“From many angles the onset of the shadow vastly precedes contact with the bird that is generating it. The shadow may ’emerge’ from anywhere, and flit past at ‘impossible’ speeds. With birds, you may never see the bird. Or find it. In which case, ‘all you have left is the shadow’ from the position of the mind that preserves and is ‘impressed by’ shadows. But the mind that follows the shadow to its implications will not only discover the bird, but become its Origins in the moment.

This is not a dog that chases every shadow howling and barking until exhausted, with no effect whatsoever on shadows. Such a dog has no pack. It cannot detect nature, animals, food, reality, or human beings. It cannot even detect itself. It is only briefly calm in places where there can be no shadows, and even there, for reasons that should be obvious, it is nothing but disoriented. Obviously, if unprotected, such an animal would not survive even one day. If protected, however, it can survive forever. It will become a shadow dog.

Now, with birds, the onset of the shadow may vastly precede contact with the bird. But the shadow is such contact, and is like lightning between you. The bird is, as you are ‘sensing’ with your shadow. When your shadows cross, another lightning happens, but this is not ‘supernatural’, it is relationship. Seeing is another lightning.

But here is the root of this circle: all things are as birds and shadows to the mind. And most often, especially from certain angles which we may become habituated to, we will see the shadow without any actual senses of the ‘bird’ that is ‘casting’ it, for the form of that bird is our mind itself.

In the mind, it may be a very long time indeed between the sensing of the shadow, and the sudden recognition of all that was casting it. The shadow may precede the bird by a vast and unknown interval that is not merely time, but includes all relationships.

While thinking one cannot so easily discern the nature of the birds whose shadows are so terribly compelling, nor can we tell if these shadows were cast by the mind’s fascination with such things, or actual relationships that are not merely figments.

In the forest, you can sense a bird shadow. In the mind, you cannot. The shadow reforms according to your angle of approach. To understand it, you must orient on its source or nature, you must approach from many changing angles within a sphere, not, as in the forest, ‘as if on a plain’. Follow the shadows to their origins, not merely in thought or structure… in relation and nature. Filter the shadows to those worth tracing, and follow them to the birds that cast them.

You will find us there.”

— they were speaking through the trees