Barry Garden Path

I have begun to see everythig as alive. It has been gradual and didn’t happen all at once. The trees, animals, humans, rocks, planet, suns. All are becoming alive for me. Of course, they have always been alive. What is changing is that I am now awakening to the reality that presents itself and unfolds before me. I’m not even sure that my awareness is complete, but the change is happening.

Key to my view is the recognition of the active intelligence that is expressed in everything I can encounter. Everything is infused with an intelligence that both expresses how things present themselves and animates us all. Intelligence gives form and shape to everything. It creates everything forms its attributes and infuses dynamic energy in all things. In my view, this all-inclusive intelligence brings everything alive.

Just looking at the world from a materialistic perspective, we have come to the conclusion , based on observation, that all things are made up of atoms. The consensus is that these atoms are active, that their “parts” are in motion. Nothing simply sits still but it is, at least internally, very active. In this mostly materialistic way, everything is in motion. For me this is enough to conclude that it is alive. Everything is active, not passive.

The first atoms that came together to form molecules expressed this aliveness. They actively engaged with one another. Molecules act further to create complexity and the complexity engages in a way to create what, even in common speech, we call organisms. Along the way, from the beginning and through the growing complexity , every entity expresses itself with dynamic energy. For me, they are alive.

There is in everything this alive energy that I have come to see as the erotic energy of the universe. It drives and defines everything that exists. Significantly for me, it invites deep and engaged participation in this wild expression of eroticism. This is the engagement that the universe calls us all to enter into, to become part of. For me, it is all about being alive and sharing in common what it means to be alive.

It is this view that allows me to walk through my garden and feel in my whole body the aliveness all around me, above me, beneath me. All the world, the plants, the trees, the ground, the wood in my deck are alive and inviting. This awareness makes it explosively clear that everyone walking past is alive just like me, like my garden, like my universe.

Everything around me takes on a magnetic attractiveness once I recognize that it is alive. Everything and everyone becomes preciously alive and invites me to engage with it. Once I recognize that everything is alive, I want to embrace and guard it from harm. Being alive is not just a trait of the universe and its energy. It is a welcoming invitation to an alive union. We all share being alive.

There are no answers or clear guidance outside. It is all inside, within me. My most trustworthy understanding is inside me and arises from my own personal experience. All the rest is someone else’s way, someone else’s path. My path is inside the winding patterns of what I myself experiences. It is not within the patterns of others.

My life is shaped by my learning what I observe of the patterns within me. For me, it has been important not to be distracted or guided by fears and an imagined future. It has been most reliable to stay in touch with what I am experiencing right now, not what I might experience in the future. Even less reliable has it been to stay in touch with what others imagine or experience.

I rely on what I experience inside of me, not what others experiene inside them. My reactions, like my dreams, are messages of how I am to move through the world. The experiences and imaginatins of others form their own path. The paths of others may provide an environment for my own experiences, and I can learn from them. I observe the experiences of others, and then I notice how I react. I learn from the experience of others, I see more clearly toward where I may want to go or away from where I may want to steer. Theirs is not my path. My path is mine alone, but I can learn from what I see others do.

A great shortcoming of my life has been to live in the imagination of others expressed in dogma, in teachings of religion. Their path is not mine, but I can learn from their path. Even the teachings expressed in Buddhism are no more than the expression of what others have experienced. I pay attention to what resonates inside of me and I act accordingly. The formulas of religion expressed in practices are no more than examples of how others have found their way. I have to find the way that is forming inside of me. That is how I make choices specific to me. That is how I recommend guidance to others. Others have to find the path inside of them.

I can only say what works inside of me. That means first of all that I have to pay attention to what is inside of me. I must above all be aware how I am experiening the world around me. Perhaps that is why I approach the world around me with love. I fall in love so many times each day, and that is an invitation to the world to show its loving self to me. That is how I learn to experience the world, by loving all that I encounter. And that gives me the most reliable experience inside of me. When I am open to the outside in a loving way, my inside path is most reliably based on what is real, what most accurately present.

