a photo essay led by beings from afar

When encountered a promotional attempt for some type of educational program that reads “let’s raise children who know the names of all trees and flowers”, I was reminded of my own confusions and grasping tendencies during walks and time away from excessively human-centric spaces. 

Names that they were wearing I couldn’t call out. 

Birds I watched waited for the books at home to be known. 

Trees and plants linger in ambiguous identification choices instigated by lowly rated apps, or waited in clouds for the participation of experts’. 

Mushrooms and fungus are chatted about in Discord and community Facebook. One combs through comments and arguments, dynamics and alienation, to generate clues that are ever so unstable yet defined in its suspension. Beings become knowledge that are glidable objects, then follows the attachment to knowing, in order to be known. 

two brown bodied birds one perched on a fence post and another in a hilly field

For an intentional period of time, I was in community with people who came from different places to learn and share on climate activism and buddhism. The topics weren’t means to an end, we shared from deeper places. 

One individual was experiencing what seemed similar to my own recent events of navigating grief in relation. After her sharing, I wanted to point at the similarities, to “offer” something perhaps. I resorted to keep reminding myself to stay silent, held by our community guidelines where we agreed to not comment, “this is not a conversation”, the line reads. 

In the end, what was seen remained present, and the spaces felt more held. 

an orange and brown bodied bird perched on a utility pole

Teachers of dharma often say that to uphold awareness is like pulling skin away from bones, so as to be aware of what’s moving, rather than going along with our tendencies, our patterns, and our wheels. 

In spaces that overlaps work and personal relations, which in its initial separation speaks to the effect of having being alienated, I put effort in pealing away my attachment of the social self. And still, I find it difficult to not “comment”, to not declare a knowing, which seems to be what is sought at times from the interlocutors. 

a long neck and dark bodied bird perched on a rock overlooking the ocean

Perhaps knowing reified has to do with how one attaches, and as modern therapeutic practices taught us, attachment styles vary, but all are symptomatic of some other stories. Although I’m no enthusiastic investigator of styles in attaching, I could understand that it halts the potential of being fully in relation.

A gutsy place is then often called upon, to not fill silence, to not worry about what is reflected back upon, to not read weathers on a dinner table, to not glide, and to be in touch with a spaciousness within, that points to our capacity to be in relation, our capacity to make kins. 

a dark bodied mammal showing tip of head and belly in the middle of an ocean

Later on I was often reminded of the silence I kept in that session during my walks, and I could sense a similar kind of reciprocity there alongside the steps into muds and puddles. 

Eyes come in touch with bare shapes and lines, inhaling what moves waves, marked by hand brushing through thorns tall and low. 

When one is not traveling but here with rootedness, adhering to openness inherit the grace of living. Gradually one picks up the paired relations through the embodied time spent holding an open awareness, what needs to be cut away, reinforced, or counted, what’s concealing, thriving, enduring, adapting, conflicting, slowly become ways of being together. 

You could then name what you love, and the named returns a knowing of you.

a brown bodied bird perched on a hill top against background of blue ocean and snow mountains

I have asked myself countless times when trying to sustain this practice, what is this space one drops into that has such immense capacity? Is this what true listening feels like? And is its apparent nature the reason why we were able to drift so far to resist trust and truth, like reckless children of life's sparks, being proud of warmth’s origin.

This space offers listening and being with, in Buddhism philosophies it has many names, essence love, clarity, luminosity, lucidity, basic goodness, foundation, etc. In indigenous philosophies it is often known as interbeing-ness through our capacity to make kins. 

Both are frequently misunderstood as suppressions of thoughts and bounds of identifications. Yet none of which can happen without the background and spaciousness of how one can be enabled to know, sense, and act, of which both affirms. 

a grey bodied mammal showing tip of a nose in the middle of dynamic ocean waves
a dark bodied bird with curly and long beak walking on rocky shores of an ocean

This space is filled with acceptance, in a state that is most susceptible to differences.

Here, unconditional relationships form through sensing and thinking. 

All accepting is not a route many can afford, all accepting has once been the demise of us. 

Our capacity for kinship is a wounded space, not able to root in units and representations we wander and define, in order to survive. 

To live and make from an unconditional relationship returns one to unscalable sites. And sometimes they are close-by, windy, filled with patterns moving in memories. Sometimes lands one lived and is living on collide against the backdrop of light, and it is received in silence.

These images taken from walks around our home constitute a series of beings from afar, and some of them have many names. Please enjoy a few more from this collection:

a dark bodied bird standing on rocky shores overlooking the ocean
two birds with large wingspan against sky and clouds seen from below
a brown bodied bird with white chest on a hill ridge
a dark bodied bird perched on a pine tree top seen from below