Wandering in the desert the other day, looking for things to photograph as if the mere act of seeing that one special moment, from the right angle were all that mattered…and it is all that matters.

Watching a hawk in the distance I saw it turn to catch the air currents moving up the canyon, right over my head.

I almost got a good shot of it, almost nailed the exposure but not quite. Still they’re strangely thrilling to see flying low oeverhead.

And that notion made me ponder the reality of that bird. A hawk scanning the ground for tiny critters, hunting, hoping to catch something and tear it apart for food. It’s a majestic power animal and a killing machine. Cats are cute and lovable and they’re killing machines too. In fact, every living thing that isn’t a plant is a killing machine. Cows slaughter the innocent plants by the billions. Cats tear the tiny heads off birds for fun and profit.

This is the thing. You live, you kill and you die and are eaten.

This is the cycle of life that we live with every moment and that we, in our lovely safe world, have forgotten about completely. Or maybe we just pretend to forget. I don’t know. People get pretty damn vicious when their perceived interests are threatened.

Civilization is a game we play, a game with pleasant rules constructed so that most people win something. under it all is the animal and the challenge to living, of living. The universe is not Gaia, is not an earth mother, a misstep from Eden. Surviving is a fight of sorts, winning love is a challenge and a battle, sex is violence, eating is killing (sorry vegetarians you’re just as guilty of slaughter). Everything is a battle surrounded in a candy coating.

This is what life is. The happy moments are interstitials. Like commercials for the rest of it all.

And all of that to me is wonder. Not just wonder what it’s all about since I do that all the time. It’s wonder, awe, inspiration, marvel.

Within pain is transformation and within happiness is languish and death. The yin and the yang spin frantically hoping to catch each other and devour each other and neither has any hope.

And that makes me wonder, ponder maybe…ponder what if the perspective was all wrong.

We see the world in opposites and polarities. We see the fight and the consummation. But the fight and the consummation are one of a sort.

So what if you could see the world from another perspective where all of these apparent conflicts and dichotomies were one and the same. This notion haunts me since all the radical change that humans have dreamed up has come from changing the way we see the world, from expanding what was into what might be.

So, how to see the hawk? The mystical experience is of oneness. The hawk and the squirrel are one. Why the dichotomy? Why the apparent difference? Where do you have to be to be able to see it all fade to sameness?

What of death? What of life? The two so clearly different. One the stuff of revulsion and horror, the other eternal joy, a kind of hum, the ringing of a bell, joy. Is there a unity of those states? Is there some perspective some way of thinking in which it all becomes clear.

People need answers, our minds demand them, religion answers. What’s always bothered me is that the whole process of human knowledge is one of constant expanding, and understanding of life and death have not.

Battle, conflict, persuasion, consumption, love, have all become much more complicated and still the old thoughts stand. This is more curious than the thoughts themselves. They feel so wrong to me and yet they exist so they have some reality.

What is that essence they’ve touched? Can it be deeper? Can it be subtler? Can it be more?