Author: barryschade@gmail.com

Flowers have been teaching me all my life. It began when I was young and I gradually learned to recognize individual flowers and call them by their proper, given names. I spent hours in graduate school, learning the names of hundreds of flowers that bloomed in the woods. It continues even now, as fellow gardeners teach me to recognize and name new flowers I have not paid attention to before.

Young children often stop by when I am busy in the garden and want to know what I am doing. Sometimes they are more interested in seeing the fish, but I don’t miss a chance to point out the individual flowers, the trilliums or the bloodroots. For parents, I point out the Fritillaria, a new-found delight of mine. For those who want to know, I name the Scilla and the assorted varieties in the garden.

Then one day it happened. All those names faded into the background. I still recognized their individual traits, but for me they all became flowers. Like the children visiting the garden, I simply saw them as flowers. It was their commonness that moved to the front. I saw them more by what they have in common, how they are all part of a whole. They are flowers.

Isn’t that how it is with all things? I spend much of my life learning to distinguish one thing from another. Then one day it happens. Everything takes on a unifying commonness. All things become part of one huge whole. Like flowers, every thing can be distinguished and be named. But the beauty is in the unity, how everything is connected and part of a whole.

I think I learned this from flowers.

What I seek and what I offer more than anything else is deep comfort. The Buddhist speak of freedom from suffering, but in my idiom freedom from suffering is the same as comfort. I am a refuge, a loving oasis, a place of comfort. I seek the same.

I offer freedom and release from suffering. I give escape from the essential discomfort of life. I am a window that flies from a lack of ease, from the disquieting mark on the forehead of us all. This is what I give, this is what I see.

The comfort I give comes with many faces. I offer myself as a guardian of nature, a healer of misery, a messenger of wonder, an architect of peace, a release from suffering, a fountain of loving kindness.

Finding and giving comfort is not the same as freedom from struggle, conflict or turmoil. Comfort is being at ease in the midst of difficulty, accepting things as they are. It is a refuge from all that might trouble me and others at the base. Comfort is the shore that surrounds a tumultuous sea. I would be that shore. I would be comfort.

Perhaps some day I will forget all the things I think I know. All my notions of how I think things are will have disappeared. I will find freedom in forgetting.

Some day, all my reasons to be afraid of certain people will have vanished. I will see the familiar tree in my backyard as something never seen before. It will appear in total newness, in spite of my having seen it and touched it many times before. I will forget what that was like.

At first, it seems a frightening thing to imagine a day when I forget. But there may be an unseen gift in no longer remembering what things and people should be like and I will see them as totally new.

It make me wonder how much of my experience of the world is based on memory, based on how I remember and think how things once were. The memory is so strong, it sometimes keeps me from seeing things and people just as they are right now. I am often not able to see them without any preconceived notions of what they might be like right now.

Memory can serve me well in preparing me for everything I meet. I do not have to relearn what I might have already known. Perhaps memory also keeps me from having a beginners mind, a fresh view of things. I see them more as I remember them, as I think they might be, as they aught to be. I fail to see them as they are right now.

I am not ready to totally forget, to lose my memory of everything. For now, it is enough to let go of a small part of memory, to no longer presume what things are or how they exist. I can open a small window that gives me a fresh and new view every moment, every day. It would be nice to forget just a little.

It is a great gift to be able to reveal myself, as am. Likewise, it is such a great giving when something or someone reveals themself to me, as they are.

The reveal is often by sight or sound. But the strongest giving and receiving of reveal is in touch. In touch there is the most powerful reveal of presence and essence. I touch the earth, I touch the tree, I touch someone’s arm, and their presence is revealed in the most abundant manner.

I have sometimes marveled how sight has been how reveal has unfolded. I also think that touch is more revealing than sight. I encourage kids to touch plants in my garden, one-finger touch, because that is how reveal takes place at a deeper level than what sight alone can provide.

I would never want to lose the benefit of sight and what is revealed through sight. Still, I am aware of how the greater wonders are revealed in touch. In touch I come closer, I feel deeply, I become more intimately aware.

I hope to allow enough space in my life to be wrong. For so very long, it has been important to be certain about many things. Then I started to let go.

The anxiety about being wrong gradually diminished. I began to relax about having things turn out as I wanted, intended or planned. I slowly realized there were few wrong ways of going. I accepted that all paths go somewhere.

