Non-dependent

It has been somewhat of a gradual process, but in a little over three years, I have suddenly learned a lot about how it feels to be non-dependent.     Even though I had spent decades knowing about dependence and how stifling it could be, I was apprehensive when it came time for me to actually choose to be non-dependent.   I was somewhat tentative about taking that step, but I gulped a deep breath and took the plunge.

Now my feeling about being non-dependent is robust and firm.    My intent is clear.    My experience is affirming.

For me, being non-dependent is not quite the same as being independent.   Being independent implies a kind of aloofness which is not at all what I want or experience.   I want and appreciate closeness, especially an intimate and open-hearted connection with my companions.    I have been learning what it means to have a non-grasping relationship with them.

I am gradually settling into the feeling and acceptance of being alone.    There still are times that feeling alone is unsettling, even de-stabilizing.    I am learning that there is a place of stability inside of me that I can reliable go to.    I only have to relax and concentrate into it.    I can be my own port of refuge from the anxiety of being alone.

I also have a small group of friends and companions who I know are there and with whom I am connected.    Most of them reliably respond when I text, email or call them.    That small circle has been slowly growing and I want it to continue to expand.

When I am in contact with them, I can offer them a mooring line as well as receive one.   I have become very comfortable and at ease in being fully present.   I am happy that I have companions with whom that is easy, possible and accessible.

I recognize that my own stability in being non-dependent has made me  a more reliable and stable port for others.    I am very comfortable in inviting others to enter my private garden.    It is a place of joy and refreshment, and I feel at ease in sharing those delights.    My own stability can be a source of refuge for those who choose it.

I sure like the feeling and effects of being non-dependent.

Present

I am having a wondrous time uncovering what it means for me to be fully present with someone, especially someone I significantly care about.   These people are all those with whom I have had a lovely  exchange of open-heartedness.

I see that there is no small amount of fearlessness about the experience.    I need to plunge fearlessly to be truly present.    I am finding, however, that the courage to be present is so much more a facile action when my emphasis is on the now.     The future is irrelevant, the past is interesting but only in as much as it embellishes or explains the present.

It is a moment when I am most acutely aware of what is happening now, and I can be deeply present.    I am not paying attention to  building a structure or foundation for the future.    Even if that may actually be happening, and I may be obliquely aware of it, my focus and intention is on the present, what is going on right now.

How freeing it is when there is no intention or presumption on continuance.   We are attentive only to what is happening right now in this present time together.   I am starting to think that perhaps some lives are best lived as a string of airplane conversations.    Plunge then come up for air.    Then plunge again.

This experience reminds me how unfortunate it is that the societal tendency and intention is to focus on continuance, the future.    It is grasping in a culturally enforced form.    I have been taught to grasp the experience and grasp the intention to continue it.    People ask ‘where is this going, what is your intention?’

Being present is often not enough in my society and I am encouraged to  attempt to preserve it rather than simply being open to being present again and again.

I think society has, in fact, created a damaging structure that often erodes the experience of being present by promoting marriage.    This institution and practice attempts to enshrine the wonderful experiences of being present in a structure that just doesn’t work for most.

We are encouraged to enter into a relationship that guarantees that we will “always be together, present for one another, to death…….”     This is such a lofty promise that it is beyond the realistic reach of most humans.    It is a promise that actually is undermined by being constantly physically close to one another.

There are practical reasons for living together.    Economics encourages it.    Raising kids requires close cooperation, presence and effort.    But the actual being together makes it more difficult to be fully present to one another.    It is possible, but hard.    My experience has convinced me of this reality.

This, of course, is a good reason for me to choose to live alone.   I get to come up for air.     I hope that there will be individuals in my life with whom I can take the plunge and  be fully present.    I hope to share the joy that rises from being fully present.   But for me, this will have to be on terms that offer little security, little assurance of permanence.

Any assurances to the contrary would be illusory and false anyhow.

I think that this approach actually makes me more capable and available to be present.   I can be much more focused on the here and now if I am not constantly thinking of where this will lead.    I rely on my awareness and insight into what is happening now.    And then I take the plunge to be present.

