A Raven in the Desert

A Raven in the Desert
by Mr. Smith

Renata walks through the desert alone and irritated. His mood doesn’t match the serene setting: pale red, yellow, and white sand, cactus and scrub against a background of a rocky canyon. His aloneness does, there is nothing moving and almost no sound except the far away rumble of a distant highway.

Suddenly his thoughts leak out and he growls loudly to himself “I want it to matter damn it!” Stopping, he pulls out a cigarette and lights it, takes an angry puff, another, and then settles into the rhythm of having a smoke. His mind wanders away from its irritation for a moment, looking up at the sky above the canyon wall. A raven flies over the ridge and across the canyon; Renata’s eye catches on a cave high up and recessed in the wall as the raven ghosts over it. Grinding out his cigarette and packing away the butt, he heads up the canyon.

His irritation stemmed from the contemplation of his teacher’s words before he set out on this quest.

“It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, nothing about who you are or what you do affects the Infinite, affects Consciousness, Pure Awareness. It doesn’t matter whether you spend this whole life indulging your desires, or you spend it attending to What IS. Neither one affects the Infinite Mystery in any way, shape or form.”

“But sir” Renata had said “If it doesn’t matter then why am I practicing holding more energy, why am I practicing stillness, why do anything?” The Teacher had grinned at him and asked him the age old question “Are you suffering? I said it didn’t matter to the Infinite, but from our perspective it matters because we want to change our point of perception from a separate, suffering human to that Which Is without distinction, the ONE.”

Still grumbling to himself as he walked Renata remembered the rest of his teacher’s lesson

“What is important to remember is to be able to attend to What Is takes more energy, this is why you are trying to hold more energy, not to manifest anything, but to have more ability to turn your awareness to What Is rather than getting hooked by the parts of the whole, rather than identifying with the parts.

When your attention is trapped by one of the pieces you experience yourself as suffering because you are separate from the whole.

Inherently suffering is the feeling of being separate from the whole. It is the identification with the pieces.”


“Pieces, Shmieces” grumbled Renata, but then sighing to himself he thought “Enough of this, take a breath and let it go, you came here to understand, not let your mind cycle some useless story. I have, after all, come here to experience myself as God, not as irritation” as he grinned to himself the raven flew by cawing at him and flew straight as an arrow to the cave he had seen from below. Finding the humor in his situation and laughing to himself Renata said out loud “Ok goofball, enough is enough, lets practice!”

Taking a deep breath into his belly Renata began his practice. First he focused on his feet, feeling them against the earth as he walked and took full breaths. Then he looked out ahead about fifteen feet and opened up his peripheral vision so that he could hold his attention on everything 180 degrees side to side and top to bottom in the canyon he was walking down.

Once he could hold all of it in his perception and still be aware of his breath and feet he continued on with his kinesthetic sense of his skin. Picking one place on his chest where he could feel his clothing against his skin he opened up his perception until he could feel every inch of his skin. The moment his mind started to skip from one thing to another he would come back to his breathing and start over.

Next came his sense of hearing. Picking the far off sound of the highway he expanded his hearing to include the sound of his breath, his feet crunching sand beneath him, and the distant cawing of the raven that had flown by earlier.

Opening his sense of smell he flared his nostrils and inhaled deeply. Picking up the scent of the earth, his clothing, flowers blooming along the canyon sides he opened to every smell he could pull from the air.

Continuing to his sense of taste he opened his mouth and took a deep breath, tasting the air, and the residue of smoke in his mouth.

His mind, now overwhelmed by sensory data, became increasingly quiet, the dialogue that normally kept him company all day fading into stillness. As he finished his climb up to the cave his sense of aliveness intensified, the energy in his body vibrating faster and fuller, the environment around him becoming more brilliant and beautiful. Appreciation and gratitude washed through him as he at last reached the mouth of the cave and turned to look back down the canyon.

