Author: barryschade@gmail.com

My mind is easily attracted to passing dangers, but I might not notice the greatest danger of all. I take care when I step out of the shower lest I slip on a floor lightly splattered by errant water. I take my time descending the stars, focused on the banister in case I should need it. I pull back as I begin sliding out of my car in to the street as a vehicle flashes by just outside my car’s door.

While I pay attention to these passing dangers, it is easy to ignore a greater danger. There is a danger that I might never be aware of what it is really like to be alive, to thrive as a human, to enter into another day of existence.

If I were to become truly aware, it would be for me to enter into a deep understanding of how I function. For me, this means being attentive to my mind and observing how I react to the world around me and inside me.

I have some awareness of my solitary self, and that is part of my insight into what it means to be human. There is another aspect that is also important for not to miss. I want to be deeply aware of how I relate to the world around me. How do I fit into that vast realm of limitless possibilities.

I think I have a danger of not paying attention to how I am related to other humans who are dealing with this same vast mystery, maybe as inattentively as I. There is a danger that I might not fully grasp how I am related to all other humans struggling to understand just as I struggle.

The friends who sit with me on my deck, the kids visiting the fish in my back yard, the passers-by who are chatting with one another in their own small realm. I am related to them all, and there is a great danger that I might live with little awareness of how we collectively are part of the vast mystery.

I seem alert to so many life’s dangers. The radio voices and the printed news remind me routinely of the vast dangers surrounding me. The real danger is that I might never become fully aware of how we all fit together in a vast wholeness, that I might never understand how we are intimately connected.

There is a danger I might not fully see my connection not only to the flowers that bloom in my yard, but also how I am connected to all those other humans who see those same blooms. There is a danger of not living in that realized connection.

Is there room in the world for a Wild Barry? Wild Berries grow outside the cultivation constraints developed by our culture. What if there were a Wild Barry growing outside the limits and constraints of society.

Limits make living much more complicated than it need be. I know because I have been pushing against limits all my life. But not always.

I have been fortunate to have companions all my life who have invited, sometimes pushed, me beyond my limited comfort zone. For that I have no regrets. I have done things I likely would never have done on my own. Thanks to them, my experience of being alive has been expanded and I ignored the limits placed by a cautious culture.

Maybe this is one of the things we do for one another. We encourage and invite one another to go beyond the limits we put on ourselves. I am grateful for all the companions who have supported me to venture beyond my limits in thinking and acting.

For several years now, it has been my first-light ritual to combine a reading of Rilke with another poet as soon as I turn on the lamp. This is been a heady concoction that almost always prepares me for a unique day. I drink in the words and felt experience of a poet, captured now on a page of a book. It stirs a reflection of what the new day might mean. The reading sends me off with a first-light, fresh view of what it means for me to be alive in this new and wonderful day.

Besides Rilke, Ellen Bass has been a frequent contributor to my daily first-light experience in recent years. I have recently discovered Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, a poet who lives in Colorado, and now she often shows up when the light goes on. Within the pages of “Naked for Tea,” I am certain to find a new depth and freshness any morning I choose. Her skill as a poet invites a pleasant plunge into reflections cultivated in a life apparently lived in awareness.

There is an almost unsettling intimacy in sharing her observations. Similar to my reading of Ellen Bass, Rosemerry has a way of writing that is close to common human experience. Always penetrating, she writes in a way slightly less individual and personal than Ellen.

Rosemerry writes from a place of personal insight I think is available to us all. It certainly is available to me, and she coaxes it to emerge especially when I read her poetry at first-light.

I can’t help but think it is what we all want. Everyone I pass on the sidewalk or in the parking lot at COSTCO wants it. We all want to love and be loved. It is a natural force stirring inside and between us all. For the the most part we resist it or attempt to ignore it.

I think of all the people I’ve sat next to on an airplane. Not the overweight ones who forced themselves into my narrow seat. Rather I think of all those from whom I felt the warmth of their close presence. I remember the light chatter as we talked, as we exchanged small tidbits of our lives.

For the duration of the flight, we allowed ourselves to experience a small pForced into closeness, we wanted to be allowed to drop our external guard and genuinely love one another, for just a little while. It would only be for the duration of the flight we knew. But we got a small taste of what we really wanted.