Who

My response to a question of ‘who’ I am has certainly changed.    There was a time that I myself pursued an answer to that question, and now that is beginning to seem so irrelevant.    As my notions of self continue to evolve, it is all becoming more of a blur.   At the same time,  the response of ‘who’ I am seems to become all-embracing.

On the outside, I imagine myself as appearing as a hollow sphere, a ball inflated to a certain size, even distinct and distinguishable.   I imagine myself as appearing defined and occupying a place in space.

From the inside, however, all I see is the surrounding, all encompassing inner surface of the ball.    My world is both all around me and is also all of me.    There is no other, I imagine very little beyond what I see.

On the outside, I imagine myself appearing to others as a labyrinth of human traits.    I am defined, actually, by none of them.    I like to refer to myself as a Gardener.     It is a simple term, and it is what I see on the inside of the ball.    So it has become a useful term to use when I describe ‘who’ I am.

In a broad sense, Gardener is an apt metaphor  both for ‘who’ I see myself to be, and for how I see myself interacting with the world.   I walk through the world with all the tenderness and care a gardener extends to the beds of plants.   I am not afraid or hesitant to stoop occasionally and pull out weeds that I think are not part of my sense of Beauty.    I rearrange plants so that they may relate differently to one another and to me.

‘Who’ am I?    I feel like an alien to this world.    I have abandoned a good part of my illusory relationship with reality, and I am beginning to see all things and people with fresh, alien eyes.     I am living inside, but I have outsider’s eyes.   As I look about, I have a paradoxical notion of no longer being part of my surroundings.    At the same time I have a most intimate relationship with plants, rocks and people.   It is an intimate relationship with basically all I  encounter.

I feel like I am less and less of this world.    I am on the outside, looking all around inside.    All the while I am aware that I am a great song that has penetrated all that exists around me and I am part of all I can see.

I suppose I am less of a ‘who’ than I once was.    ‘ Who’ I am has become hard to describe, but I still attempt to do it to help others understand.     All the while, however, I am perhaps no one.     I have this growing notion of being no one and not needing to be some  one.

It is not so critical any more that I be a ‘who,’ that I be some one.    Perhaps that is because I am gradually becoming aware that I am in everything and every one that I touch.

Invitation

Some days I feel like I am standing at the entrance to a worm hole, inviting all passers-by to enter with me.    It is a strange place to be since the last couple of years have been so transformative for me.    I feel like I am living in an alternate reality.    The world I am walking in is no longer the same as it once was.    I cross the street at 9th and Hennepin and it feels amazingly different than it once did.

The disappointment I sometimes feel is that I now know what is possible, and when I invite friends or even casual acquaintances to enter this world with me, they decline.    They are not ready.    And at that moment I remember all those years that I was not yet ready.

I clearly want to have companions.    I prefer not to feel the aloneness that my alternate world seems to demand.    I still have this notion that it is a place that can be shared, and I want to share it with as many companions as is possible.    It is not an easy step for them to take.   I am painfully aware of this.

I still want others to experience the bliss and delight that my alternate world offers.    It is a place where illusions are  questioned, where teachings are doubted, and where the awareness of reality is sharpened.    I want others to be able to experience this world in all its  wonderful splendor and excitement.   Above all others I want my sons to know what it is like.

And so I repeatedly invite others to enter this worm hole.    I suspect that it is a one-way trip.    Once entered, this alternative reality may from hour to hour lose its sharpest and vigor.     But there really is no turning back.   Maybe others realize that and do not want to give up all they must leave behind.

I invite others to join me, fully aware of the danger I am inviting them to take on.    If they join me, it will demand that they shatter old concepts, give up old comforting illusions, perhaps adjust their human relationships.    It is not a step for the faint-hearted, and perhaps even seems weird and off-balanced, contradictory and uncertain.    All that is true.

I still will continue to invite others to join me.    I offer an invitation with my words, my eyes and my presence.   It is a good place to be.   I hope that neither they or I  will be completely alone.

