nesting woodpecker

I've just been watching a woodpecker chipping away at a tree trunk, excavating a nesting hole, here on a wooded hillside in Himachal Pradesh, in the north of India. The woodpecker was amazing to watch. It was a master in its craft, very efficiently digging a neat hole. And now I see its back, continuing its work, very rhythmically.

And watching this woodpecker, it's highlighted to me that there are two ways to make something. One is by collecting stuff and building things up. This is the way most birds build a nest. They go and collect some twigs, some straw, maybe some moss, and they construct something. Here's this woodpecker, though, taking more the approach of a sculptor: removing material, in order to create a nest. And this contrast, between building things up or removing material, is reminiscent of the difference between human beings.

Most people collect stuff in their life, and try and build an identity, really, out of stuff, collecting more and more as the years go by: wealth, possessions, relationships. This is really the ego approach to life. There's another way, though. It's the way of a monk, and that is to remove things, to live with as little stuff as possible: giving things away, shedding material objects whenever possible. And this monkish approach also involves digging inside, a little bit like this woodpecker is digging into this tree. On the spiritual path we have to look inside ourself, and clear out as much rubbish as we can from our inside, at the same time as shedding as much as possible in the external world.

This is the analogy that's coming to me today, as I watch this woodpecker digging away at the tree trunk, building its own home by removing material.