The other day as Rebecca and I strolled along our country road, we came upon a strange sound emerging from a stand of pines. It was five woodpeckers, all pecking at the same time.

Bemused, since we don’t often hear so many woodpeckers in such close proximity, we stood for a while and listened. The funny thing about something like a woodpecker’s pecking is that it’s easy not to hear it. What I mean is that we hear the pecking, and we think to ourselves ‘Oh, that’s a woodpecker’, and then we sort of stop hearing the sound. It’s as if our mind wants to slap a label on everything we perceive, and then our mind feels like it’s ‘figured it out’ and can wander off to something else.

This is one of the greatest barriers to really drinking fully of life – our mind’s tendency to ignore sensation in favor of slapping labels on things. It’s really not our fault – we’ve been taught since we were infants to try to affix labels on our perceptions – we need this skill, because it’s called ‘language’ and it enables us to communicate amazing ideas. But if we let language blind us, we can forget to really taste our dinner, smell the scent of woodsmoke, see the clouds in the sky, or hear the pecking of woodpeckers. Indeed, each moment of life is filled with immeasurable sensations, if only we stop to sense them.
                                                                                                              One of the musicians visits our birdfeeder.
It’s amazing what happens when we do this. Suddenly, Rebecca and I weren’t hearing ‘woodpeckers pecking’, but rather a strange and magical sound. It was as if each tree were a woodblock, and someone was using them to play a long-forgotten song. Each tree had its own resonance, so that five distinct pitches emerged from the pines, playing and dancing a song composed by nature.

Eventually we left the woodblock symphony behind, but for the rest of the walk home, the world seemed very bright and complete, alive with treats for our senses.

I’ve written about a meditation I used to do at Two-Wolf’s camp that can help us remember what it’s like to sense the world purely. I invite you to give it a try.

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