Barry Garden Path

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.

Knowing is not the same as feeling. Being routinely aware of that has made a wonderful difference in how I live. I can know a tree and all its traits. I can know that it is rooted in front of me. But feeling its presence is a dramatically different way of experiencing the tree.

The same is true of people. I can know that they are walking toward me, I can see their appearance, I can know a lot about their identity and history. But to feel their presence is another kind of awareness. I can look around the circle of people gathered in my Sangha and I can see them sitting quietly. I can even be aware of them in a sensory and knowing way. But it is such a deeper exerience to feel their presence.

Being able to feel the presence of someone or something is how I feel deeply connected with them. Feeling the presence of anything allows me to experience union with them. My awareness of my presence is joined with the awareness of their presence, and it occurs on a feeling level, not just a knowing level. In that instant of feeling, I am connected with them in an experience of oneness.

Many times my mind is distracting from feeling. Mind can easily block and be an obstacle to wonder. Wonder for me is in the realm of feeling. Knowing can sometimes keep me from feeling the presence of someone or something. My thoughts can distract my awareness and restrict how I can be open to feeling. Thoughts can even result in revulsion or avoidance.

Knowing can also be a doorway to feeling when knowing takes away the limits of time. Mind can take away the constraint of time and see an individual not just as they are now but as they have been many years from now. Stripping away the constraint of time allows me to see someone in their timeless entirety, in the timeless youth they continue to carry within them.

I have been learning how to change my way of being aware. I am learning how to enter the realm of formless perception. I have learned how to let go of the mind constraints I have such a natural tendency to put on peope and things. Knowing is such a limiting way of experiencing the world, and relying on what I feel has dismissed much of the tension I have felt about the people and things around me.

It is almost like I have discovered another sense by relying on what I feel, not so much on what I know.

There is no easy way to describe what connection means to me. Perhaps it is enough to say that I know what I experience, but then it gets difficult to find words that describe that experience.

I know that when I was walking in the small woods surrounding my cabin, I felt a deep connection with the trees and the ground. The memory of that experience is fresh in my awareness today. I remember what it meant to stand on my front small deck and feel the presence of trees in front of me. I also remember the wet shoreline by the lake, feeling its wetness even though I never bent over to touch it.

I know what it feels like each morning to stand before a burning canadle and swirling incense. The sound of my singing bowl travels all through my body and I can feel it all around me. I move my body in familiar patterned gestures, and the experience fills my entire skin. I often ignore my sensations and feel a connection with the whole universe, even though I am sitting still on my bed. It helps when I am not impeded by clothing and my body is free to reach out to feel where I am and what is happening.

I know what it feels like to be connected with a friend when they walk towards me or sit at my table. I feel the connection in every hug, no matter who they are. I look around the circle of friends who come together in my Sangha. I feel connected to each of them, but in different and specific ways.

None of this experience of connection has happened in a flash. It has not happened without clearing my mind through repeated acts of concentration. My sense of touch plays a frequent role in my experience of connection. I touch trees, I touch my desk, I touch friends. Sometimes I let go of my senses and that allows me to exprience what it means to be connected to all that I cannot see or touch.

To anyone who might want to know what I mean by connection, there is no easy answer. I only can offer that they enter into my experience. I offer that they use their senses to initially be connected and then let go of that sensation to be deeply connected. Being connected in this way gets easier with practice. With practice, the experience of connection comes easier. For me, the experience of connection lingers and stays me the more I let it take hold of me.

It is something of a paradox. The more I let go, the deeper I experience connection.

I do not think there is a reliabe recipe for life, for living, for loving. With that in mind I step into each day, aware that there is no set path to follow. There is only the path that I can see beneath me and that I left behind. I am not following a path, I am forming my path with every decision and every action I take.

I have let go and am falling into an awareness that there is no recipe to life and to how to love. This is the wisdom of having lived and stumbled through many decades. I have for times allowed myself to follow custom and the recipe that my culture has offered me as a guide. I have been a follower of the patterns of religion and found that the reliable recipe was inside me and not in what I was taught or told.

Some recipes offered by my culture have served as loose predictions of consequences. I have been given a map that showed where my decisions and actions might lead. But my rewarding experiences of life have arisen when I strayed from the directions handed to me. The consequences have not always been positive, but I have learned how to step into the moment without the clutter of should and shouldn’t. I have actually gotten a much more clear view of the past, present and future when I have ignored what I have been told and instead relied on my own awareness.

I am aware that I have little asssurance of the outcome if I ignore the many recipes offered to me. My life has no predicable outcome, my actions do not lead to guaranteed results. But I know that the more I keep an open mind and open heart, the more I am going to enjoy my daily journey. I think I will enjoy the outcomes no matter how much I ignore recipes. There is joy for me when I wander off the path, at least for awhile. I feel more agile.

I may plan and structure my days, but I allow myself to wander inside and outside those structures and plans.

Rigidity has typically been a part of my life, but not always a welcome part. The rigors and structure of rigidity have been a source of stability, predictably and comfort. For me, rigidity has also been a barrier to creativity, contemplation and community. Now I am realizing more than ever how rigidity blocks my in-depth relationship with the world . I am now seeing clearly how religious rigidity in particular has been a problem for me. Religious rigidity in some of my sangha members is now rising as a threat I am increasingly aware of. And I resist.

That I am resisting religious rigidity is nothing new to me. It has been part of the dynamic that resulted in my leaving the community of Franciscans that I had been part of for a dozen years. I attempted to break away from the rigidity of the monastic life and the catholic church, but it has been a gradual process. Only recently have I learned what it feels like to let go and enter a realm of unstructured perception.

My life obviously has a lot of structure in it, but I am embracing the unstructured more and more. Someone described my garden as “controlled chaos” and that description is becoming a characteristic of my life and my thinking. I am making strides in abandoning rigidity. I am becoming more comfortable with the formless and unplanned realm of existence. I am growing more resistant and uncomfortable when I am surrounded by rigid behavior, especially any signs of rigid religiosity. I have learned to recognize it, almost instinctively.

Like many others, I have taken comfort in rigidity. It has given me a feeling of security and helped me to feel in control. I now am aware that this is due in part because I am white and see myself as white. Rigidity is a huge part of white behavior. White people have traditionally taken comfot in religous culture that offered rigid, predictable, controlling structure. For me, that seems like the tyranny of being white. This religious tyranny creeps into my sangha, and I want nothing of it.

A highly organized and predictable structure is not what I want. Nor is it something many young people are looking for today. Certainly I want structure in my life. I welcome control of the unformed chaos. But I want plenty of room to welcome the chaos. I want the rigidity to be only what is absolutely needed. I want to experience the darkness of each endless fall. I want to learn to let go in how I think, how I feel and how I behave. I want rigidity to be by my side but not in front of me.

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