two nights ago.
While I was building it, and as they were growing like sponges in water, we were able to let them out during the day, thanks to a toddler’s playpen given to us by a friend. It struck us both as too coincidental to be coincidence that the pen began breaking just as we were both trying to put the finishing touches on the run. Trying, but being stymied and wanting to quit. Can’t quit when the duckies are out of the tub and the playpen is falling apart, so we pushed through beneath the unforgiving Hawaiian sun.
As if that wasn’t pressure enough, A hinge connecting the pull-behind mower to our tractor snapped, making it impossible to mow our acreage. Thankfully, we thought, we were able to get a replacement part quickly. But it was the wrong part and so we had to order the right one. It should arrive by Tuesday.
The whole time of the build, I’d been griping about the fact that I couldn’t mow and needed to, because we don’t have normal grass. We have grass that grows taller than me. We’d gone through a few weeks of consistent rain, which I had no reason to believe would let up, but let up it did. And so, the grass was not as out of control as it otherwise would have been and I didn’t lose two days to mowing. Had I, we’d still be working on the duck run and all parties involved would be miserable: the ducks in their bathtub prison, our cats, who were none too fond of any of this, and we, stressed and fatigued.
Upon reflection, I am grateful that the tractor broke down. Otherwise, we’d still be at it. I am grateful that the playpen broke, too. It lit a fire under us to work faster, which the ducks needed. Sometimes we see the invisible hand at work in our lives as we’re chugging along; often, we see it only after the fact. In this case we saw it both ways.
“Invisible hand?” you might ask. “I thought the ultimate stage of being was the onenessy consciousness of No-Thing shining through the body, putting down the illusion of twoness.”
Yes, astute reader, yes. But remember that twoness exists within oneness. Thingness resides in nothingness. That invisible hand and I are one, but it doesn’t mean it’s me in any functional way. The functional way is intrinsic to twoness. The necessary illusions of separation don’t stop manifesting simply because you are aware of them as such. They will always be the case so long as dualistic time-mind dreams them. Nondual timeless-mind uses them like tools—and uses them flawlessly. One who has experienced timeless-mind, yet continues to exist in time-mind, understands all of this. Understands the hidden hand the way taking film classes allows one to watch films as an entranced viewer immersed in the art’s hypnotic trappings and as an objective outsider who notices the brilliance of the score, the cunning of the edits, the tension of the lighting, the delivery of the actors, and so forth, simultaneously.
The universe is a dream. What is the architecture of a dream? Dreams are actions disguised as objects and actions through feeling, both emotional and sensory. They’re also nothing. I mean, right?
And so you may wake up into a dream, become lucid within it, but the dream as action does what it does, even though you know you and the dream and every apparent thing in it are one. The contours of the invisible hand may become visible, but it’s still a hand lending itself. And though deeply the hand is your own, on the level of interactions—the level in which such a hand exists—the hand coordinates. You are one. And you are both.
And you’re also the ducks in the pen quacking, which is why you give so much love and energy and time to little, innocent beings, new to the world, who don’t know you, and may end up fearing you. You are one. And you are both.
At least that’s what you tell yourself when you’re me and exhausted and pondering what it’s all for.