So when I reliy on the guidance that is within me, it is founded on my intent to see things and people just as they are. That may be how I learn to live in the world just as it is. It is not a learning based on the spoken or written teachings of others. It is based on what I experience inside of me when I am open to the world. I follow my own path. I follow what is most clear inside of me.

It is an on-going challenge for me to avoid being distracted. I practice walking in my garden, aware of my plants and where I am in relation to them. But I become easily distracted by what needs to be done. I constantly pay attention to what has yet to happen and am easily distracted from what is happening right now. I get distracted by my own thoughts and the thoughts of others. I get distracted by what I would like to do and by what I want to avoid.

For me, walking the middle path is largely about not becoming distracted. Rather than being aware of who I am and where I am, I get distracted by what I would like to have happen or by what I don’t want to happen. If I focus on what is happening right now, I have less inclination to wander off the middle path. I get less hooked by craving or avoidance if I am not distracted, if I am paying attention to where I am and who I am.

I notice that when I walk from the bus to the light rail and from the light rail to my classroom, my mind wanders from one thing to another. I could be attentive to the sidewalk, the people moving around me, the feel of the air. But I get distracted by my plans or my problems. I would prefer to pay more attention to what I see and what I feel. I would like to be paying more attention to how I am reacting, what my body is experiencing, what it is like to be me in this moment.

My iPhone and my computer are great distractions. They take me away from the moment and direct me to other places, to the past, to the future. These tools encourage me to live in the imaginations of other people, in what they are thinking, in what they want of me. I can be so easily distracted by what others are saying or what they have said. I can easily be distracted by the words and thoughts of teachers. I get distracted from my own thoughts and feelings by getting too immersed in what teachers, even teachers like Thay, have said. I want to know more about what I think, even if my own thoughts are stimulated by what others have said.

Even while driving, I want to be more aware of who I am and what I am doing, not what someone is saying on the radio or podcast. It is a hard balance to maintain. Walking the middle path is for me a challenge to avoid distraction. I choose to be aware of me and where I am. I want to take full possession of my life, and not be distracted by what is beyond me . I want to be focused on who I am and where I am.

I have always bent toward being a teacher. Perhaps sometimes too much, I have always wanted to teach others. Not all that teaching has been welcome, and I have gradually learned when not to teach. Now that I am in my elder years, I am much more casual and subtle in my teaching. More than anything, I have learned that I can be an inviter and less of a shower. I invite people into an experience, and they can do their own teaching to themselves.

I don’t tell others as much I once did. I more often show them. One way I do this is my my casual openness. I invite others to experience openness by my relaxed, focused openness to them. It can be as simple as nodding or speaking to someone I am passing in a passage way. I can be the way I talk to the checkout person at the store. I invite others into a bubble of openness, and they can experience what it feels like. If they want to.

This is a key part of my falling in love multiple times a day. My falling in love is simply my being open to another person or thing. For me it is a loving invitation for them to reciprocate, to fall in love as well. It can be quite vulnerable, it can be awkward, it can be off-putting. It can also be an experience of what vulnerability and openness feels like.

That is a risk I am more and more willing to take. It is what it means for me to be a teacher. Others are invited to experience what I experience. Being an elder is my last chance to be a master of loving, a master teacher. I want to make the most of my being a teacher.

Being neuro divergent hasn’t alaways been that comfortable. Now, so much has changed. I didn’t realize that my brain worked a little differently from many others. I did know that I was different, that I didn’t fit in. In time I realized that my brain did function a little differently from others.

Then I was officially identified as being on the autism spectrum. The medical team confirmed that they considered me divergent.

I was somewhere on one of the tail ends of the bell shaped cure that said I was different from most. I was not considered average. It was then that I really began to like being different. It had been a long, drawn out process.

I finally accepted that not only was I different but that difference was a unique attribute. I developed a confidence and comfort in following my divergent way. Over time, I learned to understand what I felt and trust what I felt. I think I alaways had a sense of wanting to do things my way. But now I know and feel that this is my own personal path, and I like it.

For a few years now, I have seen that being divergent has been my own special gift. I have embraced being divergent.

