I am on a walk through the woods. I take a familiar path trying to do the unfamiliar. I am attempting to see and listen in a new way. A way that does not put me in the equation. A way where I am aware of what is around me without making it have to do with me. It is difficult.

Even in the naming of the birds, trees and other life I pass is a kind of claiming on my part, another way of making it have to do with me. Naming is a way of making other life belong to me somehow through my definitions and interpretations, believing I could know that life because I think I know what it is called. While the naming of the world around us serves an important function, it also has its serious drawbacks. As in assumptions we  make. As in believing we have the whole story. As in believing we give something its place. As in believing somehow it belongs to you.

Everything does not have to do with us. The world is not here to be at our beck and call. It is not here to deliver to us our version of how it should be. Other forms of life are sovereign unto themselves, separate from what we want them to be. What would our lives be like if we could simultaneously hold and respect the different forms life takes while knowing on a deeper level that there is Something unifying us all? Or how about on a purely practical level–What would it be like to know that what others do has got absolutely nothing to do with us?