I had a break up today

Today I had a break-up.

Not the kind between two people. It felt more like a breaking apart of my identity — except instead of breaking down, somehow I broke upwards.

These moments have become strangely familiar to me now. Moments of clarity, insight, perspective. Almost like slipping through some psychedelic antechamber of my own brain.

The Buddha called this Penetrative Truth, as opposed to Conditioned Truth.

They tend to happen when I’m walking up a mountain, staring down into a valley, or when I’m alone and silent with the horses. Perhaps it’s the beauty, the awe, wonder, bilateral stimulation, connection without the barrier of language?

Just sitting with them.

Being as they are.

Alive.

And nothing else.

Today, something about that felt almost unbearably profound.

I suppose someone might call it a a glimmer of enlightenment. It didn’t feel like enlightenment. There was no sense of being at one with everything. No feeling of being held by the universe.

It was almost the opposite.

I became acutely aware of how utterly random it all is.

That I am here.

That any of us are here.

A surprise.

A blissful aching miracle.

A tiny drop of consciousness in an ocean of vastness and chaos.

For a moment I simply couldn’t believe that I was here, actually experiencing this extraordinary process we have casually named life on Earth. How did I come to get this privilege?

And then I looked around.

That leaf was here too.

That bird.

That sunset.

All of us existing at precisely the same moment.

And then I thought of my children.

They were sitting in the living room at home.

On this planet.

In this universe.

At exactly the same time as me.

We were here together.

And suddenly that seemed miraculous.

Not miraculous in the sentimental sense. Miraculous in the almost impossible sense.

What were the chances?

I immediately burned all thoughts of what they did with their lives, how they progressed in society, what they achieved….

They were actually here and that wasn’t just enough, it was sublime, intense and astonishing and it was ours.

It was such a strange and beautiful realisation that I almost had to shake my head, as if to drop ball bearing into this new position.

And then, with tears in my eyes, I thought about my horses.

When I sit beside them, we are doing something astonishingly simple.

We are sharing our own private miracle.

For this tiny window in the unimaginable history of the universe, their lives and mine have coincided.

We got to be here together.

What a privilege.

Both of my horses were once going to be killed because they could no longer be ridden.

And suddenly the enormity of that struck me differently.

Who gets to decide which miracle stays and which miracle goes because of the expedience of a leisure pursuit?

When did usefulness in sport become the measure of the value of a life?

There seems to me to be an enormous leap between loving life and believing we have the right to cease one life deemed not useful enough to continue experiencing it.

It feels like a galactic leap away from journeying with heart.

Away from whatever we might call God, the Tao, nature, love or simply trusting the great mystery of being here.

We often say:

I love you more than life itself.

Because somewhere inside us, we already understand the value of life.

Life is the ultimate comparison.

The thing beyond price.

So if we truly love life, shouldn’t we value it wherever we find it?

The horse who can no longer carry us.

The old animal.

The frightened animal.

The inconvenient animal.

The person sitting beside us.

Our children in another room.

The bird in the tree.

The leaf moving in the wind.

Perhaps our purpose isn’t to conquer life, control it or even understand it.

Perhaps we are here, for this astonishingly brief moment, to guard it.

To notice it.

To protect it.

To recognise the extraordinary privilege of finding ourselves alive at the same time as all these other lives.

I don’t know whether that is enlightenment.

I don’t think it matters.

But being a guardian of life?

That feels right to me.