Having a sudden inspiration he reached into his pack and pulled out another cigarette. He lit it with an exquisite flame from a wooden stick he struck with a wondrous “whoosh” off a nearby rock. The dancing coal beckoned his eye as he slowly inhaled the rich, wonderfully warm smoke deep into his lungs. Exhaling a cloud of smoke that glowed with light and subtle color his awareness expanded out into the energetic realms. Feeling the energy flowing around him his consciousness expanded out into the infinite. Stillness that moved sinuously, timeless motion that never moved, the world stopped and became something infinitely greater. Awareness with nothing to be aware of, fuller than the most incredible moment of bliss and emptier than the feeling of death approaching on swift wings. Everything died and began again in an endless moment of Being……..

The raven swoops in from the sky and lands on a rock at eye level with Renata.
“Do you get it? Do you get it?” cries the raven, jumping up and down
Startled from his silence by a talking bird Renata replies “Uh…..”

“The identification with the desires, not the desires themselves!” squawked the raven, “Woohoo, hey original thought huh?” referring to Renata’s long journey down the path of yoga in which this is a prevalent thought.

Still somewhat startled by the talking bird Renata replied “Yeah, yeah, I get it, Attend To What Is, that is what I’ve been trying to do.”

“Get it do you? Think not, I do.” said Raven, parroting Yoda, then cackling gleefully

“All right” sighed Renata “Help me out here.” Hopping from foot to foot the raven replied “What is normally going on is by indulging your desires at the rate you usually do, you do not have enough personal power to sustain attending to What Is. If you did, then who cares?” Raven paused for a moment “The truth is sometimes you do, you have enough energy to do both and this is not a problem.

Like just before you sat down at the cave when you were smoking cigarettes and experiencing What Is at the same time. Why were you able to do that?”

Renata scratched his head before answering, “Well, because getting out in the desert, being alone with my thoughts and energy and tapping into the energy of nature really works for me. It increases my personal power immensely, so there is more energy available for me to do things like this simultaneously.“

“That’s right” said Raven “So when you are in power places or doing things that are direct practices for connecting with What Is, you have the space and the energy to also spend some attention on your desires without it interfering with your attention on The Mystery.” Hopping to another rock he cocked his head at Renata “However in your day to day life, you often do not have that extra energy available, so indulging the desires eats up all the available energy and leaves you without the space and power to attend to Being Spirit.”

Hoping to pound the point into Renata’s thick skull the Raven squawked a little louder, punctuating each sentence with a twitch of his wings “Because you are not out in the desert being quiet and still, you are not out connecting with nature, you are not running energy at the top of the pyramid of the sun, you are having to attend to the day to day stuff of having a life, and that attention coupled with attending to the desires leaves no room or energy for staying aware of What Is.”

Letting Renata digest that for a few minutes the raven continued “The other piece you are missing is that the way you have handled restraining desires in the past is you wind up focusing on the suffering caused by restraining the desire, the overcoming of the desire, which leaves you attending to the desire all time, just as much as when you were indulging it. Plus of course you were irritated all the time.

Your new practices have moved you onto the path of opening, which has worked much better for you. You have learned to open directly to spirit without the suffering of the restraint getting in the way. However if you then just indulge the desires you wind up with the problem you began with which is not having the energy or attention available to open or connect with What Is.”

Standing on one leg the raven kept talking “What all this smacks of is BALANCE! There needs to be a balance between restraining the desires and opening to What Is. Nothing new here Renata, you’ve been teaching this to others for a year!”

Bowing humbly to the raven Renata lets out a wry chuckle “Guess I just need to walk my talk eh? Find a balance between the opening, nourishing, cleaning, and clear perception.” Which was something he talked to people about all the time.

“That’s right!” said Raven “When you are indulging in your mishigas about the money and about being bad or good or restraining versus indulgence, there isn’t energy left to attend to what is , thus you experience yourself as suffering , not as What Is”

(“who ever heard of a Raven with a Jewish accent?” Thought Renata)

The Raven continued, “When you indulge your judge you are honing your perception on being separate, not on being whole, on being the One. The one goofball that is!” Cawing loudly the raven jumps into the air, and floats off down the canyon.

As the raven flew away Renata finally noticed that the twinkle in its eye and the way it hopped around was remarkably reminiscent of the Teacher. Laughing out loud he continued his trek into the desert.

Renata means born anew.

© 2006 Raven Smith