As a human, I have this awesome ability to reciprocate awareness. I suspect that other creatures have a similar ability, but mostly among their own kind. I best reciprocate awareness with my own kind as well.
I can open my heart to rocks and plants, and for a moment even share mutual awareness. This awareness, however, is remarkably different from the shared awareness I have had with other persons. It is a recognition and acknowledgement of each other. It is a gift we give to one another, and nothing we can take back. It endures, whether I choose to experience it or not.
When I relax and open my heart to someone, it is an invitation for them to do the same. It is an invitation to reciprocate, to be aware, to be present with me at whatever level we might be capable. We signal that connection in myriad ways, but the open heart is always involved. Even if the heart is open but a small crack, that instance of shared awareness never passes, it is never lost.
I allow myself to feel connected to all those with whom I have had those moments of shared awareness. Those were the moments when we conspired to look or listen and we entered into the same moment of time, we entered the same sphere of space. I think that those are moments of timelessness, a time of stepping out of the normal reckoning of the passage of time. They endure, they never go away.
I continue to experience those moments of reciprocal awareness, not as a grasping for some lost treasure but as an enduring expression of mutual awareness and joy. I don’t know if there was a beginning, but I am sure that there has been no end.
There have been many ways that other persons and I have opened our hearts to one another, but it seems all of them have endured. They are not experienced as memories, but as enduring instances of love.
Maybe that is what love does and why so many people resist entering that realm of awareness. I now know that those loving moments of love endure, especially those marked by reciprocity. Once I have opened my heart, that moment never goes away, even if I resist continuing to experience it.
That moment exists outside normal time. I may later resist that same form of openness. We may no longer reciprocate that instance of strong openness. But that open time of awareness and joy is still present. I have a choice whether to experience that reciprocated awareness.
So I routinely choose to continue to experience that awareness. I allow my heart to experience those reciprocated moments at least once a day. I knowingly invite all those I have loved to be present with me. I might as well do that because they are part of me, and they are waiting there to share in my awareness and joy.
I choose not to resist entering into that timeless embrace. It is not just a memory. It is allowing myself to feel an experience of reciprocated awareness that took me out of time. I meet that experience again and again, whenever I choose to allow it.