A Glimmering, Hidden World Inviting Us to Humble Grace
The Hawk, the Mirror, and the Beholder
The Hawk, the Mirror, and the Beholder Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else. — Former Princess Yodo, the abbess of Tokeiji Feathers litter the stone pathway As evidence. Like a chalk line Where a body used to be. I have never killed a dove. But I have gloried in the hawk Who lingers by my fountain Nearly every day, Waiting, Still and silent as a shadow-mottled knot, In the branches Of my tree of heaven. Waiting As patient as a sniper To become a feathered bullet, Striking as a swift and silent thunder Of beak and claw. Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else. I have never killed a dove. And I am comforted By my kind choices: By the proud green morality Of my front yard, A habitat of my own making. With its cool shimmering fountain, This urban garden provides for hawks Both with water And the smaller birds Who surely come to my feeders With thanksgiving At having found a banquet In my tiny woodland island In a hot shimmering sea Of downtown desert pavement. I am comforted By the slow, deep murmurations Of mourning doves, Of white-winged doves, Of Inca doves, Of common ground doves, Of all the dovesongs Of our sky-bound neighbors. Heart unclouded, heart clouded; Standing or falling, it is still the same body. — Tokeiji Mirror Zen, Former Princess Yodo, the abbess of Tokeiji. I have never killed a dove And I am comforted By my chosen diet That includes no flesh or eggs. And so I live adjacent to death In the illusion That I have no participation in it. That my hands are clean. That I don’t have my own talons That often seize another little life. I live in the illusion That I am the architect Of a little private Eden, And that I don’t participate In the frameworks of injustice Or the machinations of death. Where does my fountain’s water come from? Where have I been the hawk And when have I been the dove? What creatures Have watched me soar In awe or terror — Or heard my soft mumblings with comfort? Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else. I have never killed a dove. The hawk kills to survive. She does not line her nest With conquests. She does not store up flesh that rots. She will never hire another raptor To do her killing. Her instinct is to live By taking only what she needs With the tools she was born to use. And yet my instinct This morning, Perhaps from a lifetime In a desert of approval, Was to be be repulsed By the illusion of cruelty, Then quickly comforted By a camouflage of virtuous distance. The flower becomes the seed. The seed becomes the dove. The dove becomes the hawk. The hawk becomes my mirror. The mirror becomes my own song Calling out to All the beauty and the bloodshed, All the ways I try to live more softly In the world I get to make. Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else.
Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Florida made me a rock hound. Finding tumbled treasures on the beach or glistening stones in the crystalline rivers and limestone caverns was possibly the first time I realized that there was more in the world than we could ever imagine, and that even I, a poor kid living in a trailer park, could have beautiful things too if I kept an eye out for hidden treasures.
I think this was early bedrock material for what would develop into fierce resilience in a face of many tragedies. The curiosity and appreciation for beauty that kept me on the lookout for that perfect rock, shell, or potsherd is very similar to the tenacity it takes to look for spiritual or emotional gifts in times of heartbreak.
I still have a bunch of those stones, arrowheads, potsherds, and other bounty I’ve found throughout my life. As I continued to collect these prizes, I’ve learned how to identify minerals, what their symbolism or purported metaphysical properties might be, where they came from or how they were formed, ways they were used in history, and whether or not they appeared in famous examples of art or literature. Slowly, over the years I built my collection, in no small part due to the fact that I moved to Tucson, which is home to the world’s largest gem and mineral show each year. I’ve now got everything from precious gemstones to entire stalactites and dinosaur bones in my collection.
This appreciation for little treasures has morphed over the years to include a love of heart-shaped rocks, which I collect from all over the world, as well as a passion for fluorescent minerals. In order to pursue this hobby, I bought a shortwave UV lamp many years ago, and I would take it on night hikes. The thing was enormous and heavy, the batteries didn’t last long, and it had a cover that quickly degraded from the UV light, but which was necessary for blocking out the visible spectrum.
