Ecstatic Mystic

The words may have little or nothing to do with the great hawk migration I watched on Sunday afternoon. It was whispered in my ear, I think, as I slept last night, or the night before; by a friend maybe. It had the sweet urgency of a gift that needed unwrapping. With no idea of what it meant, I woke up and googled the term.

Maybe it was the echo of Quaker meeting that Sunday morning. But the word "l'inespoir" was what floated on my breath in the silence, pressing for delivery. This is a French word used by Kashmiri Shivaite Tantra teacher Daniel Odier to describe the state of having no clingy expectations of life, enjoying rather an immediate and thorough experience of what actually exists as it happens.

Another woman stood, though, and said that "emptiness" was the word she was hearing. It seemed just right to me. In the wisdom of the Quaker unprogrammed service, if words need to be spoken, someone in the room will do it, even if you feel you're not the right person, or aren't hearing the words clearly enough to share.

She explained that "emptiness" came to her as a direction - that one should empty her mind, so she could discover that the love she was looking for was already sitting in her heart. Another way of hearing "l'inespoir".

There is poetry in the expectant quiet of a Quaker service. And mysticism, I suppose.

But the term ecstatic mystic to describe non-dualism is new to me even though the traditions I read seem to fall in the category. Kabbalah, Tantra, Zen, Quakers are all non-dualist: we may have some nasty habits and look like hell, but we are all godstuff with great potential.

Which seems fundamental to appreciating the astonishing joy of our lives on this planet. "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself." That's Carl Sagan, and non-dualism. Peter Matthiessen, the nature writer, weaves these things together brilliantly. I've spent the last two months in The Snow Leopard, which may be longer than his trek to the Crystal Mountain in Nepal actually took, although I don't know because I haven't finished, circling back as I am through the chapters.

What I can tell you is that the hawk migration was breathtaking. Few were visible to the naked eye, but with a decent pair of binoculars and a still hand, you could actually watch hundreds of hawks "kettling" up in the wisps of the clouds: lifting on thermals in soaring paths.

From the ground, you couldn't hear the joy of the hawks, but the joy of the hawk watchers sounded something like this: "two dozen shorties kettling in the big gray cloud 2 o'clock from the 2nd cuppola".

I don't suppose we have the technology yet to examine those whispers we hear, feel, know so clearly, that bear us to love.