Author: barryschade@gmail.com

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.

As I lay on the padded table, the physical therapist pushed down on my extended knee, then slowly moved my knee cap and joint with his fingers. All the while, I made a focused effort to relax, to let go of the resistance I had to his firm touch.

Today, I am aware that, like so many, I am constantly schooled in resistance to any kind of touching. I become alert at the first signs of possible touching, and it takes a moment to let go of a learned reluctance to be touched. It often takes a moment before I remember how touching is so healing, so affirming, so comforting.

It seems so natural that I have a strong desire to touch and be touched. But I also live with so many social norms against touching. So many meanings and interpretations are attached to touching that it is typically regarded as creepy, excessive, intrusive, abusive ……. the list goes on. Most of the touching I am fortunate enough to experience is none of those negative things. Yet the resistance is there. And I notice a caution in others constantly.

Perhaps I should wear a sign that simply says, “Touching acceptable.”

I see myself living in a world that is whirling with activity, bursting with life, and constantly inviting me to join in. I feel like I am immersed in a living sea, from the magnificent trees to the tiniest of creatures floating on the moving air. There is no escaping the presence of life that envelops me and invites me in to join the flow of living energy. Why do I so often resist? Why do I feel such resistance from my companions as well?

There are so many times I resist to join in, to fling my whole self into the vast flow of living energy. I seem not to be alone in this reluctance. Sometimes I feel the swell of aliveness and I ride the swift current of living energy. I relax, I yield and I do not resist. Other times I resist the siren beckoning of a world that throbs with life and invites me to jump in.

To yield to life is to surrender to a world of deepening intimacy. To yield is for me to welcome things just as they are and no longer regard the world as something for me to like or dislike. Yielding means for me to give up any notion of a world as I want it to be and instead plunge into it just as it is.

It is a toxic notion that I can shape my world as I want it to be. Instead it is healing for me to yield to a world prepared to shape me. Resistance is against the grain of life, and yet I persist in holding back.

I am glad for the days when I can surrender to the flow, allow myself to experience the free fall. I am glad when I can make that my way of living, if only for a brief time. For me this becomes the path to deep intimacy, to the other shore, to emptiness. It is a way of great joy.

Only now am I beginning to accept that it has been my destiny to be broken.    I was born into  an experience of separation and I have spent much of my life trying unsuccessfully to escape that experience of feeling separate.   When I was born human, I was fashioned for intimacy, but not in a way I could have imagined.   So I began a life of being seduced in a realm where I would always feel the unease and attempt to escape the disquiet of being broken.

For my heart to be open, I see that I must accept its being broken apart.    The protective wall of an imagined separate self has to be allowed to be broken.   The inner nakedness and exposure has to be not only allowed but be fully embraced and accepted.    I have to be willing to surrender to a world that might be hostile or intensely beautiful.  As I reach for intimacy with a blooming plant, with savory food, with another person, I must allow myself to experience being progressively and constantly broken.  

To accept being broken, I have to accept that I will never achieve what I most desire.   It must come to me.   I must allow the free fall into the Gap of separation.    This is the Gap that exists between my most ardent desires and the most attractive, beckoning objects before me.   Once broken open, my heart allows for more than I could ever imagine, even though my heart never quite touches or is joined with the object I most desire. 

To feel that I am crossing the bridge to what I most desire, I must abandon all hesitation and security.   I must become fully broken with full awareness.   Then I begin to realize that the bridge is only an illusion and I am actually plunging into the chasm below.    The Gap engulfs me and the bridge dissolves.   My broken grasp that once held on to a notion of a separate self, allows for a kind of intimate absorption never really imagined in my quest for intimacy with the world beyond me.

The Gap is where I belong, even while I struggled so much to bridge or escape it.   It is my true home.    But to get there I must first learn and experience what it means to be broken.   I have to abandon any notion of an intact heart and break open to an intimacy that always lies just beyond my reach.   I have to abandon all my imagined security of an intact self and be deeply aware how only a divested, naked and broken heart can enter into the deep experience of intimacy.   Deep intimacy will be experienced by descending and remaining in the Gap.  

I know that I am not alone on this quest for deep abandon and deep union.   It is a realm I invite my companions to experience and join me.   We can assist one another, gently helping one another to yield to the destiny of brokenness.  We settle into the Gap.   We serve one another in experiencing a life of being fully human.  

What may appear as intimacy is actually an invitation to go deeper, to become absorbed in the Gap of non-union.   The experience of non-union is like a step into emptiness.    The surrender to what appears as brokenness is only the beginning of something else.   

To me it feels like what Harry Potter must have experienced as he accepted his destiny and went to meet Lord Voldemort in the woods.   He accepted and entered the Gap, with the help of a few friends.   Only then did he become truly free.   

I am struggling to define what I mean by emotional intimacy. I intuitively know I want it. It is part of my self care, a support for my well being. The closest I get to defining it is that it feels like emotional skinny-dipping with a friend.

I think that emotional intimacy is possible when our circles of engagement overlap and allow for an intimate sharing of those places in us where we feel vibrant and live. There remains a clear distinction of those circles that define us as unique but also not separate. As I said, emotional intimacy is hard for me to define.