It wasn’t easy to use at all, but this bulky tool completely changed the way I looked at rocks. On nearly every trail I could find a fluorescent stone here or there, and usually they just looked like ordinary rocks in daylight. That meant that all around me, probably every day, there was a whole world of glowing color that I didn’t even know existed because my eyes couldn’t see those wavelengths on their own.
What else was out there?
Eventually technology caught up with my curiosity, and I bought a little pocket LED flashlight that had both long wave and shortwave UV light, and it was super bright, super light, and, best of all, super convenient, with a powerful rechargeable battery that lasted for weeks on a single charge.
Now that I had a way to take this light everywhere, my world would expand again.
Walking through my historic neighborhood, I discovered that many of the huge stones in the fences, retaining walls, and landscapes of the old houses glowed bright orange, pink, blue, or even green under my flashlight! Many of the specimens in my collection fluoresced, and under this stronger light, and I found that a lot of them were even phosphorescent, meaning that they retained a charge and continued glowing even after the light was removed. This uncovered so many fascinations, like once-invisible oil deposits trapped for millions of years inside hundreds of Herkimer diamonds that I’d collected over the years, now speckled with bright galaxies of pink, green, orange, and white under a black light.
I started taking the flashlight with me on trips, and this led to the discovery that some beaches in California are covered with fluorescent sand, that a lot of wood varnish glows brightly, that many types of green seaweed fluoresce deep crimson when under a black light. Seeing neon-green-and-blue crabs scurrying across a beach studded with tiny glowing shells was like watching the summer zodiac arc across the night sky.
I found fluorescent flowers everywhere, many revealing patterns in the light no human could see with the naked eye.
I also discovered that, like crabs, scorpions also fluoresce brightly. I’ll never forget the first time I used my black light in a particular garden where I’d spent a lot of time watching the sunset. Once it was dark I got out my black light to see if I could find any cool treasures and instead saw dozens and dozens of scorpions glowing brightly in just about every nook and cranny of the garden, from the stone walls to the concrete benches I’d been sitting on just moments before. My first instinct was to be horrified, but then I realized I’d been sitting there coexisting with them for hours and they hadn’t bothered me at all, so odds are they wouldn’t sting me now.
I think the main lesson this has taught me is that there is always something I just can’t see, can’t discern, can’t know. Right there under the surface of things is a whole other world I may never be able to sense — unless I look more deeply or with special tools.
As I considered all of this again this week, I thought about the concept of the Johari Window, the idea that all of us have parts of ourselves that are public, private, and hidden even from ourselves.
There are things about me that I may never notice unless someone else points them out to me, just like there are parts of myself that I keep private, even though I tend to be an open book with people. I’ve been learning the difference between deception and discretion, secrets and privacy, and so my mask has become a lot more authentic and intentional over the years, but still, there is a public persona and an internal private self that only I get to see, and that’s okay.
Through this, I’ve learned that masks are not always used to deceive, but sometimes to protect, just like we wore masks during the pandemic. I might wear a mask that hides some aspect of myself or my thoughts that aren’t safe or appropriate to share in a particular context, and I might do this to protect both myself and others.
And thank god for that, because I wouldn’t want all of my internal thoughts and processes to become “contagious.” Sometimes we can’t take back things we’ve said, and I am very grateful for having discretion regarding how I speak. I think we’ve all probably been around someone who said things with no filter, and it often hurts. I don’t ever want to be like that, so I see nothing disingenuous about being thoughtful and edited when appropriate. But, really, isn’t that a form of a facade? Maybe. But the Johari window shows us that we all have our masks. Perhaps that’s the difference between discretion and deception.
Likewise, we all have our blind spots, and we also have the parts of ourselves that nobody knows — including ourselves. So often I am completely unaware of my motivations, my subconscious triggers, the programming, ethics, biases, assumptions, and values that I’ve absorbed from living in my family and culture. There is so much about myself that remains a mystery to me.
