Hi Holly. (Holly is young enough to have just started school) How are you doing?

‘I’m OK’… smiles

I’ve just been up underneath the trees, it’s really windy isn’t it?

‘Yep’

I was listening to the sounds underneath the tree… do you listen to that sometimes too?

‘Yes’

What’s sounds do you hear?

Holly thinks, seriously, and looks at me… a big smile crosses her face and she declares:

‘Rustle…!’

Mmmm…hmmm…and can you tell me what the sound is when the wind blows even stronger… and more and more trees are waving their leaves and branches?

Holly thinks again…smiles… and puts on a bigger emphasis

‘Rustle…!!’

OK…. So what sound would you hear when all the trees are joining in… and dry leaves are blowing past your feet really quickly down the tarmac road…

Holly considers for a while and then gets back to me… loudly proudly and happily:

‘RUSSELL!!!’

Interesting… Do you think maybe they are all calling out for their dear friend Russell?

Laughter from Holly, and the parents who are there as well.

What you could try, one day if you like, is to stand under the trees but kind of sit inside your ear… and let the sound fill you up completely… And feel how that is ….

Then there is no ‘thinking about’…
which word makes a noise closest to the sound?
… or which word the sound is supposed to sound like…?

But you will really get the sound of the sound….

I know I asked for it in this case, but trying to ‘can’ experience into words is like a kind of desiccation for later re-presentation… a feebly ghost-like gesture towards the amazing actual.

‘Thinking about’ what leaves sound like brings about an abstraction…
Holly disappears into the ‘thought chamber’ and comes back with what she has learned….

The problem with that is we kind of hang a label around the neck of what is always a unique experience – and write on it what we have learned… or our opinion of it… or someone else’s opinion of it.

Then encounters which are fresh seem similar to us. We stop looking and listening, directly experiencing, because we already know.

Instead of there being a co-emergent arising in the field of experience (where I become as I find myself in relation to what is arising, within awareness)… we become the subject, separated. Searching for the right label – as we imagine it to be, then reading off and using what we have written on the label to inform our response.

Using these labels to define/quantify/ qualify experience seems smart but it deadens the world for us, it’s like pouring ash over it.

Abstracted from the actual we sleep through many moments of our lives… in thinking about this or that thought…in pouring in our life energy into them, linking them to make tapestries, arriving at ‘certainties’….

Busy writing on water…we forget…
how the game started…
how the blinkers came on… and we started to believe what we thought to be true.