Once, and regrettably only once, we went beyond when I sat next to someone in the airport while we were waiting for a flight. We actually extended that brief encounter and became friends for a longer while. We were never lovers in the common sense. But we allowed ourselves to extend and savor what should have been by design only a brief chance encounter, sitting next to one another under the aura of flying. We dared to pursue a little bit more of what we really wanted.

What about all those other people with whom I rubbed shoulders during a concert or discussed what we thought of a painting in a museum. Every one a small gesture of what we wanted, to see and be seen, to love and be loved. My life is full of the memory of these small gestures of want. I was part of an exchange of gestures of acknowledgement and recognition how I and someone else is profoundly lovable.

Only our cultural constraints kept us rom plunging into an outpouring of affirmation of what we see. How many missed opportunities I had to exchange how we were each infinity beautiful and lovable. My life is littered with situations of love that was so easy to feel but equally restrained from expression except in subtle and small ways.

We all are meant to be lovers and be loved. It is what we want. We want to share one another’s burdens and be thrilled in one another’s joy. Yet we resist. Too often we briefly reveal who we really are then rapidly retreat into a place of hiding and seclusion. If I have any regrets of my life they are all about the times I said “No.”

I hope I can change that, and honor what I really want. I want to add time to the brief encounters. I want to ignore cultural constraints. I want to be more of a fountain of loving kindness and a reservoir of the same.

I don’t think I was born this way, but in this culture I learned to form sharp edges. I learned to be competitive, how to be better than others, a habit hard to break. I learned that sports are about winning, which I did little of. Grades were for me about ranking. That I did well.

Critical thinking was taught more about rejecting than about developing insight. I learned the lessons of how to avoid or dominate others, especially those who could cause me harm.

It is so easy to develop sharp edges in our society. It takes hard work to resist the sharpening wheel. It is challenging to become soft, caring and cuddly, especially if one is male. I choose to be tender, not sharp, with anyone I meet.

I walk across what seems to be a stable and unyielding floor made of wooden strips. And I am reminded that there is more. This platform that keeps me from plunging into the basement is only part of what is there. There is more.

The bottom of my feet press against the solid maple planks, but there is more beyond what my sensing feet perceive. Things have shape and form that I can touch and see. Everything I can contact presents a sensory platform for my experience. But I know there is a deeper reality beyond my senses.

Even physicists speak of a space, a kind of emptiness our senses cannot yet perceive. This apparent emptiness exists between the particles of matter that we and our instruments can detect.

What my senses detect is only a very small aspect of what lies beyond my senses. I know there is more. It is a vast emptiness, a formless something I do not yet know directly. There is more reality than the reality my senses experience directly.

Sometimes, people speak of a reality behind our perceived reality as a spiritual realm. That to me sounds like something separate, something other, something beyond experience. I prefer to think of what I sense is just the surface, the shape of what lies below.

What I perceive is real, but it is only a small manifestation of the foundation reality. There is more. The sensory world may be spoken of as an illusion but it is illusory only in that there is much more than what the senses perceive.

There is much more.

Some lessons are easy for me to learn. Some others seem to take a lifetime. My language is one such thing. The three languages I learned to understand and somewhat speak were lessons that went on for several years. It was an effort that left me stumbling through two of them. Over decades, I developed a true fluency in only one.

That one language is now punctuated by nuance I never expected to learn. To begin, my language now relies on knowing when not to speak, a lesson it has taken me a lifetime to learn. My familiar, spoken language sometimes serves me best when not spoken at all. When all I do is listen. It has taken a long time to learn to speak silence.

I now use language in a pattern not taught me when I was young. I remember it was years before I learned to put words in an orderly sometimes artful fashion. I wrote carefully constructed poetry as a teenager. My written language followed rhythms and patterns of sound. It was constrained by the role of rhyme most of the time. This was a learned skill that stayed with me and still emerged when I as an adult parent wrote verse that were clues in games for my two kids. It is part of how I almost habitually construct prose.

Throughout much of my adult life, I learned to follow the laws of english that was correctly spoken. The order of my words, noting which tense of verbs to use, what order to impose on words one before one another, all became second nature to me, but it took time. Knowing when to say “I” or “me” became part of how I spoke. Even more important, how I used language shaped the way I thought.