And this doesn’t just apply to emotions, thoughts, and beliefs either. Physically, we are continuing, as a society, to uncover new wisdom about the human body, and I think we’ve all had experiences where we’ve realized something new about our bodies, whether it be from aging, pleasure, strength, weakness, or seeing ourselves in a mirror, photograph, or medical imaging. In fact, I only discovered that I was born with ovaries last year.
I always knew I was both male and female, from my very earliest memories, but I didn’t have words for that when I was a kid, and I certainly didn’t have access to modern medicine that would identify what caused that inner knowing. The first time a doctor told me I was intersex was in 1997 when I was 23 years old, after a blood karyotype showed that I had an extremely rare chromosome translocation governing my entire endocrine system. It would take another decade to start treating the symptoms from that, and another decade after that to discover that I had ovaries. My own body was a miraculous mystery, waiting to be discovered layer by layer over the span of decades as science and medicine unlocked my genetics.
What else have we not had the ability to see or measure yet? In the early 1800s doctors started successfully using a smallpox vaccine, but they had absolutely no idea why it worked. It wasn’t until the 1850s that Louis Pasteur pioneered microbiology, and viruses weren’t discovered until the 1890s! Until then, many illnesses were thought to be caused by miasma, ethers, spirits, sin, humors, and all manner of other “corrupting agents.” All were things people never knew existed until they found new ways of seeing.
Just a few years ago scientists discovered a human “organ” they’d never known before: the interstitium. (For an absolutely mind-blowing article about this, click here: Orion Magazine — Invisible Landscapes, by Jennifer Brandel.) Amazingly, the reason we failed to notice it despite eons of study around human anatomy was not from a lack of technology, but because of biases and preconceived notions in Western medicine and academia. It was there all along, and it had even been hinted at in Eastern medical paradigms, but our allopathic doctors and scientists couldn’t see it because they were trained not to.
What else do we not see because we are trained not to see it? That is very much the same experience I’ve had as an intersex person. Society is trained not to see me. I’ve had people literally tell me that people like me can’t possibly exist because “God made male and female.” People bristle against my very biology, now measurable with all sorts of medical tests. Even with medical proof, some people continue to argue with me about how it doesn’t make any sense, even when I point out the many eunuchs in the Bible, who were often considered a third sex, including the first ever foreign convert to Christianity (the Ethiopian eunuch), and the fact that Jesus himself said that there are “born eunuchs,” which he warned would be hard for some people to hear. Their faith keeps them from seeing facts.
And yet, while my condition is extremely rare, intersex traits are not, and intersex variations are actually about as common as red hair. Despite this, most of us are completely invisible to society, and sometimes even intersex people have no idea that they, themselves, aren’t biologically completely male or female. Many were lied to as children and forced to undergo “normalization” surgeries as infants (a horrific practice that continues to this day), or they think they are trans, or that they have a hormone imbalance, or that they are simply sterile.
For my whole life I thought I was a medical freak, and yet I’ve only recently come to learn that there are millions of people like me out there, most of us living lives that don’t openly challenge the male/female binary.
This is like a societal version of the Johari window. What does society not know because people like me stay in the closet?
It’s a heck of a lot easier to just pass as a “normal” person, so I understand why people stay quiet, but then I think of the potential for people like us to completely change the way society sees gender. How might feminism, trans rights, gender-affirming care, concepts of drag and fashion, pay disparity, patriarchy, and other systems change once we realize that there are millions of people who don’t fit into either category of male or female? If our very bodies disprove millennia of assumptions about hierarchy, gender norms, and natural order?
And what might I still not know about myself because we simply haven’t developed the technology or mindset to measure it yet?
Just like all those bland-looking rocks all over the desert trails, or the scorpions resting invisibly in the crevasses of the garden, or the glowing crabs scurrying across the beach, how much would we have never known could be filled with light if we hadn’t developed the technology to see in UV?
