For some time during my sit in the morning I have heard just before dawn a noise outside my window which I thought might be a possum 'invading' the house. I put this out of mind for, while in the past, possums took a liking to the space under the eves between the brick wall and the rafted roof I had filled this area up with bricks and this had deterred the possums. However looking at this later I saw that an adult possum had taken advantage of living in the space a few centimetres high between the loose bricks and the eve. I think part of the body of the possum is occupied in the small gap between two bricks. This is a true Houdini exercise.
Well, what has this to do with my sit and Zen? During zazen you get a heightened sense of sound and movement generally. So the late nocturnal return of the possum to his humble home punctuates my silence in a very special way. I not only hear it I feel it. And I
think in the deepest Zen sense of this humble creature returning regularly each dawn to take his rest and accepting the most difficult and poorest of abodes. Yet I know also that when I rise from meditation my simian mind will start restlessly seeking to optimise this and that so that my poor ego is fully satisfied. We can learn a lot from how animals deal with living.
