The Overview Effect
The road is dirt, her two companions are large and white and hairy. They are 7600’ above the sea.
The silence is ear splitting when you think about it. Instead, she fills the quiet with vibrating rambling thoughts. At first her ears would careen for sound, seeking it out, filling it in. But now six years into the silence, her senses are filled with mountain air - evergreen trees - rocks - stars - bears - wind - clouds - dust and dirt - deer - moon phases - foxes -and valleys.
Some days all are nearly unseen, that is why she walks.
She takes a walk in the early evening, during the old ‘arsenic hour’, a time of transition from outside work (job) to inside work (family). This shifting is no longer filled with carpools and car seats, lunchboxes, laundry, homework, shopping and meal prep. Those weekday transformation hours historically included a meltdown and a generous amount of wine. Now working from her home, with no small children, she doesn’t commute, but instead walks the road, usually with wine.
The Overview Effect by Frank White explains how astronauts experience earth as one mass with disregard to borders, boundaries, fences, maps, roads and communities. Within the context of interminable space our EARTH is a speck. The only lineation seen is the intersecting shadow line of day and night.
A recurring childhood dream:
Lying in her bed, as sleep delves heavier into her subconscious she begins to levitate, at first only a few feet above her bed. Then as she goes deeper, the “leaning in” part of the dream, not resisting the float seems to be vital, she drifts out her bedroom window. Rising above her house, her street, her neighbors, her town, her city, state. Widening, broadening, a reverse telescoping. Depending upon her degree of submission, her breadth, her overview could be never ending. To date, however, she has actually only recalled going as far as her own galaxy.
We are just a place in the whole. Place is perspective.
“When you meet the Buddha on the road kill him” is a koan, or a puzzle, attributed to Zen master Linji in the ninth century. This seemingly “un-buddhist” anecdote or contemplation, is designed to exhaust discriminating thoughts with a hope that a deeper more intuitive insight will arise. As with many spiritual quotes it is not meant to be taken literally but crafted to prompt curiosity. The road is your path through this life, to ultimate enlightenment. When you turn the Buddha into a religious fetish or an egoic form, or develop an obsession with enlightenment, even thinking you may have attained or are close to attaining such enlightenment, it is time to kill the Buddha. Let it go, lean in, release it, “kill it”, otherwise you will never acquire true wisdom.
A slogan seen on the back of an adventure magazine subtly overlayed on a topographic map:
“the deeper you get, the deeper you get”
From the surreal confines of their spaceship, space travelers witness our home as a “tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished only by a paper-thin atmosphere”*.
During their first days in space astronauts can point out their country and maybe their city from their ship’s portals. After a few more days in the void they can point out only their continent. Eventually through more time living within an infinity of blank, they cannot distinguish any separateness on our planet. They experience a cognitive shift in awareness, an awe, letting go of self, the oneness of our planet, the reality of Earth in space.
One evening, two women meet on the road. One a stranger, beautiful, tall, thin, tastefully made up, perfect bun, wearing pink (flimsy) trainers, that honestly wouldn’t survive a hike to the neighborhood’s mailboxes. An “Airbnb-er” no doubt. The image of a ballerina comes to mind, a ballerina wrapped in a knee length camel hair coat. The other woman on the road wears more traditional mountain garb. Rubber boots, jeans, sweatshirts, down vest, disheveled hair, a Mtn Gal. The latter has two Great Pyrenees dogs leaping at the ends of their harnesses and leashes desperately pulling to meet, and jump on, The Ballerina.
"One-World Island in a One-World Ocean"
helps us to view the world
as one interdependent
system of relationships. - Buckminster Fuller
At first the Ballerina and the Mtn Gal exchanged tentative glances at each other. Both were not expecting to have run into the other on the deserted lane. The two pony sized dogs win their scramble and reach the hem of the elegant coat. The dogs are, after all, the true keepers of the road, the guardians...the barkers. Their fur instantly magnetized to the coat, coat on coat. Ballerina’s manicured hand quickly slobbered upon and a large muddy paw print atop her pretty pink trainers.
With obvious summoned courage The Ballerina blurts out to the Mtn Gal “Do you actually LIVE here? HERE?!” eyes wide, questioning, bewildered, disbelieving. “Is that your beautiful adobe house? I almost walked down to it.” She is braver than her city exterior lets on as “walking down” would have meant another quarter mile to a treacherous 20 step curved stairway (with no railing) down the side of the mountain to where the handmade adobe home is perched. Instead they walk together in the opposite direction, to the end of the road, to the “overlook” where the city lies in ceaseless flurry below. Above them are birds in an open blue sky, beside them rock and evergreens for eternity, under their feet the solid ground of mountain. They stand in witness as strangers, feeling what unites them, seeing what separates them.
"You see things as you see them with your eyes, but you experience them emotionally, viscerally as it was ecstasy and a sense of total unity and oneness." Edgar Mitchell, astronaut on Apollo 14 when viewing Earth from space for the first time.
These regular pre-sunset walks on the road are filled with nourishment, rest, unwinding, presence, the occasional ballerina and of course, the killing of Buddhas. The sun is the signal, the dusk grows, the shadows elongate, the clouds glide across the sky ever so slightly below the thin line of atmosphere. This time is no longer for arsenic, but exposure. A new kind of self reflection - a looking back at our planet, at ourselves, at our communities, at our Buddhas and our roads.
We are the moon
the sun
the spinning heavens
We are stardust
*The Overview Effect by Frank WhiteThe road is dirt, her two companions are large and white and hairy. They are 7600’ above the sea.