What's in a name?

I was once given an exercise to name everything I saw without judging it. Just the name. For instance, I would not call that a beautiful tree or this a smelly sock. Just ‘tree’, ‘sock’, etc. After spending some time doing this, I found that it was often difficult to name what I saw: is that a chain link fence? wire? or am I looking at the gaps between the wire? At this point I found it easier just to call everything I saw, ‘God’.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not religious. I don’t go to church, I’ve never read the Bible, and I probably believe less now than I did when that word carried a big charge for me. God to me meant religion, and religion meant the opiate of the masses; it meant war and politics; it meant believing in the improbable, blind faith. Now God to me simply means everything. You, me, this, that: all of it. There is no my God and your God because my God includes your God, whatever that may be. And if you don’t have a God, it includes that too. There is no right or wrong with this God, no good or bad, no judgement. There is only this. And this, and this, and this.

I’ve been doing this exercise again recently, and I am finding the same peace in it as I found then. I am seeing through it that there is no real distinction between things: this hand, this pen, that sky and that barn are all essentially the same thing. It is only my perception that would tell me different. And I refuse to be a hostage to my perception, for I am determined to see.