I’m emerging from a nine-mile run deep in some of the largest swaths of protected forest in Oregon. I’ve been pounding the path for well over two hours. I’m flying, hitting such a well-oiled that I forget I’m touching the ground with every footstep. As the trail transforms back into asphalt, I stumble across a few people taking pictures of something in the trees. I reach the crowd and follow their gaze into the foliage.

Perched unassumingly on a high branch is a small barred owl. Black and grey, it looks like a piece of London sky streaked with soot. It turns its head toward me, and meets my gaze, nearly overwhelming me with its penetrating state. We lock eyes for what seems like eternity. Then, it throws its head in the direction I’m running, as if reminding me to finish.

People are walking by. The woman who had pointed out the owl to me–a Parks and Rec employee who was supposed to be clearing brush nearby–mentions the bird to the others passing by.

“There’s an owl,” she’d say quietly as they walk by, as if to herself.

Some stop, with varied reactions. One woman drops her jaw and turns to me.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen an owl in the wild and I’ve been looking for 66 years.”

Another woman pulls out her phone and starts recording. She looks at us sheepishly. “It’s an owl, right?” she asks.

Another woman stops and laments that she didn’t have her phone with her for a picture. “Oh no!” another agrees, as if the experience itself weren’t enough.

Some people keep on walking, or stay for a moment before continuing.

Some miss it altogether.

As this crowd of people gathers silently around this precious creature, it tucks its head into its left wing and pulls out one of its feathers. The owl releases it from its beak and the grey tuft floats on the wind. It seems to hover in place for a moment before descending at a pace that only nature knows how to take. The tenderness of the moment makes us hold our breath. We are transfixed. One woman reaches for it with her palm toward the sky, as if it might settle gently into her hand, but the breeze lifts it beyond her grasp. The feather disappears into the brush behind us.

I spend the next ten minutes staring in awe. I tear up several times, as this micro-community–moms on walks, retirees getting daily exercise, a businesswoman on own schedule, the Portland Parks employees birdwatching on the taxpayer’s dime–gathers to soak in the preciousness of life. We are united by wonder.

Then, the owl looks back at me, straight into my eyes. I have a feeling this moment will be different than the last. When it had looked at me before, I was in awe–but this time, I’m more centered. I recognize the owl for what we share: a strand of perfection present in everything around us. We gaze into each other’s eyes. The crowd is silent.

I begin to do shikantaza.

Staring into the eyes of the owl, I use my peripheral vision to see everywhere at once, which somehow makes the experience grander, and brings the owl’s eyes into even sharper relief. A shiver ripples through my body. The owl and I stared at each other, dropping into a state of deep understanding. The only thought that crossed my mind was “Stay with it.”

And I did.

Right before the owl broke the stare, the same shiver roared through my body and made me convulse. The owl looked in the same direction–where I needed to run to go home–and never met my gaze again.

When I talk about being in conversation with the wind or a mug at Kornblatt’s or an owl, I mean that there is something which connects us beyond language. Meditating as I stared into the eyes of an owl didn’t feel like viewer and object–it felt like two equals in conversation, speaking through one experience. It wasn’t about me seeing it or it seeing me–it was a transmission beyond that, like two beings finding a place beyond space to sit and be.

Whether you’re reading this blog without a genuine taste of what the “it” of meditation is; you know the feeling well; or somewhere in between, the owl is not important. The world presents us with gorgeous gifts every day, gifts we can choose to see or ignore. The owl is a bird in the park but it’s also the act of putting on my shoes or unlocking the mailbox.

The ecstatic is the ordinary. There is no need to meditate into the eyes of an owl. You don’t need to go to India and meet a guru on a crowded street choked with incense at a festival of colors. I went on a run and I saw a bird. That’s it.

This miracle is open to you, no matter where you are. Whatever you are doing didn’t have to happen. You could have been dissolved by an asteroid or kissed by a poison berry, but your choices brought you here to this moment–the pinnacle of every moment you’ve ever lived. Your life is forever the culmination of every other moment before it. Stumbling upon an owl isn’t the miracle–it all is.

The night before my run, I took a walk. The temperature was perfect and the clouds were caught in the daily undoing of astronomical twilight. I had been staring at a particularly giant mass of cumulonimbus when someone walked by.

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” I asked him.

“What’s up there?” he asked.

He walked from under the trees to I was standing: on a dirty sidewalk corner in the midst of an unobstructed sky unraveling in front of me. He peered into the heavens–searching momentarily for what could be so extraordinary to make me stop and stare.

“Oh, it’s just clouds,” he said before I could answer him, and he walked on.

I watched him walk away.

Ten seconds later, I saw his head cock slightly, as if finally comprehending what I was doing.

And then, as if by magic, for a single fleeting moment, he looked back up to the sky.