My expectations of myself and others slowly faded. I accepted there were many ways to see reality and my view as but one out of infinite possibilities.

To see things as they really are became less of a pursuit of truth narrowly defined. Seeing things as they are became more of an invitation to see the infinite possibility in every thing and everyone.

Becoming a lover of the world has meant accepting my own fragmented, broken view of everything and everyone I come across. I have learned that seeing things and loving them as they really are means admitting I am mostly wrong. My notion of reality is flawed, misguided by my ideas about how things must be.

I am letting go of my learned narrow view of everything and everyone. I am accepting that I am wrong about most everything. It has become such a flight of freedom to escape being right all the time, any time.

“Lightly with intimacy” was written by the composer above the notes. So do I want my life to be played by me and all around me. I will play each passage of the hours as though they compose an improvised score.

Perhaps others will join me and the music will blend with thrilling harmonies. Lightly with intimacy seems how I want it to be, and in tender amazement and great kindness.

In my thoughtful moments, I wonder why I am so reluctant to fall down and adore each of my companions. It would be so simple, so fitting. Then I realize it is not an action to be taken just because I have become aware of their radiant presence.

Adoration, after all, is more an action of the heart. It is an opening of my heart to allow another to enter in, to mingle with my own essence, to feel in the most intimate way the common bond we share.

It is a mistake to try to adore an entity outside my human realm of experience. It is more appropriate to express adoration within my realm of experience. For the most part, it means that I truly adore each individual that makes up my small group of companions.

For some of them, I feel that they similarly adore me. Our adoration is not a falling down, submissive kind of adore. It is an ongoing openness to see one another as we are and share a deep joy in that awareness. For the most part, our adore is reciprocal, joyful, smiling, sometimes exuberant.

I think I adore plants in the same manner as I do my human companions. Our expression of adore is more subtle. When I adore in my garden, it is a similar form of recognition and shared joy I experience with humans.

I wish that I could say that I adore all beings I come across, but that is not yet my experience. There are so many learned reactions, so many taught barriers that keep us apart and prevent our mutual adoring. But I am learning to walk more with an open heart, ready to adore who ever comes into my presence.

The more I am able to see the radiance in others, the more I see the radiance we share. As I become more adept in seeing my own radiance, I am better able to adore.

Another day has begun and opportunity stretches out before me. How often will I respond today to open my heart to each rising opportunity? It will be a day poorly spent if I do not fall in love at least a dozen times. Or a dozen times a dozen.

My day will be filled with inviting opportunity and today I take the risk not to be so miserly protective of my heart that I do not welcome all that presents. I take in the watery warmth of a shower and allow it to draw my heart into its languorous stream. I step into the misty outside air and am swept away in the rapturous embrace of a chilly morning air.

Walking through the garden is a continuous falling head over heels with plants into a dance of amorous ecstasy. I talk or text with friends and share words that say ‘share with me the intimacy of being fully alive in this precious moment.’

When the day draws to a gentle close, I want to feel the lingering thrill of dozens of rapturous love affairs. I want to be drunk with the memory of dozens of opportunities where I fell in love again and again.

Come to me all you unique opportunities, sit with me, drink in all I have to offer. Reveal yourself in unfolding zeal to share the moments that will never come again.

It seems so common. As I look around, so many people carry “No Trespass” signs across their heart. I wonder if mine is so noticeable as theirs, a warning not to come too close.

If I remove my “No Trespass,” will anyone notice? I am not even sure I’ve been aware it has been there, but I think I will be aware when it is gone.

Perhaps then the flood of goodness will begin to flow, flow in both directions.

It is why I train so often. It is why I spend time meditating, why I pause often throughout the day. Meditation, deep concentration addresses a basic problem for me by allowing me to become unfettered. It is my practiced way of becoming unattached.

Unfettered, I am better able to release my grip on all the conventions that shape my thinking, that guide what I do. It is my way of relinquishing cherished beliefs, fantasies, roles, ideals. It is my embraced invitation to become unfettered. I am able to let go of attachments.

I want to let go of all my expectations except to one: the expectation to become unfettered, to become unattached. Even my grip on that singular expectation will ultimately go. Then I will experience what it is to be free. I will be home.