 

Pleasure

I am ignoring all the flashing red lights as I plunge ahead.     What I was once taught to avoid I now embrace.    Was it my German heritage or my Catholic school that taught me to beware of pleasurable things?    Either way, I was certainly well-educated.

When I could have been learning to understand and become aware how to indulge in the beauty of the world, I was instead taught to be wary and suspicious of anything pleasurable.    It would be best if I would simply avoid pleasurable experiences.    The teachings still go on, even in books I sometimes read.

I am escaping those dole teachings.    Instead I plunge into the rapture of sounds rising from a Beethoven concerto to the point that tears flow from my eyes.    Walking through my garden in the morning is a sensory adventure and delight to sight and touch.    My whole body thrills with glee to the experience of a beauty reaching out to me.

I have learned and absorbed the pleasure of sitting with a friend for hours, talking of our individual experiences with such intimacy that they become a shared encounter.    The pleasure of a shared presence laps against the shores of rapture.

I now gleefully accept my awareness of indulgences with a pleasure that mocks the teachings I receive.   No, I will not avoid and shy away.    I will not avoid the delights of the world.    I especially will not avoid the pleasure of human encounters that have become experiences of beauty and wonder.

The pleasure of a chance encounter with a plant, a person, a rock is a welcome delight.   I indulge in the pulsing warm water of a morning shower.   I wantonly discover the touch of a soft, dry towel.     The body I was taught not to touch is now a routine source of delight.    I take pleasure in the soft fuzzy surface of a peach, I feel the knife plunging through the texture of the peach flesh, I feel the knife strike the pit, I slowly slurp the sweetness of the peach.

Why would I listen to the advice of teachers and ancestors when the pleasures of living are mine to enjoy.    My heart, my inner self, my skin all reach out and the pleasures are mine.     We are becoming one.

Separation

When did humans divide themselves into male and female genders?    Certainly, this division was more than a separation of function, in the role each plays in reproduction.   At some time, this became a separation into categories of who we are and how we see ourselves.

At some point we became male vs. female, and the two are not always complementary.    The tension and antagonism pulls us apart.   We are pulled apart within ourselves as well as within relationship.   How do we ever put ourselves back together again?

The Creation and Fall story in the book of Genesis is a testimony to the division felt in those who wrote the story and who passed it on.    It is a felt division, a split between the genders in society and in us as individuals.    We became male and we became female.   At the core of this separation is a sense of betrayal and distance that is difficult to overcome.    One acts against the other.

This is the story that I grew up with and it resonates with the social conditions I experience.    All through my adult life I have tried to reduce the role of the male side of me and reunite the two.    I am perhaps only now figuring out how to do it.

I think I was born with both aspects in me of male and female.    I learned the role of one of these to some degree, but the two have never been rejoined.    I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to reunite these two parts of myself.

Society has helped as the rising gay tide has ignored or blurred some of the definition of separate genders.     Transgender expressions are also a strong attempt to bridge the division in individual people and in society.

My comfort with an androgynous inner self has been my way of bridging the male and female aspects of me.    I think my preference for female companions has been because of my interest in associating  with my own people.   I sometimes think that I enjoy the company of women in whom I can see a part of myself reflected.

As I plunge into deep emotional parts of myself through the experience of meditation, I am gradually uncovering some of the female aspects of myself.     This was especially evident in my recent five day meditation retreat and all the expressions of deep emotion since then.

I recognize that I am mostly male identified.    But the female part of me is becoming a more evident part of me.     I like that the separation the male and female parts of me is being diminished.

 

 

Curious

I admit that I am curious.    In fact, I kind of like that I am.   I am curious about many things:  my garden and the gardens of friends,  the shape of the edge of water, the feel of my cup of tea.    I am especially curious about people.   I watch them, I absorb them as they sit down on the bus, I smile as I watch them crowd around my pond searching for elusive fish.

It is the kind of curiosity that draws me into the kind of open-hearted awareness I increasingly experience.    This combination of curiosity and awareness is something I commonly experience with people, plants and rocks.    People are at the top of my list.