My learned patterns of language have also filtered the words of others. They signal to me that those who do not speak as I not only use a different language pattern but also think in a way unlike me. I often need to pause and sort that out. I have learned to speak and to think in a way different from them.

My lessons of language have become a well-worn street that after many years now allows my inner self to be expressed fully and with ease. My language has become a close ally of my heart, and I seem to have learned a lesson of honest and genuine speech. It has become a learned habit, but it has taken most of my life to trust this learning.

I realize that I often do not speak clearly and in a manner that others can understand. However, the words habitually carry the heart-warmed nature of honesty. Learning to speak and write with trust and heart has been a lifelong learning. I no longer feel that my words need to be carefully chosen. I trust myself more to speak freely, knowing the words will arise naturally and reflect who I truly am.

I still struggle to learn the names of places and people. Names of locations like Catalhoyuk and Cahokia have eluded me for weeks. I wonder if I will ever become intimately connected to them as I am to the names of friends.

However, there are other lessons of language that are now a stable and intimate part of me. There are well-worn lessons that go beyond new names, grammar and correct sounds. It has taken a lifetime to learn the deeper aspects of my own personal language so that I can be fluent and be able to trust myself to speak in a comfortable manner. It has taken a lifetime to learn how to naturally speak a language that is honest, genuine and true.

Last evening, I gave a talk about the radiance that is present in us and in all things. This radiance has been given many names, probably because it is experienced in so many different ways, and so it is named based on that variety of experience. The debate has gone on for centuries whether this is an entity or not. I am convinced it is real.

It is this radiance that allows me to be conscious and become aware of things that seem to be all around me. This radiance is an animating entity that is present in everything and manifests in a myriad of experiences.

I have recently heard this radiance described as the underlying consciousness of the universe. I think rather that it is what allows consciousness to occur. It generates the dynamic brilliance that allows things to be perceived either in a contrived, conditioned appearance or as they really are.

One hardly ever sees this radiance directly. If I could, I would be fully enlightened or fully awake. However, this radiance gives appearance to all things and allows me to get small glimpses of the luminosity within me and that exists behind my experience of everything that seems to appear before me.

Perhaps it is helpful to see this radiance as an ocean of luminosity that takes shape in limitless fashion. Perhaps it is in this way that the ultimate shapes the historical. I hardly ever see it directly, but I experience it inside of me and all around me. I mostly see it as if I am looking through fogged glass.

It has the shape of the wet tile walls of my shower. My radiance encountered it there this morning. It appeared to me as the wall of my shower and I touched its cool hardness, knowing it was actually the radiance within me bouncing off the shower wall, going me a small, blurry glimpse of the undifferentiated commonness in me and the shower wall.

Very briefly, the radiance manifested as a shower wall. The radiance within me manifested in the sensory experience that allowed me to be aware of the shower wall. There is deep joy in recognizing, becoming conscious of the common linkage, the radiance in all.

I trust in softness. I prefer the gentle touch, the mild approach. I weep at the soft , quiet movements of Beethoven. Bombastic movements stir me, but I float in a yielding, more trusting manner with the gentler passages.

I trust the expectant early morning before the sound of birds overcomes the sounds of softly moving leaves. I trust that concentration and insight will flow from gentle settling, not from determined effort.

I trust in the soft settling into a letting go of all I aspire to experience. What I desire rushes into the formless abode I prepare.

Doubt is harsh and holds all at a distance. Trust is welcoming, soft and embracing.

I am sure that at some point I decided to stop trying so hard. Perhaps it was a gradual and evolving decision to stop. Maybe it was only a loosely defined intention.

It is now clear to me that it is no longer so important to me that I achieve. My driving gust to be the best has changed direction. Where there were once goals, things to achieve, I now stop, pause and take in the view.

Accepting things as they are seems so much more important to me than changing them to my liking. I may have even stoped imposing expectations on others, especially my own kids. I don’t seem to be so attached to their achieving, reaching certain outcomes. It is better, I think, that I accept and observe what is happening than think of how things might be changed.

I am less inclined to yield to how others might want to change me. I smile more at their attempts and gently nod. Now I nod in acknowledgement, not in acquiesce. I may have stopped investing in their expectations, or being moved by them.

I suspect that I am missing opportunities for what might be considered progress. It has been the human habit to seek to make things better, to achieve, to produce. I more often stop to observe, to notice, to understand.