Month: July 2021

As I walk through my home, it is like passing through a time capsule of the world. My home is a museum of relics that tell the history of the world I inhabit, the past and the current.

Nothing is older than the granite I touch as I lean on my bathroom sink or my kitchen counter. So cold to my touch this morning, it holds an ancient memory of such high temperatures that melted rock to form this pattern of colors I enjoy.

The age of my granite is unknown to me, but it easily could be of precambrian origin, formed more than 500 milion years ago. It is a thrill to touch such an accumulation of years, allowing me to reach back into earth’s history before there were creatures crawling and swimming about.

All the rest of my home has a much younger origin. The wood of my window frames and bed could be perhaps a hundred years old. The glass of my windows was surely formed in my lifetime. Though made of ancient organic substances taken from the earth, the synthetic fabric of my carpet is younger than me. There is leather in my couch and cotton on my bed that are from animals and plants so recently alive.

There are many objects in my home older than me: drinking glasses my parents received at their wedding, photos of ancestors taken in the early part of the past century and hanging on my hallway wall. My other walls have framed objects that range from the thousand year old Peruvian fabric to a South American ceramic plaque made just a couple years ago.

If I could put a date of origin on everything, I would find myself surrounded by an amazing record of passing time, from hundreds of millions of years to a couple of weeks or days. It would extend from the ancient granite surfaces to the flowers that were growing in my garden this week. It would include fruit and vegetables only recently growing somewhere in the world as well as the newspaper printed just this morning.

I find myself fitting somewhere, perhaps everywhere in this chronology laid out in my living space. I have shown up alive today, and parts of me have been around for decades, having traveled around the sun for decades. Some parts of me appeared over night. I love living in this wonderful kaleidoscope of time.

I am quite uncertain. I have begun to wonder if my deepening is something I have to do alone. By myself. I keep hoping to bring one or more companions along with me as I explore what it means to plunge. I’m beginning to wonder if that will happen.

Is deep intimacy such a solitary experience that no one can join me there? Are there any companions who can follow along with me, or am I simply on my own?

Once again, the image comes to mind of Harry Potter walking along through the forest to meet Voldemort and his expected death. It is a lonely walk. Though his supporters are nearby, it is his walk alone. The movie does a great job of portraying this.

I am beginning to feel that I also walk alone, just like Harry. It is a walk that I know is moving slowly into a deep well, into the Gap, into a great emptiness. I don’t know what it will be like, how it will feel. While I’m not there yet, I can sense where I am headed. It would be nice to have companions, but I may not have the closeness of companions who are on a similar path.

It was a morning gift from Rilke. He opened a fresh vista for me when he pointed out that “those who sense eternity are beyond all fear.”

I’m not sure which comes first. Is it the sensing of eternity or the movement beyond all fear? Perhaps there is no causality. Perhaps they are both part of the same movement, the same free fall, the same plunge into emptiness. Entering the Gap requires a surrender that abandons all fear. Certainly all attachment or clinging to fear are left behind. There is a lack of awareness of consequences, there are no regrets of outcomes from the past, no grasping for the future. The void opens where there is no fear.

To face the reality of my death without fear is to sense the eternal. To be intimately aware that “this will end” is to step into the eternal realm, to approach the other shore.

The intimacy that I want to become a hallmark of my life is the experience of that place of no fear. That place has no past and no future. For me, intimacy is all about learning to simply be, to stand where I reside and be aware of that simple uncluttered spot. Intimacy is becoming aware of the presence of everything and anyone around me, how they exist just as they are.

The rug on my bathroom floor, the tree I touch in my garden, the companion riding beside me in my car are all present in intimate ways. They are present just by being there. For me to experience them without fear, to allow them to simply be as they are is to experience them in an intimate way. It happens in such a deep way that it brings a sense of eternity. The eternal present arises. There are no regrets, no grasping, no pushing away.

