Month: December 2016

I am slowly realizing how important it is to me to be a trusted companion. I want to be someone who can be totally present and aware, accepting and not judging.   I want to be able to listen without feeling compelled to respond.   I want to be attentive.

I will be a trusted witness who is openly aware of others, but especially my close companions.   I intend to affirm their pain and their accomplishments in whatever way I can.   This begins by paying attention, being aware of their pain and accomplishments.  I intend to be acutely attentive to anything they will trust to reveal to me.

I am prepared to be present, to be aware, to be a trusted witness.    This I also want from my companions.  I want it from any of my close friends willing to step into that circle of exchange.

More than anything else, I am a gardener.   My world is a garden, and it changes from season to season, from year to year.   All the while it remains the same garden, and welcomes anyone who cares to enter it.

I ask my garden to be both a whisper and a shout.   I invite all visitors to be carried away by its abundance, variety and beauty.   I summon  blooms to erupt with surprise, delight and excitement.  I nurture secrets to lurk at every turn, ready to reveal subtleties for the curious and daring.

I want to live in a world that welcomes poets, mystics and lovers.   This would be a world that values people who see beyond the obvious, people who are not distracted by illusion and fantasy, people who penetrate to the hearts of matter.   For them it would be a routine and normal occurrence to want to see what is really present and who their companions really are.

I want to live in their world and be able to look behind the curtain of appearances and find the gold at the root of the mountains.   I want to be comfortable with and very aware of the unseen reality hidden in the flesh of my companions.

Perhaps if I learn to live in this world of people who see with their hearts, I may just be able to become one of them.

For me, loving other people is best done from a position of solitude. I mean this from the ground up, from the very beginning.   I think that it is in this manner that authentic love comes in its genuine form, gentle, caring, not controlling .  When solitudes border one another, they offer a magnitude of mutual support and protection.   From solitudes, the ability to greet and welcome are magnified.

The path of solitude avoids the great disappointment so many lovers experience.   Disappointment arises when lovers leave their own solitary orbit and begin to orbit around one another.   The border and distinction between them weakens and, having entered the space of the other, they want the other to be just like them.

Without my place of solitude, it is easy for me to begin to expect others to change.  This is true of the most casual relationship through the most intimate.  Respecting the solitude of others supports an open-hearted manner of loving.  To achieve this, it is important for me to be grounded in my own solitude.

I am grateful that my world includes a variety of friends whom I love in many ways and degrees.   I think we are free to love one another in the manner we do because we do so from a place of solitude.   We support one another, acknowledge one another, care for one another in a full-hearted way.   Our differences can enchant, not disappoint.   We share a mutual respect for one another’s solitude, and our love is more authentic.

 

I’m counting on my friends to be a lifeline as I venture into some unknown territory.   I have clearly been changing, and my sense of reality is no longer what it once was.   It is as different for me as when I first went snorkeling, breathing air but very much in a new watery world.

Sometimes I seem to be living in a new and different body.   Maybe it is the same old body, but my relationship with it has dramatically changed.  It is both distinct from me and yet very much me at the same time.   I find myself trying to juggle a paradox.

I can be in my body and at the same time I have a real sense of being my body.   It is like I am living in a mirror.   Everything is a true image of the original, but they are also distinct.  Which is real?  Is the image any less real than the original, does it make any difference?   Are the two images part of the same reality, two aspects of me?

I do have a strong sense that there are these two aspects of me only when I am totally paying attention.   They are real aspects only when intentionally seen.   Like layers peeled apart, they take on a certain amount of separateness only when I am being mindful, when my awareness is excited.   Still there is one whole.

This is why I need my friends to be a lifeline.    This is a world of mirrors, and I don’t yet dare to become separated from friends.