The Suspicion of Ducks

I'm at a cafe, overlooking the rice terraces, facing west towards the setting sun.

I go for a stroll to stretch my legs, descending the narrow path between each field.

I sit on a wall separating two domains.

The water runs gentle as a tiny stream under my feet.

Ants scurrying over my legs. The breeze tickles the skin on my face.

Palm trees sway lazily in the same wind. Butterflies flit and flirt.

Everything is rich, green and pungent.

And if I relax enough, I can feel it. That same subtle energy. The same sweetness and

aliveness is right there on the surface of reality, overlooked as we reach beyond it.

Discarded as mundane.

It reflects off the flowers and shrubs. It sings soft and shy in the burbling stream.

I rub my thumb and finger together, the friction felt as tectonic plates. There in the

pressure and resistance is the vitality of the universe. The same potency as a crack of

thunder. The effortless motion that bends a blade of grass. The separateness gone, not

because I am gone, but because I am also all of it.

A bunch of twenty ducks flood the field below, speckled white, brown and black.

Swarming across the wet, muddy patches between fronds of rice.

Eagerly pecking for worms and tasty morsels.

They take turns in checking for predators, at least two of them pulling up to scan for snakes, then bobbing back down for more.

The hypersensitivity of my childhood reflected in their nervous system.

As if somehow, they were ever separate from me.

Driven to participate in the dance of eating and being eaten.

Bound to the same cycles of decay and rebirth.

Balancing on the edge of fear and love.

Clinging to safety in a world of change.

Never knowing the existential dread of the furious human capacity to think ourselves

into a state of confusion and madness.

Never lost from the direct contact with this infinite friction, never mistaking it for mundane.

They look at me with suspicion, as well they should. A trespasser on their patch of turf.

A hitch-hiker in this plane of consciousness. A vagabond on the path to nowhere.

No destination now worthy of leaving this visceral clarity, which will slip away the moment

I'm cast back into the bustling turmoil of humanity. With its ever-increasing penchant for

complexity without seeing the trade, for the opportunity to sit and just be.

I reluctantly stand and walk back up the path to the cafe. Unaware that the sweetness is

leaking from the soles of my feet. Perhaps the footprints I leave behind are filled with

tender shoots of new life, more likely a gradual decay as I reach the world of time,

responsibility, money and disconnection.

That I have seen it at all a gift. That I can't hold it felt as a tragedy in slow motion.

The days will pass, the aliveness on my skin shedding scales of impermanence, until all that

is left is the memory of the whole experience.

But there will be tiny flashes, out of the corner of my eye. The sun will catch a flower

dancing in the breeze and I will feel that miniature pulse of recognition. That the flower

is me. The breeze also. That you are me. That the moon is me, smiling in the inky sky.

In the last field brimming with water, I catch the reflection of the softening sky and the

swaying palms. There under the surface a tiny frog sits perfectly still, waiting for a bite

but not to be bitten.

The clouds shimmer as I freeze to meet its gaze.

I move to get closer, to examine it better, to hold the connection but my shadow startles it.

The quick evasion triggers a ripple that turns the sky to mud.

The moment slips through my grasp.