One of my favorite treasures in my tea collection is a chawan (tea bowl) by artist Kinoto Kuniko. It’s gorgeous, like something that came from the ocean, and every time I’ve used it guests become enraptured with its beauty. But there on the surface is a hidden message, which I always leave for the very last moment of the tea ceremony.
I turn the lights in the tearoom off, take out my black light, and watch their astonished faces as the bowl transforms. There among the oceanic glazes is an entire universe of bright, phosphorescent splashes and shapes, shimmering like a deep-sea creature or the fallout from a nuclear bomb.
This sudden revelation, in the context of a mindfulness practice like a tea ceremony, becomes an invitation to consider what other lights might be glimmering there just beyond the limits of our perceptions. What else might be waiting to dazzle us if only we look with different eyes? And what else may we never know because it is beyond the scope of our human grasp?
Also, what stories buried deep in our subconscious cause some to see beautiful bioluminescent sea life while others see the horrors of an atomic bomb?
In this way, wonder and curiosity lead to humility — the humble awareness that all of us contain mysteries, even to ourselves. None of us knows all the answers, and often we can’t possibly know the depths of our own ignorance or short-sightedness. Yet, because this is part of what it means to be human, there is also no judgment, no shame in admitting that we “know in part…we see through a glass darkly.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this quote, which comes from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, also contains the admonition that all the great spiritual gifts mean absolutely nothing without love and compassion. That’s the cornerstone of this mystery. It becomes easier to have love and compassion for ourselves and for others when we recognize that there’s an entire universe of knowledge beyond our grasp. So maybe I should give myself and others some grace, especially when I am tempted to think that I know everything about a situation, or that I am right and they are wrong.
Mystery is hard. We all want to feel safe and secure, and mystery often erodes that security in knowing, of certainty. But maybe healthy faith (as opposed to absolutism, zealotry, or denial) is like my black light, inviting me to shine a new perspective on things I always took for granted as being a particular way.
One of the perspectives I need to unlearn is Descartes’s idea that human reasoning is the highest form of reality and value, enshrined in his statement that “I think, therefore I am.” I started dismantling this idea in college when I read about what a monster Descartes was. I still wince when I think of the intensity of his cruelty, especially toward animals, which he regarded as mere flesh machines.
Instead of looking at the natural world as something inferior and without any real life or intelligence, what if instead we looked through the eyes of other species? Would a dolphin care about my extra body fat? Does my cat resent the fact that he is dependent on others for food and shelter? Does the river think I should be ashamed of my past? Does the mountain try to hide its scars? Does the tree wish it was a star? Is the pebble jealous of the diamonds in my watch? Does the tadpole care about my intersex chromosomes? Does the hawk in my front yard think I’m more moral because I’m vegan? What would I be able to see if I took on another perspective — even a perspective that isn’t human?
Perhaps these types of questions will lead us toward a different kind of natural order — one we should seek more of. There is an entire universe of wisdom waiting to be discovered!
Just a couple of weeks ago I got to stay with a friend in an incredible old stone cabin built into the side of a canyon near Sedona. With my trusty black light, one night I decided to see if I could find anything interesting. Sure enough, right there all over the cabin walls, both inside and out, were stones that glowed brilliantly. It was a revelation as we realized that we may be the only people in the cabin’s nearly hundred-year history to know that there was a hidden world right there all along, shimmering across the walls as if painted with invisible ink. How many thousands of people had stayed here and never known? Some of the stones even retained their soft glow, slowly fading over several seconds once we turned the light off. What a magical moment!
That led us to search the creek bed for fluorescent minerals, where we found that the waters were full of little glowing stones and mosses. On the trail, lichens blazed bright orange and yellow on rocks, and the undersides of leaves lit up crimson like fiery embers. Here it was again, an entire parallel universe just waiting to be discovered by some curious people with new tools.
And isn’t that life? Isn’t every perspective, every environment, every person, every belief, every idea, every scientific construct, every system, every judgment, every moral schema, and every part of this universe full of nuance and mystery, full of things we may never know or even perceive?