I try to make it a daily practice. Perhaps I am simply choosing a daily experience of falling in love. Rosemerry constantly gives me the words for it all. But for me it is my own invention to find and welcome the exerience of falling in love again and again and again. Rosemerry says “I want to love life as if it matters.” It is up to me to make that happen in whatever I do. It is my own daily experience that teaches me what that really means.

I have often said that any day spent without falling in love at least once is a day not well spent. There are so many opportunities that present themselves daily. I daily step in to a world brimming with “what and who “, all waiting for me to fall in love with them. The trees wait for me just outside my back door, beckoning me to embrace them with an open heart. We speak to one another and it is a language dripping with love and affection.

I walk through my garden yard, and the grass and I caress oneanother with tender affection. The plants lean in all sorts of postures and directions, waiting to be touched and acknowledged. They welcome me with sighs of loveliness and scents that make my whole body tingle. Falling in love with so many living plants around me is an excitement I feel daily. I am constantly being changed by what I lovingly absorb, and I know it.

There are so many people I come close to every day. The miriad of encounters can be overwhelming. Some of them are very close to me and I can acknowlege their presence with an openness that accepts them just as they are. Many respond to my openness and respond in a reciprocal way, encouraging me to fall in love again and again. I often allow them to change me, I become different because of them.

I talk to plants and I touch them. It is a loving touch. I talk to people. Sometimes I touch then, and it is a loving touch that connects in a way that goes beyond words and sight. It is my world, and I have learned how to fall in love daily with it, how to not just acknowledge it but also to absorb it. It seems to become a part of me, but that is a reality that has always been there. We are so intimately connected and falling in love is just my way of acknowledging that intimacy.

I have had teachers that have helped me learn what it is like to absorb, to take in the world around me. Daily I have many opportunities to experience what that is like. I intend to be ready to fall in love at every opportunity that presents itself. I want to live my life daily as if it matters. Because it does.

I think it is OK to retreat. I even consider it an important part of living a good life. For me, it is a pause in a life of engagement. It is a time to disengage for a spell, and then re-engage again. I have been on many formal retreats in my life, and they have been less of a refuge and more of a springboard to the next time of engagement.

I now find those formal times of retreat less important. Perhaps it is because every day has its time of retreat. Every morning has a time of disengagement for me when I deliberately enter into a time of mindful movement and a quiet time between bells. My burning candle and rising incense remind me that this is a special time to withdraw, to retreat into a unique space. My mind relaxes. I may have moments of formless exploring or times of exploding thoughts of awareness. Every morning has a mini time of retreat.

Those moments of retreat are woven into the fabric of my days. There are even brief moments of retreat when my hourly mindfulness bell reminds me to stop, to pause. Those brief moments are also times of intense engagement with whatever is near as I touch the counter top, my desk, my leg. I become unaware so that I can become intensely aware. These moments of retreat are a kind of refuge from whatever is demading my attentin. Those moments of refuge are a spring board into a renewed kind of awareness and engagement.

My Sangha offers itself as a refuge, a place for a brief retreat every week. Our weekly meetings are a retreat from our daily thoughts and concerns. They are a time of quiet space more often than not. We even had a novelty visit from a group of monks that reminded us what a life apart from life could be like. All this opportunity for retreat and refuge is attractive and can be useful.

I also want those Sangha times of retreat to be spring boards to engagement. For me, those times of refuge are opportunities to become aware of what stirs inside of me and what needs to be dealt with. By creating those times of letting go I can gain insight into what engagement awaits me. Engagement emerges from retreat in my morning practice. I want engagement to emerge from the weekly retreats of my Sangha. I want my Sangha to be both a refuge and also a doorway to active engagement with the world. I do not want my Sangha to exist only as a safe escape from the world but a portal and invitation to involvement.

My retreats are an important, even essential part of my days. My skill and practice of retreat allows me to walk through my garden in an engaged manner. My retreat practice allows me to meet the world in a loving way, with an open heart. My practice of retreating sets me up, opens me up for active engagement with my world.

What is inside counts most for me. I try to be attentive to the world around me I reach out to people and things and embrace them in a loving manner. But what really seems real and meaningful to me is what happens inside of me. My engagement with people and things is deeply moving for me, but it is what moves inside me is what I value most. I pay attention to the world around me, but I pay most attention to how I feel and how I react.

