Yellow Bird

This morning, another unforgiving news cycle. I poured a cup of coffee and stepped into my back yard, needing a bit of quiet. A small, yellow bird landed on the fence. A small sun flaring in a smoky light. It tilted its head, looked at me in that sideways way that birds do, and for a moment, the noise of the world slipped away.

Every day brings reminders of how precarious life feels. Wars erupt and storms grow more severe, wildfires permeate each summer; governments and societies collapse, and computers learn faster than humans. I am often tempted to retreat into smaller worlds, to shrink my circle. Yet here was this tiny thing, breathing the same air as me, its heart beating with atoms once inside other hearts.

Scientists tell us that this feeling has a factual basis. The elements that make up our bones, our blood and our thoughts were born in stars. NASA explains that the hydrogen and helium forged in the early universe, were scattered across space and eventually became part of planets, trees, birds and humans. When we trace our matter back far enough, we find ourselves in a cosmic recycling loop; the elements in yellow bird’s beak and the elements in my teeth have both been parts of other bodies and will one day be part of others still. Carl Sagan captured this idea when he said that the cosmos are within us, that we are literally “made of star stuff.” Yellow bird and I sensed this shared ancestry, a lineage not of genes but of dirt.

The story of dirt begins before there were stars. If we wind the film of the universe backwards, we arrive at a point where density and temperature become infinite. Physicists call this the Big Bang. Under broad assumptions, such a singularity is inevitable. The equations of general relativity break down at that boundary and cannot tell us what, if anything, came before. Cosmologists caution that this “singularity” is more a signpost of ignorance than a description of reality. Extrapolating physics to that extreme is like extrapolating your life back past birth. You’ll reach a place where your model no longer applies. In that sense, the origin of everything remains cloaked, a mystery that evades even our most intelligent minds.

Mystery, however, is not emptiness. It is the fertile soil of wonder. When I gaze upon yellow bird, I think that perhaps the universe is not only producing observers but is, through us, observing itself. Our minds and senses are cosmic experiments in awareness. We are a way for the universe to know itself. If that is true, then the curious eyes of a the warbler and the questions in my mind are both expressions of the same vast process. Seen this way, ordinary becomes extraordinary; magic is folded into the daily act of paying attention.

In quantum mechanics, two particles can become entangled so that their properties remain correlated even when separated by great distances. Entanglement is not like glue that binds objects; it is more like a dance or a relationship, an emergent property that arises from the connection itself. This strangeness at the subatomic scale invites metaphor: perhaps the universe is laced with threads of relation we cannot see, and our separateness is less absolute than it feels. When I lock eyes with yellow bird, I wonder if some faint version of entanglement exists in the way our attentions met. The idea is less a claim than a question that opens my heart.

Buddhist teachers offer another language for this experience. Thích Nhất Hạnh coined the term interbeing to convey that all things “inextricably interpenetrate.” Drawing on dependent origination and the concept of emptiness, he teaches that everything needs everything else to exist; nothing has an independent, permanent self. Interbeing means “co‑being”: you cannot be by yourself alone; you have to inter‑be with everyone and everything. He points to a flower made of “non‑flower” elements like sunshine, clouds, rain and soil. Without these, the flower cannot exist. “It is the case with humans also,” he writes. “I am here because you are there.” When I looked at yellow bird, I did not see a separate object but a constellation of relationships. Sunlight streaming from a star, water drawn from clouds into the bird bath, the potters work of the bath, seeds eaten, the chance garden encounter. I too am a constellation. Food from distant soil, language from ancestors, habits shaped by culture. Our lives are composed of non‑self elements, woven from the world and our experiences.

The teaching goes further. Thích Nhất Hạnh reminds us that humans are made of non‑human elements. Animal, vegetable and mineral. The so‑called self is made of non‑self elements. If we live according to that insight, he says, we will protect ourselves and our environment. To bring harm to yellow bird is to harm a piece of myself. Such understanding is not an ethical rule imposed from outside but a recognition of what already is. It invites me to care.

We cannot cleanly separate an objective world from our perception of it. To be is to inter‑be. The sheet of paper on your desk contains the sunshine, the rain, the logger, the tree, the trucker, the salesman, and also your awareness of it. Everything co‑exists with everything else. When I feel a pulse of anxiety reading the news, that emotion is not just “mine”; it arises from information, from my upbringing, from neurons shaped by evolution. Recognizing this does not dissolve the feeling but situates it within a larger field. It creates space around it, like stepping back in a crowded room and realizing I am not stuck, I am not alone.

In a fractured world, these ideas become more than abstractions. They are invitations. The uncertainties that rattle me become a reminder of our dependence. We may think we can insulate ourselves with walls and policies, but the pandemic showed how porous our boundaries are. The smoke that tinged the morning air when I met yellow bird had travelled from fires hundreds of miles south, that would engulf me without the help of firefighters. My breath carried molecules that had been inside strangers. Yellow bird does not need to know any of this to live; it simply lives. Yet in that moment of mutual notice, I felt their quiet instruction: Remember your place in the world. It is neither higher nor lower but always in relation to.

What if every glance held the possibility of such recognition? What if, in the midst of uncertainty, we could touch this steady ground? We are made of the same ancient matter, that we arise from conditions we cannot control, that our very perception is part of the world we perceive? The questions do not resolve the chaos of history or the complexity of physics. They do not deliver a final answer about what preceded time or why there is something rather than nothing. But they soften the grip of isolation and they give me hope that our interconnectedness is our path away from our fractured realities.

Standing in the yard, I realize that awe is not a rare event reserved for mountaintops. It can live in a simple meeting of glances on a smoky morning. The universe and our existence might be unfathomable at its edges. It is also intimate, perched on a fence and tilting its curious head. Between the unknown and the familiar there is room for reverence. And in that space, the question “Who are we?” opens into a more generous answer: we are everything, we inter‑are, and the world is not something we observe from outside but something that breathes through us, as surely as yellow bird lifts its wings and vanishes into the branches.

We are the universe observing itself.