And if that’s true, then isn’t a beautiful idea to step back and allow ourselves to inhabit the grace, humility, curiosity, and hope that this revelation begs of us? I’m allowed to not know! I’m allowed to change my mind, to be uncertain, to not be an expert, to bumble along in curious wandering, to not having to know THE TRUTH about anything — or convince anyone else that I am right and they are wrong.
This is antithetical to so many of the messages we get from society, but this is the same society that tells me that I don’t exist, that men and women need to conform to gendered roles, that certain people are worth more than others, that we have to take sides, that there is either guilt or innocence, good or bad, heroes or villains, right or wrong, activism or complicity, true or false, and myriad other either/or dichotomies. This is the same society that would probably just see an ugly brown rock instead of a brilliantly glowing fluorescent wonder.
And I think, for now, I’m done with limiting myself to that world. I’d much rather go explore in the dark with my spiritual flashlight to see what treasures I can find when I allow myself to look with new ways of seeing.
The Hawk, the Mirror, and the Beholder Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else. — Former Princess Yodo, the abbess of Tokeiji Feathers litter the stone pathway As evidence. Like a chalk line Where a body used to be. I have never killed a dove. But I have gloried in the hawk Who lingers by my fountain Nearly every day, Waiting, Still and silent as a shadow-mottled knot, In the branches Of my tree of heaven. Waiting As patient as a sniper To become a feathered bullet, Striking as a swift and silent thunder Of beak and claw. Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else. I have never killed a dove. And I am comforted By my kind choices: By the proud green morality Of my front yard, A habitat of my own making. With its cool shimmering fountain, This urban garden provides for hawks Both with water And the smaller birds Who surely come to my feeders With thanksgiving At having found a banquet In my tiny woodland island In a hot shimmering sea Of downtown desert pavement. I am comforted By the slow, deep murmurations Of mourning doves, Of white-winged doves, Of Inca doves, Of common ground doves, Of all the dovesongs Of our sky-bound neighbors. Heart unclouded, heart clouded; Standing or falling, it is still the same body. — Tokeiji Mirror Zen, Former Princess Yodo, the abbess of Tokeiji. I have never killed a dove And I am comforted By my chosen diet That includes no flesh or eggs. And so I live adjacent to death In the illusion That I have no participation in it. That my hands are clean. That I don’t have my own talons That often seize another little life. I live in the illusion That I am the architect Of a little private Eden, And that I don’t participate In the frameworks of injustice Or the machinations of death. Where does my fountain’s water come from? Where have I been the hawk And when have I been the dove? What creatures Have watched me soar In awe or terror — Or heard my soft mumblings with comfort? Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else. I have never killed a dove. The hawk kills to survive. She does not line her nest With conquests. She does not store up flesh that rots. She will never hire another raptor To do her killing. Her instinct is to live By taking only what she needs With the tools she was born to use. And yet my instinct This morning, Perhaps from a lifetime In a desert of approval, Was to be be repulsed By the illusion of cruelty, Then quickly comforted By a camouflage of virtuous distance. The flower becomes the seed. The seed becomes the dove. The dove becomes the hawk. The hawk becomes my mirror. The mirror becomes my own song Calling out to All the beauty and the bloodshed, All the ways I try to live more softly In the world I get to make. Decorate the halls of the beholder, for the Buddha of the flower hall is nowhere else.
I love you!
Eric
Eric - thanks for writing vulnerably and boldly about your body. Our bodies.
I wonder with you about what the world would be if all those born intersex were recognized as other-sex. I wonder what societal pressures would be eased, what other unknowns could be explored and endured, what role we'd be expected to fill - in a healthy culture that recognizes and values our differences.
I wonder about the intersex woman who touched Yeshua's robe and was healed - the only instance of Yeshua's healing power being accessed without his consent.
And I'm finally speaking vulnerably and personally to those in my circles about my body. Our bodies.
The rest with the blacklight and the hawk was cool too.