I sat last evening with a lovely friend in a quiet sidewalk cafe in St. Paul, and I was swept here and there with curiosity as I listened to her.    It became such a pleasant, aware time.    Earlier, I sat in a concert hall and was curious about a piece of music I had never heard before.   My curiosity allowed me to be transformed by a weaving disharmony that carried me through a labyrinth of new musical awareness.    It was thrilling.

I am aware that I routinely invite others into the world of curiosity.    I encourage them to be curious about me as I am about them.    I know that this may have some unfavorable aspects of ego-building in it.    But I am also inviting them into a relationship built on curiosity and awareness, theirs and mine.     I too am curious and want them to be with me.

It is a dance of curiosity and awareness.    It is a dance that always requires a partner, whether it be a person, plant or rock.    We lean toward one another in an exchange of curiosity that easily morphs into awareness.

I have often encouraged my son to be curious, especially when I hear something like, “I don’t care about that.”   I  am myself learning the meaning of my own words.    I don’t think I fully understood the invitation I was offering and promoting.

I encourage others to be curious about many wonderful things:   school, retirement, gardening, friends, the world.   I often remind myself that it is time for me  to be mindful.    How much more exciting, energizing and effective to remind myself to be curious.

 

Singularity

It is very hard to shed the myth of singularity.   The notion of loving one person and only one person still haunts me in so many ways.    And that notion is absolutely wrong.   It is so contrary to my experience, and yet it still lurks in the periphery of my awareness.

I have been taught in thousands of ways that loving more than one person somehow diminishes the love you have of each.     It just doesn’t work that way.    As I distance myself more and more from this unreliable notion of singularity, I find that the depth of love and affection simply grows as the perimeter of people I love expands.     I have been misled.

While a lot of people rely on the idea of “just one love” in their lives, singularity is just not true.   It actually causes problems such as jealousy, possessiveness, and control.     By its nature, singularity is exclusive, it excludes the rest of humankind.     I lived on the path of singularity for much of my life, and I am realizing how shallow a life that was.    It even had a truncating effect on my love for my singular lover.

As I relax and just allow the openness to happen, I find that a lot of people can find an ardent place in my heart.    It is still true that I focus individually on those I love.    When I am with someone, my attention and felt ardor is focused on them.    I am typically not thinking about someone else, nor am I making comparisons.    The person with me or receiving attention in any way is the only one I am aware of.

So what to do?    Simply indulge, day by day, encounter by encounter.    When I am with someone, the connection I feel is out in the open, shared, felt.   When we are not together, we are connected in multiple other but more subtle ways.

I choose not to express love in measured out or equal dollops.    It simply gushes out in whatever way the situation allows.   I find that the size of outpouring is often related to the ability or willingness of someone to receive love.    The degree of felt, experienced intimacy is a mutually agreed-upon item.     However, I don’t always get this right unless we talk about it.

I probably have never totally bought into the notion of singularity, because there have always been an assortment of men and women I have loved, been in love with.   I have, however, been confused about how to express that love, and mostly remained silent about it.

The silence is slowly being lifted.     I am gradually taking the bold step of saying “I love you” in relatively clear terms.    I’m still mostly indirect in how I say it, but the expressed affection whispers it in soft ways.    There are people I have loved for many years that I hope to be able to tell how close to my heart they are.    Hopefully that will be some day before either of us dies.

The untruth of singularity has kept both my tongue and my heart silent for too long.     Already, I am finding that some people are not at all sure how to handle love clearly or indirectly spoken.     I’m also not so adept in how to speak it.    Nevertheless, I still think that it is a message we all benefit from hearing.   I know what it is like to live a life of muffled messages of love because of the stifling constriction of singularity.    I wish to put that aside.

I wish for all those I love that they be free of the notions of singularity with all its pernicious attributes.     I wish the same for myself.

