The Peepers Call Out

Yesterday’s warm drizzle spread quietly into the sleeping earth and roused the cold blood of us all, including the tiny amphibians, the peeper frogs, who suddenly came alive and began singing for their lives. From puddles and vernal pools throughout the neighborhood, the males began their shrill chirping and whistling–enacting the ancient call of life for attention and sex.

I suppose the little frogs have no awareness of their purpose. The male frog does not think ‘I’ll call out especially fast and loud to attract a really hot babe so we can have sex and have a nice family of eight or nine hundred little ones who will be so cute and fun to play with.’ He calls out because he calls out. In his pure expression, there is no gap between intention and action. The calling, as well as the subsequent conjugal activity, serves life’s essential purpose that is unknown to the one who calls out.

On some level, for all our painful human self-consciousness, each one of us too lives by instinct and acts without knowledge. Current research shows that our awareness lags several milliseconds behind our actions. Like the little peepers, we act first, before we even know we have decided. It is then, a fraction later, that the thinking mind comes online and scrambles to figure out a ‘reason’ why I ‘decided’ to do that which I have already done.

Aside from the vast majority of our ‘thinking’ which happily trundles on beneath the level of our consciousness and beats our heart and breathes our breath and constantly maintains our precarious constantly moving exchange with the world we live in—aside from all this, most of our thinking is post hoc—it comes after the fact of our activity. Our thinking is simply our best guess as to why a certain feeling is arising or why I said or did what I just said or did. Its assertion of agency and authority is an elaborate (and often quite convincing) charade.

Mostly we’re like the eight-year-old boy who trips and falls, then quickly leaps up and looks around to see if anyone was watching. And if they were, he defiantly proclaims ‘I meant to do that.’ The ancient delusive claim of purpose and control. Though I spend a lot of time encouraging people to clarify their purpose and to act in alignment with whatever that deeper direction may be, in the end, I find life to be much more mysterious (and interesting) than that.

Our lives unfold through each action we take or don’t take. I have no idea why one day I get out and go for the brisk walk that I know is good for me and the next day hardly get out of the house. Why I have continued to meditate and lead Zen groups for the past thirty years is also a mystery to me. I can, of course, make up a thousand reasons and some of them feel true, but really, my life is simply what I have done.

I’m not advocating we let libido run wild and imitate the licentious behavior of this season’s cacophonous vernal pools. But maybe I am. Maybe I mean to say that we can appreciate the ten thousand joys and sorrows of our lives as part of a bigger movement of life, as not quite so personal and therefore not quite so fraught with regret and anxiety. Maybe we are not as separate as we think and we are all simply calling and responding to the ancient necessities of attention and reproduction. In that case, I’ll just follow what calls to me and sing as quickly and as loudly as I can and hope for the best.

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)