Month: September 2016

I’ve been involved in various ways with a group of people who now see themselves as the Spirit of St. Stephens etc.   They see themselves as a Catholic community, but I try to ignore that.

I have a deep affection for this community.  I had a hand in giving shape to some of their practices, practices that came from my own heart and still do.   I love the people, they are close to my heart, and I like to be in their presence.

It is painful for me, now, to be with them because they have become an aging couple who no longer create a newness in their relationship. They are a young couple who know how to be together and are committed always to be that way, to preserve what they have.   Without deepening, searching, and exploring, the heart to the community has lost its vigor.

Sometimes, I think they have found something they dearly love, and have put it in a safe place.     However, what they found is a living thing, and it must grow, change and become new.    I haven’t seen that happening much.  The Spirit has been put in a gilded cage.

I have stopped being with them and will stay that way, unless I see that they want to break out of the “same tried and true.”    Maybe let the Spirit fly again.  I might be able to help.

I’ve focused on mindfulness as though it were a thing of the mind, and it is nothing like that at all.   It really is an affair of the heart.

The mind has a role, and that is to get out of the way as fast as possible.   Clear thinking means clear out all thoughts.   Open-mindedfulness might be closer to what is needed.   Get rid of all the mental constructs so that the senses / perception can take over, really “see” what is there.   The seeing is not just with open eyes, though that can sometime help.   Instead, I try to see with an open heart.

The heart is the true organ of mindfulness, of deep perception.  Acting mindfully is not a way of thinking but a way of loving, of yielding to love.

 

For me, my body is a gateway to mindfulness.  Before each private meditation sitting, I spend time practicing Tai Chi Chih.   This practice involves body movement and the stirring of sensory energy throughout my body, but especially my hands.   This makes me very body-aware, which reminds me acutely where I am in space and time, and I become mindfully present.

I am given this experience by most things that focus on my hands, whether it is moving air,  or a position of my hands.  Touching myself,  someone else or some solid object, can have the same effect of bringing me present in a mindful manner, and with that, a glowing sensation of well-being and presence.   I touch people and dogs and flowers whenever possible and appropriate.

While this is especially true for my hands, it can be stirred by other parts of my body, and it quickly radiates to the rest of me.   Since I began wearing Crocs, which have a ridged inner-sole, I am much more of aware of the bottoms of my feet, an assist for walking-meditation.   I now understand better why I so enjoy skinny-dipping in the lake.   The sensory experience of putting food in my mouth permeates my whole self.

I am aware that my eyes have a large impact on my being present, but I am still trying to understand this.   Sometimes it feels as though my body reaches out and touches something that gets my attention, especially if it is beautiful.   Distance seems to be no limitation, no separation .   The object and I become present in the same space.    This is especially true when I stare into the night sky.  Still, if I can touch, that is what I do.

I love and use my body as I never have before.

 

I have always seen myself as a patient person.   I am finding that I can be impatient as well.   Sometimes, even recklessly impetuous.  Perhaps it is something you get to discover when you get older.   Perhaps I am feeling more secure in my footing, unlike my struggle with bodily balance.    All this time, I thought impatience was a trait of youth.

I was a much more cautious younger me.     Maybe that was just last year, maybe last week?    I experience the caution in others, and I sometime regret my impatience.   However, I realize that it is a habit I have somewhere, sometime, somehow begun to shed.   I love the bold rush that accompanies impulsivity, but it also still unsettles me.  Walking on the edge still disturbs me.    A little.   Maybe, however, I am learning where my feet can find their home, so I can run up to the edge and back again.     Their home is somewhat ambiguous but warm.  And I think I know where it is.

Some days, I feel like a drunk trying to walk the white line.   I get myself in a mindful groove, then I wander, then I find it again, then I totally lose it, then I’m back again.   So it goes.    Forming a habit of mindfulness in the center of my life is hard.

I hesitate to use the word intimacy, because most of us instantly think of bed sheets.    But that actually is what closeness is, intimacy.   I seem to be running up against the fear of going deep, which of course means closeness.   Revealing ourselves, where we really live.  And if we reveal ourselves, we will be shunned or loved.    It’s risky business, but my appetite for it  has become demanding and impatient.

As I become more accustomed to mindful time, I find that I  am more comfortable and familiar with what I find, inside and outside.   I find it easier to be truly present and open to people.   When people approach the Master Gardener Q & A table, I find it easy and enjoyable to really be with them, listen, be present.    Their response is typically positive.

But with people I am closer to, the response is mixed.   There is the bed sheet factor, I think, that pops up.  I think it is an issue for men and women, whether they are coupled with someone or not.    And there is the simple matter of fear of closeness.

I am impatient.    I like where I am learning to live.   I love my life of being  alone, and I welcome closeness.

We’ve known for some time that there is a hidden, unseen world.   Not a matter of belief; it is part of the human experience.   To make sense of our experience, we’ve populated that part of our world with Gods and Goddesses, personifications of the forces and powers we been aware of.   Sometimes this awareness has been on the edge of experience, almost in a dream-like state.

Even the Jews, Christians and Muslims gave appearance or  personality to some kind of hidden individual.   Every  christian culture has known what Jesus looks like, a deity with form and substance.    Our imagination has been able to go only so far, but it has been a fertile ground for creating our Gods and Goddesses in our own image.

While we’ve given them faces that resemble our own, the reality has been just beyond our grasp.    We mostly know and experience nothing else other than the world we see and touch.   The exception is when we clear our minds of all images and thoughts and open ourself to become aware of that invisible aspect of our world.   It is a face-less world, but we can become aware of it.   Our whole body becomes aware and glows in its presence.

Time and distance sometime reveal themselves to me when I sit in my room or at the end of my dock.   Together, they invitingly uncloak the mystery of the deceptive illusion in which I live.   I am not a solitary drop in the ocean; I am the ocean.   I do not stare into the night sky;  I am the night sky.

What an artifact of time and distance we have conspired to create.   It is what we do to live together, but really we are one, joined forever in the time-less now.    Occasionally, I get a small glimpse.

It has been over 30 years since I fell in love with my cabin’s site and got so emotionally involved.    Over the years, I have replaced most of the cabin’s surface, the outside, the windows, the floor, the inside.     I’ve built an annex with a composting toilet and a wood shed.   But my heart clings to the trees, the land, the water, the view from the dock.    I was nearly devastated when the storm blew down so many towering oaks.  Now I smile to watch the young pines stretch to take their place.

When I am not there, I know that somewhere the wind blows thru a tall White Pine.   I know that daily, a crowd of other pines are reaching enthusiastically to fill openings in the canopy.    I know that every morning, the sun creeps over a horizon across a lake and sends an avenue of fire toward a  dock.   I know when I swim in a pool at the “Y” that there is a cool lake that holds me in its grasp and brings my skin alive.

I’ve been wondering what is happening in our little earth world.    What gigantic mechanisms have we set in motion that we only faintly understand.   I’m curious where this all is going.   I’m fascinated by what I have been told about climate change.   I’m alert to the unique surprises that pop up around many corners.

I am concerned that the changes have begun to usher in much suffering.   People, animals, plants all console one another in their shared fate.  I expect I will suffer too, but I will welcome the awe.   I am curious about the beauty in the changes we have initiated, the awesome power we have chosen to unleash.   We have been unknowingly guiding major forces in our little world and they are already in motion.    So it must be time for me to get aboard and boldly ride into the future, eyes open, without caution or regret.  I choose fascination over fear.