These are moments of intimacy, of deep awareness that we are all simply present. There is the bathroom rug, the garden tree, my beloved companion, and me. For wonderful moments, we all settle into a sense of eternity without fear.

It is my life’s work, yet I am embarrassed to speak of my love for other people. It is so difficult to include that word “love” in a conversation with individual friends. My heart knows it is a common theme running through the assortment of people I am close to. Still it feels embarrassing to tell my companions that I love them.

With them, it remains unspoken. But to me it has been no secret that I have been so unconstrained in opening my heart to many of my companions. Still, I am embarrassed to tell them so. They might be embarrassed to hear it.

Once again, I feel like I am pushing against the stifling constraints of my culture. To say “I love you” can be as embarrassing, so I am taught, as stepping naked onto the dock at my lake cabin. Too revealing, too uncomfortable, too challenging for others to experience. And so I typically remain mum. Silent.

But not always. There are a few of my friends with whom the word “love” has furtively slipped into conversation. But only a couple. Yet I am aware that among a whole assortment of companions it is no secret to my heart that I am “in love” with each of them.

I once broadcast to everyone I knew that we are “all called to be lovers, to bear one another’s burdens and share each other’s joys.” That was many years ago. Perhaps it was risky to make such a public statement, to broadcast my birthright and aspiration. It would be another challenge to say that directly and personally to everyone I knew, even though it might be ardently true.

It is sometimes a burden to despise the constraints of a culture that places such limits on us, the says we must be embarrassed to say I love you. I meant it to be my life’s work to be a lover. I might as well get on with it today while I still seem to have time. It is time to push aside my fear and caution of embarrassment, my own and my beloveds. I have no good reason to keep my heart from speaking out.

It began many years ago. I was in my early teens when I began to become intimate with the velvet woods. I never realized what was actually happening at the time. All I knew was that I felt a heart tug and I was attracted to the woods.

Something inside me reached out to experience that deep feeling of intimacy that the woods offered. In my teens, I began to describe the woods as a “velvet forest,” my way of acknowledging the deeply sensuous experience of entering and passing through the palpable embrace of the woods.

This past weekend I was walking up the path from the lake to my cabin in the woods when I unmistakably felt that deep reaching out to one another, the woods and I. The invitation was so clear. The difference between us faded and I once again touched that deeply familiar and intimate plane that I share with the woods.

In a flash, I understood how I had, over many years of practice in the woods, learned to take the seen and bring it into the unseen. What would appear in a sensory realm was a lingering and longing invitation to a place beyond sensory experience and delight. I was no longer just in a plane of trees and branches, needles and leaves. Neither was I in a wholly abstract place unaware of surrounding sights and touch.

Perhaps I was finding myself in between where my senses reached out and so did all the power and energy inside me. The seen and the unseen had a place to meet.

Stanley Kunitz spoke of gardening as an erotic experience. The garden is an invitation to the erotic, the deepening of our nature, an encounter with the deep energy which we share with all things. I think that equally describes what it is like walking in the woods. It describes what it means to be able to experience the velvet.

The erotic nature of the woods is there to be experienced, to be felt by our own erotic nature. However, that eroticism exists beyond the senses, beyond the seen. Not everyone can feel it. The woods is a waiting, welcoming lover, ready to receive anyone on a deep level. But perhaps not everyone.

Like any engagement with the erotic, the woods requires an open self if it is to share what it has to offer. It requires a willing surrender to the invitation of intimacy. The practiced blending of the seen and the unseen is a part of a walk along a path in the woods as it is in any experience of deep intimacy.

I have learned over many years, and oh so slowly, what an intimate place the woods can be. Fortunately, I began to get a taste of the velvet nature of the woods while I was still in my teens. The woods surrounding my cabin are where I intend my ashes to be placed when I can no longer walk into the embrace of my velvet forest. It is where I belong, where I feel most closely what it is like to be home.

