September/October 2008 Spirituality
Beyond Reflection

by Dawn Baumann Brunke

As my good dog pal Barney has often shared with me, there is nothing like seeing the world completely from another being's eyes to shock you into the realization that the way you experience the world is unique to you.

For me, this has certainly proved true. Seeing the world from different animal viewpoints has revealed to me, beyond a doubt, that our experience of the world "out there" is exceedingly dependent upon the world "in here" - our own distinctive thoughts, observations and manners of perception.

This is why it sometimes happens that a common, everyday image - a running dog, a flying bird, a laughing child - may unexpectedly touch us deep inside, nudging us open to an entirely different perception of reality. Some would say that this occurs not out of the blue, but because we are ripe and ready for the experience. Still it's remarkable that something so simple on the surface can suddenly cause us to realize that what we are looking at is actually much deeper, much richer, much more amazing than what we first perceived. And equally true, that we are more wondrous than what we had ever imagined.

One morning at home while watching the fish in my aquarium, I noticed a reflection in the tank from the kitchen's bay window, located on the other side of the house. The small rectangular images inside the tank perfectly revealed the window's vista of an Alaskan blue-gray sky with low puffed clouds nestling atop white-tipped mountains. This reflection was not so strange of course - it was simple science, easily explained by reflecting waves of light on glass. And yet the way in which I saw the reflection - call it my relationship to this reflection - triggered something within.

I wondered why I had never noticed the window's reflection before. Surely it had been there many times. Perhaps my vision had been so focused on the movement of the fish that I simply didn't comprehend other fields of perspective. I thought this as I watched the fish glide through the blue-gray sky, their bellies skimming the pointy mountain tops, their bodies moving in and out of the clouds' mirrored reflection: water to air and mist, and back to water again.

As I softened my gaze, I also saw silvery shadows of the fish: fishy doubles that reflected upon the reflection of the window. And as I released even further my habitual way of seeing, I watched with delight as some of the fish broke away from their reflections, swimming quite deliberately into the dark mountain and gray-skied reflection that was also a doorway.

It's a portal, I exclaimed. And, in that early morning frame of fanciful, open-ended possibilities, I considered: Why not go inside?

There is a kind of giddy silliness that accompanies some awakenings, and so it was for me. Journeying into the fluidity of water, accompanied by the cheerful encouragement of the fish people was great fun, but gliding through the doorway of the mountain, flying into the brightly reflected blue-gray sky was exhilarating. I sailed into alignment with the expansive joy that was so cleverly compacted into a phrase my dog Barney had inspired several months before: Knowledge in movement.

Back in my chair, I felt a thrumming, expansive sense of center. I marveled at how a simple shift in perception can act as such a potent key, how the unlocking of something so vast can be held as such a tiny seed inside us all along. Once again I was reminded how it is that by going beyond ourselves, we also move more deeply into ourselves.

Perhaps the real question is: Are we ready to open ourselves to a deeper relationship with reality - and with ourselves?

Dawn Baumann Brunke is the author of Animal Voices, Awakening to Animal Voices, and the recently releasedShapeshifting with Our Animal Companions: Connecting with the Spiritual Awareness of All Life. Visit www.animalvoices.net.