I've struggled with something for a few years now. It starts with a story.
Way back in the day, long before I developed any interest in birding, one of the monks and I were sitting together by a window in the brothers’ dining hall at Blue Cliff Monastery in upstate New York. A field guide to the birds of North America was sitting out on the table by a pair of binoculars and I picked them up and began searching the bird feeder and the grass beneath it for something to learn. I was going back and forth between the book and the window. After a few minutes of silently watching me, Phap Khoi turned and said, why do you need to know what they are? Isn't it enough to be mindful of them, here with us now?
He was trying to teach me something, and I didn't have an answer. But I didn't like the conclusion I felt like he was getting at. That we need not learn the nuances of nature, that the details are irrelevant to the mindfulness practitioner, that a bird is a bird.
Maybe I misinterpreted him. Maybe he just wanted me to appreciate nature with the non-discriminating mind, without the purpose of getting something or somewhere. Big nowhere-to-go energy. But it left me feeling uneasy; and for years I've come back to this question, especially as my birding life has emerged, admittedly with no small amount of somewhere-to-go, something-to-do energy, with the desire to count, to accomplish, to be amazed.
Yesterday, my mother was listening to Ekhart Tolle at her sewing desk. I love Ekhart Tolle. He was describing the beauty of a relationship with a dog to an audience of technologists. Then suddenly he turned and ended up on the same rhetorical corner as Brother Phap Khoi. You don't need to know the details of nature to be alive with it. If you note your energy, you'll see it's most alive when you're present with nature, not identifying species.
Now, I wasn't taking notes, so I'm not quoting him on saying that exactly, but that was the gist I heard. And here's why it made me upset.
For decades the American mindfulness movement has done a poor job at appreciating the gravity of climate change, focusing on personal, individual growth and liberation, certainly at the start. It's been part and parcel of the Protestant ethic and the self-help, pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, meritocratic, capitalist mythology. A bird is a bird and if it makes you feel good then that bird has done its “job.” Don't bother learning what you can about it because your job isn't to help it. Your job is to look out for you and your own spiritual attainment.
What happened to the bodhisattva vow, that Mahayana commitment to save all sentient beings?
Maybe this bird blindspot was the answer. If you don't even know what they are, how they live, what they need, how can you help?
(That not attempting to learn first is the same blindness and overconfidence that fuels the colonialist foreign aid mania of roaring into the so-called Third World with solutions and not questions and curiosity. But I'll save that rant for another day.)
I recently participated in an 8-week online Engaged Buddhism retreat, titled “This Is It”, hosted by Earth Holders. I learned a lot, and was impressed with how the virtual environment could be designed to create a holding space for the kind of powerful organic growth that characterizes the Plum Village tradition.
On the last day of the retreat, a participant asked a question to the teachers about equanimity and comfort. It was a great question. As my friend, Kae Foo, recalled it, “can't the principle of equanimity be a guise for privileged people to hide behind their privilege?”
Sister The (pr. Tey), one of the retreat teachers, took the question. She began with an expansive definition of equanimity, saying that to neglect the reality of interbeing and enter a state of mental quietude is not equanimity. To practice equanimity is to develop our understanding of interbeing and the truth that while others suffer, we suffer.
I was deeply touched by this answer. Wisdom is one of those things that seems so obvious and “of course!” when you hear it, but can be so hard to find on one’s own. Part of what surprised me was how it integrated the practice of mindfulness with the practice of mental discrimination between subjects and objects. Others are not just dreams, but part of us. I wondered if this insight could be applied to my dilemma with birds.
Personally, I don’t meditate to achieve a state of peace. I meditate so I can be a calm, clear, and compassionate member of society and of the planet. I’ve also noticed that my birding life could use a little more mindfulness energy. I think all self-aware birders will learn this at some point. There’s a lot of desire in birding. But there’s also a lot of learning.
We learn about ecosystems and evolution, unbelievable seasonal brain plasticity for the memorization of food hiding places, migratory air currents and thermals, adaptations for salt-water-only diets, sexual dimorphism, and of course feathers and beaks adapted to wonderfully specific and general uses. It’s pure magic out there, people.
Engaged Buddhism is about bringing the practice of mindfulness into every area of our lives, because suffering can be found anywhere, sometimes gross, sometimes subtle. As one of my mentors, Charles Goodman, likes to say, “birth, old age, illness, and death” don’t discriminate.
Where am I going with this? I want to say that while my birding life could use some more mindfulness, I also believe the mindfulness community could use more birding.
If what we want is to help all sentient beings, we need to understand them. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “love is understanding and understanding is love”. And if we do not understand, we cannot help. Our equanimity includes our interbeing with all animals and plants (and dare I say minerals?), so we need to learn to practice mindfulness with our birding and to practice birding with our mindfulness.
Of course, the same could be said about frogs or whales or beetles. And I’m all for it.