Like Rilke once said, I have seen myself as living “my life in widening circles.” What that means has changed a lot over the years. I admit that I once saw myself as having a wide impact on the world, or at least a good part of it. I saw myself as touching the lives of many in a healing, loving way.

I even had a small taste of that imagined widening role those times when I stood before hundreds of people and attempted to give them guidance on how to lead a good life.

That has changed. My wide horizons have shrunken year by year. My ambition of touching a wide world has shrunk from those years I spent being responsible for protecting the waters within the boundaries of Minnesota. I now pay much more attention to what happens on my small residential lot in Minneapolis.

I no longer aspire to touch the lives of many, and I realize that I may only truly touch the life I call my own. Sometimes I think I touch the lives of those who stand close to me. I am fortunate to have companions, and we live lives that touch one another and shape one another in the small intimacies we share. But it is only in touching my own life deeply that I realize that I am living a circle that reaches out and touches in widening ways.

To live in widening circles has come to mean that I must become intimately present in the tiny space and brief moment I occupy right now. Perhaps, there are times I am privileged to have companions that occasionally occupy a space close to mine. They are often a great support for my deep focus.

It has turned out that by learning to enter that narrow gap of deep focus that my life actually expands. Wideness follows me, touches what I have touched. It is not something I seek but it has become something I bring to the circle by first touching it in me.

I have no doubt that there are ways that I still touch the world in tangible concrete ways and affect the lives of others. But the widening circle is actually within. Others may come and go and share that intimate space with me. But more and more I am seeing it as a place of convergence. All is contained. It is a place without shape, without dimension and without boundaries.

It is a place of widening.

I sometimes think of him, mostly when talking with friends. I was a junior in high school when Father Arthur taught a poetry class which I was obliged to take. I never liked to write. In fact I dreaded it, avoided it. I boasted with relief that I had only written one paper in my younger years. Father Arthur changed that, changed me.

He did nothing particularly special except made me and my classmates memorize and recite 400 lines of poetry. He required that we write an equal amount. All those cadences of words, memorized, recited and written changed me. Those repeated reaching for words of my own, hammered away at my shell of dread and dislike until I was broken. I would never be the same.

Slowly I discovered the hidden music and rhythm of words, not just in poetry but prose as well. I began writing with a growing awareness of how the sounds of words blended together to create a new kind of harmony. I discovered joy in shaping words to carry hidden meaning and nuances not commonly apparent. I took pleasure in writing on several levels with the same text. Father Arthur’s poetry class revealed this hidden magic of words to me.

In time, I learned to use words to reveal not just their common meaning, but my own hidden experience as well. They became the garden that exposed the life of the gardener for anyone to see. They became a path to a special kind of intimacy.

Thanks to Father Arthur, I learned that writing can be fun, exciting and seductive, even if no one ever reads what I write. I am someone who always reads what I write, and so by writing I learn much more of what it is like to be me.

Perhaps thirty years ago, I had a chance to thank Father Arthur in person and tell him how he had changed me. Of all my high school classes, it was his poetry class that I most treasured and made an intimate part of my life. I could tell that he didn’t quite know how to respond, not too surprising for someone who had been hijacked by alcohol.

But I knew. I heard what I said. I am so pleased by what I had the chance to say. I am so pleased by what I had become, thanks to Father Arthur and his pivotal role.

Learning to live in the Gap is not always pleasant or reassuring. There are times I still want to hold on to the side of the pool, unsure about the attraction of free-fall letting go. The Gap is essentially a place I must be willing to be alone without support, and that is sometimes difficult, sometimes challenging. I am unsure.

It is so gratifying when I encounter a fellow traveler who, in spite of being unsure, is willing to enter the same unclinging, uncertain space. Those are the moments with someone who has found the joy of putting aside the protective armor so commonly worn. Our culture is such an effective training ground for learning to put on the armor of protection, possessing and clinging.

