Author: barryschade@gmail.com

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.

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.