The split second we slide out of the birth canal, we are slapped in the face with light, color and sound, not to mention the complete shock of inhaling something called air. Even though everyone one of you reading these words has had that same experience, it’s got to be like getting free-fall dropped into a world of molten lava, sensory overload. I’m gonna guess our world is very small at the time and it has to be all about us. 

Zen practitioners often speak about living in the moment and experiencing absolutely everything as if it is the first time, each time. Arriving at this state of being takes practice and it is pretty much like always reaching for the brass ring, which is just a whisper away, but it’s about the effort, because when you get there, the ring moves a fraction beyond your reach. For the newborn, the brass ring is their pacifier, without even trying to grasp for it.

I know there is a difference between eyesight and vision, the former about just seeing and the latter about assigning names and feelings to whatever it is in front of you. Slowly, the baby begins to see everything, but nothing has any meaning yet. There are people, who read libraries and spend their lives trying to get to that original state of being. Life is this wondrous circle, where the beginning and the end join together in a seamless moment, here and gone.

In the beginning, the landscape doesn’t extend all that far beyond the borders of the little human. It is a time of primal selfishness, where immediate gratification is all that matters. Patience is a non-existent commodity and it seems to be a rare and precious state of being that often eludes many of us forever. 

We grow so quickly and change is the mantra. Soon, that little baby is a memory, for us and our parents. As a parent, I remember being able to hold my sons in the crook of my arm, but you better believe they don’t and rekindling that time feels unfocused and vague to me all these years later.

I wonder if there anything more potent than having your basic needs met as a child and how fulfilling that must be. Feelings without names start becoming familiar, many of them repeated with solid predictability, breeding expectation as well. Slowly, but ever so surely, ideations begins to take hold in the minds of the little ones. Somewhere, in this continuum, imagination takes flight, the visions of the mind.

I’ve been wondering why we seem to get stuck in our dialogue with each other. So much thinking and communication doesn’t feel like it has evolved for many of us, like children still preoccupied with their immediate gratification, unable to see beyond the slats of their cribs. The first thing that came to mind for me was that moment when we first open our eyes, greeting a world for which there has been no preparation at all. 

Here I am, on the opposite end of this amazing journey, looking for the path back all that way and then trying to carry it forward to where I am now. I did want to make the distinction between being able to see with our eyes open and the visions that come to us when our eyes are closed, seeing things only we can, often at a loss for words. The spirit world exists and even though I am not one of those, who can see it, I know for certain it exists, a world witnessed by those with that special vision.

In one of nature’s tricks, the older you get, the worse your eyesight becomes, but if you have been paying attention throughout the years, your vision improves. I like to think of it as a kind of peripheral vision, being able to see where you are, in relation to the world around you. 

Zen and physics collide in what we can call the Unified Theory of All Things. The Buddha spoke about something called dependent co-arising, the relationship between absolutely everything that has ever happened and ever will happen. To make it even more elusive, every change effects every other change, an endless loop that will make your hair look like Einstein’s if you think about it too long.  You have to close your eyes if you want to even try and see it. 2,500 years after the Buddha, Quantum Physics was birthed and in fits and starts, embraced this intellectually elusive truth. No matter how hard you run after it, the harder it is to catch that damn brass ring.

I look at the hair-trigger, loaded gun, pointed right between our eyes, going by the name Climate Emergency, and the vast majority of us can’t see it. We are still in the damn crib, preoccupied with the bottle and the clean diaper. We will not be able to deal with it, as long as we refuse to understand how magnificently interconnected we all are. When I refer to interconnection, I mean the hard as diamond link between all of us, all sentient beings, the tulip, the panda, the Maori. 

Look inside, close your eyes, see everything, everywhere.