The irony of the culture is the training of protection actually makes deep intimacy more difficult and less likely. It protects me from what I most ardently want. I am forced to rely on chance encounters when I enter the Gap and cannot depend on the routine presence of fellow travelers willing to enter the same loose, unfettered, immense space of engagement.

As much as I want to live in the Gap of emptiness, I am still unsure. I hold back. And so do others.

If you never did, you should.

These things are fun, and fun is good. – Dr. Seuss

I just began reading an early book of poetry written by Rosemerry, and she starts it with enthusiastic encouragement from Dr. Seuss. It is an invitation to say “Yes!” and I accept it with gusto.

Yes to everything. Yes to today. Yes to the heat. Yes to the pleasant and unpleasant. Yes to thriving plants and to shriveled ones as well. Yes to the wet green grass, yes to the laundry asking to be taken care of.

It has taken me many trips around the Sun to learn how to say yes. Yes to this and to that. I sense resistance to yes in friends and I want to grab them and invite them into a world of yes. You are free, free to say yes.

Today is presenting so many adventures and now if only I can relax and enjoy the fun of it all. Fun is good. I want to welcome the fun and neither grasp or cling to it. Not try to make it go on and on. Just say yes to right now.

I say yes to living outside the box. I say yes to the wild freedom of no longer being in the cage my culture prefers I live in. I say yes as I escape the clutches of all those who would control how I am to meet the world.

Today is a good day and it has hardly begun. It has already been brimming with fun. Yes!

The sign at an entrance to my garden encourages visitors to touch in the garden. It is an invitation to sensuality. In the garden, plants reach out to brush against ankles, bushes lean over the path wanting to touch and be touched. There is the softness of cushions on chairs, the chill of water and ice in sweating glasses, the sound of water bouncing down rocks. The soft swish of luxurious, long green grass offers a sensuous experience of walking across the back yard. I feel its yielding softness under my feet.

Becoming sensual is an open threshold to awareness. This is a relatively new notion because, like most, I have been told to be cautious and wary of sensuality. Just like intimacy. The touch of skin is especially dangerous and to be avoided out of fear and protection, just like most forms of intimacy.

But I know that the touch of the angular, rough bark on my large tree can be highly sensual. To experience its firm, hard touch makes it easy to feel intimately connected to the tree, to simply be with it. Other opportunities to be sensual accompany me through the day. I only have to consciously open my senses to experience the world at every turn as I move from minute to minute.

There was a sensuality in the writing these words as I felt the pen move across the page of my notebook and heard its soft scratching noise. The sensation was accompanied with a deep feeling of stillness inside me. There is almost always a sensual aspect to the interior satisfaction I feel when I write, even when I am at the keyboard.

The cold surface of the sink, the warm rush of a shower, the soft encounter with a towel all contribute to a flowing stream of pleasant, sensual delights. I say leave me alone, all you fears and cautions about sensual delight and allow me the freedom to fully meet the world where it waits for me. I ignore caution and reach out, in the morning, for a day filled with sensual adventure.

The truly sensual is much more than what occurs in my finger tips, the recesses of my nose, or the taste buds on my tongue. For me, true sensuality is much deeper and experienced beyond the simple sensory. Sensuality is not in my skin, my eyes or my ears but occurs so deep inside me that it fills the whole expanse of my body.

To touch the hard, rough bark of the tree is not merely tactile but can be transformative to my roots. Perhaps it is in the awareness of the sensory that true sensuality exists for me. It is the sensory as known that stirs the deep sensual response inside of me. It is actually the deep awareness that allows the experience of deep sensuality.

This has happened for a long time when I walked through and touched the trees at my cabin, when I smelled the scent of the woods, when I allowed my skin to fully touch the water of the lake. These have all been the setting for a deeply sensual experience. My cabin is one of the most sensual places I know. The sensory experience has been only the threshold, the beginning of something much richer.

It has been the deeply felt awareness of the smell and touch of tree branches and the chill of the lake water where my sensuality has rested. The woods has been my teacher.