 

Choose

Every morning it is a choice.  I gradually wake from a world of unconscious awareness and I am faced with an immediate option of choosing to embrace a new day or not.   This is no simple choice, but it is mine to make.   Mine to seize or to ignore.    Life is that way for humans.

I have a latent awareness that lets me choose whether or not to experience what being alive means.    It is mine.   It will follow me through the day.    It will tug at my consciousness again and again and again.

This is an unknown day.    It could be a day of immense happiness or incredible sadness.   It is hard to predict, even when I try.   Predicting is something I unfortunately try to do before my feet even touch the floor.    I still have a choice whether I will embrace, experience it in the fullness or silently and passively drift through the day.

Choosing to be mindful is a choice to be engaged, to feel engaged, to be intimately engaged.

I am aware that every step I take can be filled with the joy of movement and contact.     Or it can happen in a totally unaware way without any of the experience and engagement that I am capable of feeling.

When I first wake, I typically have hints of what the day might be like.    I predict what actions I might take, the people I might get together with.   To some degree, I have a moment of awareness and engagement, even though the reality of the day is uncertain.    My only choice, however, is about the now, how much am I open to what is happening right now as I sit on the edge of my bed.

I still don’t know how much that openness will flow and continue through the day.    I  don’t yet know if I can embrace the accidental, unanticipated encounters.    Will I be able to absorb the anticipated disappointments of encounters not acknowledged by others?

My choice is not only to be aware.    A basic awareness comes naturally, and I will not avoid it except by distraction, or going back to “sleep” in a figurative manner.   But I can choose to really feel, beginning with the carpet under my bare feet, the cool hard surface of the bathroom counter, the warm and alive outpouring of the shower.

These are all choices I can make repeatedly and they set patterns of awareness I want to carry with me throughout the day.

So I sit on my cushion  and I open all my pores of awareness, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet.    I allow my body to relax and feel with all its strength.    It is a moment of being aware that this is what it can feel like. This is what the day can be like.   This is a taste of what it is like to feel fully human.

I freely give myself to it as I hope to give myself to every subsequent moment of the day.    It is a time to fully embrace both happiness and sadness, real and anticipated in my imagination.    It is an embrace I feel through my whole sitting self.    I want to learn how to experience everything I do in this manner.

I choose to live this day.    I choose it in its raw fulness.   I choose my aloneness.   I choose my garden.   I choose my friends.   I choose my planned activities.   I choose all the surprises.

I want to experience them all and feel them just as I deeply feel the softness of the carpet, the coldness of the counter, the heat of the shower.     I choose not to miss what this day might present.

 

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

– Rilke

Now

I keep recognizing how difficult it is for me to stay in the now, in the present.    I also think I witness the same difficulty in people I brush up against.   Even when I am focusing on the now in how I interact with others, it doesn’t go well when someone else isn’t doing the same.   No matter which way I go,  I seem to repeatedly run into difficulty.

I seem to be involved in a dance that others want to play.   I often become aware that they are anticipating the future at the expense of the now.    Not staying in the now causes tension and suffering.    It isn’t enough that I am present in the now.   In fact, that seems to cause tension when someone else is not ready to do the same.

Sometimes when I express all that is right now, it is too much for others.    The boldness to be fully present is sometimes too much.    The consequences are destabilizing for them and for me.   When clarity is important to me, it sometimes runs contrary to someone else’s wishes for ambiguity.    So things do not go well.

Robert Bly has told the story of Iron John in which he tells of the boy with the golden hair.    For a long time, the boy with the golden hair keeps his head covered lest the shine be too blinding and too revealing.     Then the time finally comes when he removes his head covering and only then reveals who he really is.    I think there is a lesson here for me.

It is time for me to learn how to be present in the now, but be more reserved in displaying to others just what that means.    Being transparently present is my wish and ideal, but I want to add patience when dealing with others.

It is nice to live in the present, and that is a difficult enough task.    Added to it is the challenge of seeing the now as perhaps extending into what others might regard as the future.

There may be no past or future in my now, but that is seldom the perspective of most of my companions.     However, when we do meet in a common now it is pure joy.