Author: barryschade@gmail.com

I’ve been thinking of how, in the vast expanse of the universe, would I recognize myself. What distinguishes me in such a way that anyone could answer me: Who am I? Among all sentient beings on this planet, what distinguishes me from all others?

I am, first of all, a man who wants to be fully alive no matter how many times I have traveled around the sun. I want a deep intimacy with the world, and that is characterized by my being an attentive gardener. I want to be a guardian of the world I see when I wake in the morning.

I am someone with an open heart and I welcome anyone wanting to join me in my adventure of plunging into the world. I am curious and an avid student of the world, living and not living. I teach about plants to anyone who seems attentive and I participate in discovering geology through classes at the University of Minnesota.

I love to read, and I am currently nestled between the covers of: Caste, My Grandmother’s Hands, Until The End of Time, Mindfulness And Intimacy, Fidelity and Educated. I am engaged in four book circles with other readers.

Currently, my favorite poet is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer whom I read daily along with Rainer Maria Rilke. I have a daily meditation practice and exercise program.

The question is still: Who am I? I am a man who is determined to be deeper and deeper in love with life. I stumble in that pursuit, I recover, I turn corners frequently. I do my best to turn away from the desire to possess or be possessed. Instead, I try to experience myself as part of all that is. A unique part.

It is such a circular kind of thinking. It is a circular way of seeing things that I often find myself following to define and describe what is real. All I know, all I have to go on is what I perceive with my senses. My senses alone tell me what exists. My senses connect me to what I determine is real. It is often a circuitous route, but it always comes back to what my senses tell me, what I learn through my senses. It is a circle.

It is typical that physicists fabricate laws to explain and define reality. Those laws and definitions have constantly changed as perceptions have changed. Even those explanations and laws are based on sensory observations.

For me, the laws of physics describe what is real and project what can be. They all are ultimately based on sensory experience, on what senses have perceived. It is a circular way of thinking that I say what is real only based on what my senses pick up. Anything else that is real is beyond my knowing. It would be foolish to say that nothing exists outside my bubble of perception and the thinking based on it.

The tools that physicists use all are extensions of the senses. Even the tools that look into what happens inside atoms and how small particles perform convert it all into sensory data. All my knowledge is based on this way of gathering information.

It makes no sense to me that some people limit reality to what they can perceive with the senses. It is a circular way of thinking. Of course, their reality is limited to what their senses perceive because that is how they define what is real. That is a circle.

I realize what it is a gift for me to feel useful. It is something I want. In any setting, I want to be of use and to feel useful. I have my own notions about how I can be useful. I am aware of my potential to be useful. But from a practical side, I am only really useful when my usefulness is accepted and received. I can think of myself as a potentially useful gardener, but I am actually useful to my garden when my gardening is effectively received.

The same is true of my human interactions. I am effectively useful only when what I have to offer is accepted and received. This morning, I am aware how that applies to my presence on the Annex Board.

I not only want to be effectively useful, but I also want my usefulness, my useful presence to be recognized and sometimes acknowledged. I want what I say to be listened to and be heard. I want my involvement to be accepted and maybe even valued, and not routinely resisted. I want to feel useful in just about every setting I enter.

For many years I have watched it happen to others as they were dismissed as not being of use. Sometimes I have intervened to affirm their usefulness when it was not being recognized by others. Today I am especially aware how this dynamic happened to me last evening. This time it was I who felt aware of what it feels like to not feel useful, and I am reminded how I am resolved not to cause others to feel that way.

I also learned that I must either find a way to shield myself from the experience of dismissal, or remove myself from the situation where I am not effectively useful.

For years I lived in a situation at home where I did not feel of use. I am now recognizing that my involvement with the Annex has run its course. I realize that I am not considered useful enough, not effectively useful. Most important, I no longer feel of use.

My days lately have been clouded by gray. My common instinct is to resist. Everything requires more effort than I remember. The gray has woven itself into my typical feeling of being connected. Everything seems to have wrapped itself in a soft and obscuring cloud. Shapes are less vivid. Everything is remote.

More than anything, I am missing my feeling of being connected to other people, my companions. So many gestures to connect hover in the gray mist without encouraging response. The feeling of separateness grows around me, insulating me in gray.

What I am able to succeed in doing is to turn my focus more inside myself and become more aware of what I am experiencing. I observe the grayness. I am convinced that what at times feels like a gray dead end is not what it appears to be. There is a reality lurking beyond, and it will unfold.

At the moment, however, I am not sure about how to penetrate my gray ambience. I know there is no dead end, only a time when the path seems not clear, the footing less secure.

I walk slowly in grayness, patiently, expectantly.

On one level, I believe that what I have is enough. Those reassuring moments of deep connection, however, do not seem to linger. Again and again, I am faced with wanting to go deeper, to spend more time, to linger, to be intimately connected.

Today I have settled deeply into the embrace of the woods where my cabin is nestled. I am surrounded by a familiar natural spot I so deeply love and to which I am tenderly connected. Then the moments come when that seems not quite enough, and I want to share this woodsy intimacy with others, or at least with someone. I text, and a small amount of that sharing happens. But it is not enough.

It actually is easy for me to identify individuals with whom I would want to share this special spot. But I think it is unlikely to happen. It will never be enough.

So I am faced with the intimacy of this place and what it means to be alone here. I wonder if this enough. It is a question I have when I think of the intimacy I want to experience with the world. Will it ever be enough? Will the intimacy I have learned and experienced with the world ever be enough, regardless how much I have absorbed.

When, if ever, will it really be enough? For now, it may have to be what it is. It is all I have.

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.