Oh yeah. Get this.

So I’m out enjoying the Boise weather today, taking a walk after a dharma meditation meeting. It’s a balmy forty-seven degrees outside, which is ridiculous for February, but hey, that global warming thing will only be an issue until December when the world goes tits up and the Pocky Lips claims us all. Already digressing, which is just fun to write and makes me think that when one digresses it sounds like something they should be apologetic about and probably hide from their parents and vaguely makes me think of the Kama Sutra move Congress of the Cow just because digress and congress end in the same five letters…

God damn it! Focus, E. Really, that’s WHY you were on a walk, taking in the sun and the sounds of, well, nobody, since Boise is fucking desolate downtown on a Sunday at noon.

Right.

I was downtown for a group meditation that left me feeling stellar in my mind bits in the sense that I wasn’t feeling any of my mind bits at all. I walked around and stayed as present as possible. In the moment. No projecting into the future to think of cars that can fly and cars that have lasers that can shear through other cars and cars that have been altered to look like steam-powered locomotives that can fly and have lasers. No thinking of the past, especially no thinking about jelly donuts I’ve eaten and whether or not lemon-filled donuts or raspberry-filled donuts are best (lemon wins because raspberry takes demerits for the seeds).

Here’s how it goes, sort of. I walk and focus on my breath. I think of what it means to meditate, to gain that transcendent state of full awareness. To meditate is to practice enlightenment, but to move past the thoughts to see the transitory nature of thought in our relativistic state one must…SHUT THE FUCK UP, BRAIN. THINKING ABOUT MEDITATION IS EXACTLY WHAT MEDITATION SHOULD BE CURTAILING! DON’T USE THE WORD CURTAILING IN YOU MIND. WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TRYING TO IMPRESS? THAT’S A WORD MEANT FOR ADULT CONVERSATIONS AND THERE ARE NO ADULTS IN HERE!

Okay, fine. I walk and focus on my breath. I see things. I don’t really remember what, probably downtown shit, because my eyes were open, but I don’t think about the shit or the future of the shit or the past of the shit. I’m doing pretty good. Air goes in. Air goes out. My feet keep moving.

My feet move me behind the library, taking me towards the Greenbelt and Sunday joggers and other people I hate. I’m looking around, not really focusing on anything until I’m fully present and aware and zen about this:

What the fuck is this? I think this immediately. So that counts as being in the moment, at least when you’re looking at the remains of what must have been a sodding bald eagle. Look at that giant, bloody bone! It’s like the size of my tibia, (if the tibia is one of the forearm bones…because I’m not doing A&P research for this blog post) if it had been removed and put next to some feathers collected from downed bird nests and left in the middle of the sidewalk behind the area of the library where kids go to read books about animals that never die and leave their messy parts in the middle of polite society.

Stay in the present, E. Focus on your breath.

But there’s gory crap on the ground.

Focus.

I want to look at it closer. But I don’t want to focus on my breath when I bend over it. Probably smells as dead as it really is.

Then look, but stay detached, outside of the sorrow.

Okay, I’m outside of the sorrow. But how did it die? Something has been gnawing on it. It looks like some homeless dude got himself a weapon and went dinner hunting and dealt with the eagle with his weapon and then dealt with it again with his mega-hunger, the kind of hunger only a homeless man probably has and then he left some black feathers around it in a weird, voodoo sort of offering to all birds that are tasty or maybe just because he’s a crazy. Weird, I’m stuck on this bone being decorated with feathers by someone. Like they don’t come together, that bone and feathers. Was the bone there and then the feathers came later? Yeah, probably. Feathers are definitely classified as accessories to bones.

Would you shut the fuck up and live in the moment? Meditate!

I AM living in the moment. With this gargantuan-boned dead bird-thing. Oh shit, it must have really suffered before it died. Maybe it put up a good fight. Eagle versus Wombat, which would be like any really good Kung Fu movie, except set in Tasmania where wombats actually live, not in Boise, and instead of people that employ the fighting styles of Eagle and Wombat there would be actual animals fighting to the death. Of course a wombat could never win against an eagle, not with the eagle’s talons and sharp beak. Oh, how silly would that fight be? Completely absurd and unfair to the wombat! But, okay, back to the moment. I wonder what it felt like for the bird, trying to fly away with that one giant-ass bone in it’s body. I mean, it surely had many giant-ass bones, but I only see one so I’ll focus on that. I’m trying to live in the moment.

No, you aren’t. Meditation teaches that freedom from suffering comes from detachment.

I’m not too suffer-y right now. And the bird most definitely isn’t. When its head detached, I’m sure it became free from suffering.

You’re not even trying…

Buddha would have laughed, right? Huh?

E, what would Buddha have really done in this situation?

I don’t know. He probably wouldn’t have eaten the bird. Not like the homeless man.

You made up the idea of a homeless man eating the bird.

Point?

…

Okay, well, I’m going to take a picture of it.

Why the hell do you need a picture of it?

Because I want to remember the time I saw the dead bird and its one big bone outside the library in Boise.

If you lived in transcendence, you wouldn’t need to reflect on it at all.

I can transcend later. This is really fucking interesting.

(and then the part of me that wants to try to become self-aware is throttled to death by the part of me that has an iPhone and wants to take pictures of bloody feathers on the sidewalk and think of an eagle and a wombat engaged in a battle only one can leave alive while the homeless man referees…)

To my credit, I spend the rest of my walk completely in the moment since I have the picture to look at later and write a weird-ass blog post about.

Moral of the story, kids, is to watch where you walk so you don’t get death on your Keds. Oh, and another moral to keep in mind is that you can always brow-beat parts of yourself into going back from whence they annoyingly came. And, lastly, that trying to improve on oneself is always an admirable goal. Unless you get distracted. By gnarly dead things.

Om.