I am driving south on I5 toward Williams, California. Morning sun is pouring into my friend’s Honda Fit; a big rig rumbles in front of us. Cruise control is on, and my friend and I are talking.
A large seagull flares up, and in full thrust, swerves to cross the road. A seeming miscalculation–instead of clearing the semi trailer, it careens into the metal side. Two feathers drop as the gull, its body broken, spins toward the ground, never to rise again. Our conversation is shocked into silence by this instantaneous transformation.
The mind wants to roll back time to just a mere thirty seconds ago–to somehow shift the participating objects so the seagull doesn’t have to die. At the same time, I notice that awareness has already opened and included gull, truck, car, freeway, observers.
I bless the seagull as our car rolls on, now a mile or so down the road.
Nothing about life is easy, or–if we open to the heart of the matter–hard. It simply is.
© Amrita Skye Blaine, 2012
photo credit: http://www.bluekaffee.com
the heart of the matter 
[We] are so often seduced by contemporary spirituality and its rhetoric to live only in the UP of experience, and yet, life also innocently and endlessly expresses itself with equal validity, in the so-called DOWN.
Life does not need reconciliation – only the web of [mind] seeks reconciliation, and, as you so elegantly noted, at the heart of the matter there is spontaneous transformation and transition in the here/now of [ourself].
LikeLike