As time goes on, I realize how little emotional intimacy I experienced in my first two decades of life. My father, a victim of his time and an alcoholic parent, offered me neither a model or an engagement in emotional intimacy. It was only once I turned 20 that I felt the gap in my life, and that became a quest for the kind of emotional intimacy I wanted to both give and receive.

As I am feeling the significance of my search for emotional intimacy more deeply, I am wondering if someone not practiced in mindfulness can engage in the kind of emotional intimacy I want. I think that emotional intimacy requires a high level of self reflection and self awareness before intimacy can be shared in a meaningful way. It requires the confidence of self knowledge, an absence of doubt, and freedom from hesitancy.

It may not be the definition, but I think emotional intimacy requires being willing to no longer fear the plunge.

This week I am especially aware of my connection with all the people I love and who love me. It appears that strands of love have woven a net that connects us all. This has been my birthday week, and so many people have been effusive in acknowledging the assorted connections I have with each of them.

Although I imagine that I am living more and more of may life in free fall, not counting the risks or dangers so much any more. My grip on what I want for security is loosening, I am letting go. I know that there is a loving safety net to catch me if I falter.

It is such a wonderful thing to feel so alive after the long journey so many times around the sun. Today completes my 80th solar lap in our small corner of the universe, and I don’t think I have ever before felt so alive as I do these days. Parts of my body, especially my legs, want to slow down, but every fiber in me says otherwise. Every fiber says plunge ahead, feel the full expanse of the free fall you have entered.

I spent an evening last night with old friends, most of whom I have lived close to for dozens of years. We raised kids together , all of whom are now young adults. Everyone had an open and enthusiastic hug to share with me. Their presence was easy for me to absorb and I carry them with me as I continue my orbital trek around the sun.

I doubt that any of the friends present last evening would say it the same way, but I feel an abiding intimacy with all of them. For some, it is an intimacy that runs deep. We have shared so much of our life journey, even while we have lived in separated households. It was a treasure-filed evening to spend time with them, as it has been in assorted ways over many years.

The evening reminds me that I clearly have not fallen into a restful, sleepy time of life. Instead, I have become more vibrantly alive, more attuned to everything especially my own body and mind. I am so much more aware of those with whom I share the same orbital path, all of whom I share some degree of intimacy.

I like that as I become more awake, the future seems less daunting, less a concern needing to be addressed. My focus has become today, and I am more willing to shed the expectations and norms set by my training and my culture. Today is a repeating almost constant now that invites me to embrace it with high energy and deep desire.

Becoming alive has meant ignoring all that might constrain me. Becoming alive has meant relaxing my mind to accept a new and fresh world every single day.

It has been such a gift to still be alive and be completing my 80th orbit. It is an even greater gift to discover that being alive is an accelerating process, not one of slowing down. Each day I become a little more awake and I realize more what it feels like to be alive.

I grow sad every time I am reminded how our culture shapes and spits out emotionally impotent men. They seem to keep popping up all the time. I meet them in person and in the personal narratives I listen to when I sit with women friends. Most of the men who seem to me to be emotionally alive are gay.

It is a strange evolutionary twist that for millennia the culture has preferred and been dominated by emotionally impotent men. The culture obviously leans to something other than male emotional depth and presence, allowing that aspect of our humanity to be assigned primarily to women.

It has certainly been part of my own struggle, to put aside emotional shallowness and timidity, and lunge into my own emotional depth, scattering the traces of that untidy free-fall where ever I go. It takes shedding protective layers, yielding to naked vulnerability and surrender of an abundance of control to probe my emotional core. Becoming emotionally alive is not easy or consistent with being feint of heart.

For me, becoming more capable of focusing concentration has allowed me to relax my mind and allow all the feelings to come out of hiding. Without the jailer-mind in control, the feelings rise to the surface more easily. Without limiting myself by cultural forms and constraints and a notion of how things must be, my emotional life is free to move about. Without my grasping for predictability and a certain future, my inner life is able to breathe and surface.

I have much to do, but I am thrilled to be able to caress the uneven texture of my life without regret, to be comfortable with my emotional nakedness without looking back, to be able to hear and respond to the resounding heartbeat of the universe.

My day roams lazily among auspicious things. The wet grass, waiting expectantly for me to walk across the yard. The swirling gold fish in the pond waiting and then rising to be fed. The rumbling chatter of railroad cars traveling nearly a mile away. The stealthy light of morning sun creeping into the empty street below my window.

I love the auspicious soft touch of carpet on the floor that strokes my feet as I move from room to room. The surface of the cold hard granite that absorbs my attention as I approach the sink.

I meet auspicious elements of my kitchen. The kettle that shrieks for attention when it is prepared to become tea. The rolled newspaper on my front steps reminds me there are many others to be aware of. A friend walks up the steps to my back deck, proffering a soft smiled greeting. The chickadees in the bushes tend to the impatient demands of their young. I travel to the garden of a friend to water it in her absence. I step into a wildflower garden, a cacophony of cool green and a well traveled path, sometimes alone, sometimes not.

There is food in my kitchen, promising nourishment and a time to be mindful, experience joy. The stairs auspiciously challenge me to rise to another level in spite of a reluctant leg. Soft covers invite a quick descent into an unseen world where auspicious things lie just beyond my reach. I have left a day shimmering with auspicious things.