I can be focusing on the cup of tea in my hands or the cereal I am chewing inside my mouth. But I am most in touch with how those feel inside me. I can be enjoying the view of beautiful flowers in my garden, but I am dominated by how I feel, even while I am aware of the lovely plants. I can be aware of the touch of my desk top, but it is how I experience my desk inside is such more a rich experience. I can be aware of how I am touching someone, but the feeling that fills my whole body is so much more significant.

Perhaps my resistance to be shaped by the world around me and by my culture is part of how I value most what is inside me. I value what I see, but I value even more how it moves me. I value certain features of my dominant culture, but I allow myself to be moved mostly by what I allow to penetrate inside me.

Lately, I have been alerted to how I have been refusing to say I belong to one religion or another. I am not Buddhist or Catholic, even though I allow certain features of those teachings to be a part of me. I am not willing to show up as a member of one religious group or another, but I do experience certain aspects of those systems inside me.

I resist some movement in my Sangha to look outside for experience or inspiration. We adulate the wonders of monks and visiting teachers, the experience of others. All the while, it is what is inside the Sangha that I value most. We have all we need for inspiration inside the experiences of my Sangha members. We seem to be attracted to the old notion that an expert is someone from another town. We have enough expertise in the experience of our members and we need not look often to the allurement of sirens outside our circle.

I am aware that my position in the universe is of great and unique value. I have meaning and significance just by being who I am. What is inside me is enough and I need not look often very far outside my small world. What happens inside is what ultimately counts. I have things I want to do today, but most important is what happens inside me, not what I bring about outside me. My experiece inside me is most important. What happens inside is what counts most for me.

The invitation to walk in beauty comes in so many forms. Each day presents me with a continuous string of opportunity. I have often felt that any day spent without falling in love at least once is a day not well spent. I realize that the invitation to fall in love every day is another way of saying each day presents many opportunities to fall into beauty.

Falling in love is unfortunately an experession only used to express a relationship with another person. The expression is, for me, much richer and includes all things, even though the experience is pretty much the same. To fall in love with someone I just met on the bus is an experience very much like watching a swallowtail butterfly move among the flowers in my garden. Both are an experience of falling into beauty. Each is an abandonment of caution, each is an acceptance of what is before me. Each is falling into love.

Falling into beauty for me always involves the senses. My body becomes aware and then my whole self experiences the beauty before me. This is true if it is a person or if it is any other entity. The senses are always involved in my falling in love, in my awareness. The senses are how my body reaches out and how I am firsr connected.

My attraction to beauty begins with any one of my senses or a combination of them. They are how I first become aware of the presence before me. Perhaps it is only my imagined awareness of the presence, but even then my senses are the first avenue of awareness. If I allow it, my whole being soon gets involved. If I let go of my protections, my whole self reaches out and I experience the intimacy of the presence of someone or something. I absorb, and beauty becomes part of me.

I want to learn how to move through each day prepared to be absorbed in the beauty around me. I want to experience the beauty of each encounter. I want to accept the invitation to fall into love again and again throughout the day.

The summon to achieve is a trap. I can easily get lured into the attraction of what I want to accomplish, and I get distracted what is happening right now. For me, planning is part of my day. It is one of the things I do as soon as I wake and take a look at my calendar. But I try not to put much energy into what has yet to happen, and I turn to what is happening right now.

Achievevement is a remnant trap of my old self. My to do list can easily put me into the future and not in the alive present. I can miss the erotic energy of the present when I focus on what is yet to come.

I want to engage with what is happening in my body right now. I want to touch what is around me, and I have a reminder every hour to do that kind of touching. I want to embrace the intimacy of my own mind just as it is right now and not be swept away on some possible achievement. I want no regrets about what I am not doing, what I am not accomplishing. I want to feel what tremendous energy there is in what is going on right now.

It is enough for me to be generally aware of what has happened in the past and to be aware of what might happen in the future. But I don’t want that kind of awareness to be a distraction from what is happening right now. I do not want my possible achievements or my past failures to be a trap. I want to be wholly immersed in what is happening right now.