Author: barryschade@gmail.com

I noticed that I smiled when I heard that Thomas Keneally describe himself as a “mad, ruined monk.” That too could be said of me. It is true that I folded and put away the clothing of a monk many years ago. I stepped out of a life I had been immersed in for a dozen years. Perhaps I was ruined.

What monkness I took with me must surely cause some people to think of me as “mad.” Certainly those monks I left behind must have thought of me that way. It was a radical change I made when I walked out of the monastery. I was no longer young, and I stepped into a world I had so little knowledge of. It must have looked like madness to some. As I look back, I see a boldness that even I consider to be slightly mad. So I smile.

But I knew there was a world I had yet to savor. The reality and intimacy of that world was already a small part of me, and I wanted to experience it more deeply.

That was many years ago, and I still find the reality and intimacy of the world ardently attractive, no matter how much I have already experienced. I smile when I think of all the possibilities I have yet to experience.

In so many ways I still consider myself a monk, though I probably have ruined all the common trappings and constraints of that life style. I continue to choose a new and changing life style that I embrace every morning. I smile when I think of all the possibilities the world holds for me each day. I think I smile a lot. I think that I am still a smiling monk.

The past seems so elusive to me, even though its shadow seems to show up and somehow enter into every day. Sometimes it shows up at my invitation, sometimes by chance. Perhaps that is just fine. It is just fine that my grasp of the past is so fleeting and only seems to have a moderate influence. It is probably better when I am not grasping at the past at all.

I’ve been aware lately how much fragments of the past are woven into the zig zag fabric of my dreams. Memories and images in my dreams even go back to my youth and become the stuff that my dreams are made of. Memories from the past that show up in my dreams always appear in contorted and tangled fashion, but they still contain the illusion of a distorted but vibrant reality. Those traces of memories show up in my dream world and seem to be happening right now.

In some ways, my waking memories are like those in my dreams. The waking memories are not so obviously contorted or fragmented as they are in my dreams. My memories of past experiences still can seem as vivid and real to me as an observer as they do in my dreams. I am also aware that my waking memories of the past are altered by the experiences of the intervening years.

What I think I so clearly remember is, at least in part, a fabrication and distortion of my creative mind. I suppose that is not very different from what I think I directly experience on a daily basis. My creative and orderly mind is shaping and giving meaning to what I remember from the past and what I experience here and now.

What I observe and seem to experience today is shaped, formed and made to appear real right now. How much more must my memory of the past be shaped by my active, creative mind. It all gets more complicated when I try to hold on to the past. It becomes a source of discomfort and dissonance when I attempt to grasp the past and bring it forward to now.

There are times when I not only remember the past, but also long for those moments, those experiences to be part of me right now. I can ache with longing for the past. I grasp for the past, and I forget, perhaps ignore, that there is only the present. The past is only a distorted, selective memory. It becomes almost easy to yield to the sadness and the longing for something that is a fabrication of my mind.

Actually, I have more of an inclination to try to live in the future than in the past. But the past still calls to me for attention and engagement. I forget that the past is no more real than the future that has not yet arrived.

Those are the times that I hope to remember that both the past and the future are with me right now. It is a good time to remember how the passage of time is something of an illusion . If there is a reality to be absorbed, it is the timeless reality of now. I live in a moment that has no real past or future aspect. And I also live in a moment that contains all the fragments and elements of both past and future.

Daily, I remind myself that the past is with me right now. I consciously welcome into my daily life all those individuals who have been an important part of my life. Welcoming the past is a notion that is comforting and helps me relax into the present.

There is no need to grasp what I seem to recall from the past. There is a now to be experienced, shaped as it is by the past and all the fragments of the past, those remembered and forgotten. The past is with me in a real way. I don’t need to fret about a lost past because it is with me to enjoy throughout the day.

I don’t think I have ever experienced something that I would call an insight. I have not been blown away by a rush of understanding and enduring absorption in some absolute truth or reality. However, I do occasionally get glimpses into the reality that I think lies just beyond the horizon of my ordinary experience.

While those glimpses sometimes come in unexpected ways, they almost always happen when I am paying attention. There isn’t much else I have to do except relax and pay attention. Sometimes the glimpse occurs when a friend says something that opens a whole new way of seeing things. But even that is just a passing event, a glimpse into a reality I had not had before.

I often get glimpses when walking through my garden, especially early in the day. When I am relaxed and paying attention, plants suddenly reveal themselves in ways I hadn’t noticed before. They don’t linger and often quickly depart, especially because my attention has moved on to something else. But the experience of the glimpse stays with me.

I frequently get glimpses into a vast space that has no description or dimension. The glimpse lasts only for a moment. However, this brush with emptiness comes more easily as I repeatedly glimpse it. I also am noticing that those glimpses are getting a little bit longer. I am finding it a little more easy to settle into the dimensionless nature of glimpses. I find that my glimpses of plants in my garden are becoming deeper and have more of an impact.

I am beginning to linger more in my glimpses. Perhaps I am simply allowing them to linger in me. This is a pattern of events I want to follow and enjoy.

It has been a little over a year since that morning when I had the startling experience of feeling so disconnected. Actually it was both simple and a bit frightening.

As I had done on many mornings before, I dropped backwards to sit at the foot of my bed. It was a movement of relaxing totally, falling backwards as I had done many times before. Only this time it was different. As I touched the bed, I felt as though I had abruptly dropped into a dark black hole.

My eyes had been closed as I relaxed backwards, but in that instant everything seemed to go intensely black. My body for an instant felt that it was both falling and floating in disconnected space.

I was startled and frightened as I jerked back instantly from that feeling. I immediately thought “stroke!” Had I just had a small stroke? Everything in me felt as though a switch had been flipped off, and then I instantly flipped it back on again. It was as though for a brief moment I had lost all contact, I had been disconnected from everything. My head felt strange.

Two days later I was sitting in the clinic in front of my doctor. I was asking him to help me sort it all out. Had I had a stroke? Was this a warning? Has my brain been damaged? I was worried because my head felt different ever since that morning of blackness.

Something had happened, and I had the physical sensation of an event that seemed to linger. I felt some kind of peripheral residue that seemed to come and go. I seemed to be able to revisit that experience tentatively in small but tangible ways.

I asked my doctor many times whether he thought I had damaged my brain. Was I damaging my brain, or perhaps changing it, by my attempts at deep concentration. I kept repeating that something had happened, my head now feels slightly different.

My doctor gave me repeated assurances that he did not think that I had experienced a stroke. He listened patiently as I described my experimentation with deep concentration. He did nothing to discourage me from doing what I was trying to learn by exploring my mind and perhaps reshaping my brain. I felt satisfied as I left the clinic that my body was not likely being harmed. However, ever since that experience, I have felt a little disconnected. Something has changed.

Actually, the feeling I had that morning of an uncontrolled plunge onto my bed and the related disconnection has both continued and expanded. I have nurtured and even welcomed that feeling of being disconnected. What was a frightening and disturbing feeling of falling into dark space is something I now blissfully encourage. It has become a frequent and routine occurrence.

What was, a little over a year ago, a feeling of surprise that startled and frightened me has become a companion that I often welcome into whatever I happen to be doing.

I easily and freely become disconnected as I drop into a sitting position on my bed each morning in preparation to recite my intentions for the day. I surrender all restrictions as I lay on the floor, grounding myself before beginning my routine stretches.

The sound of my bell is the signal to become disconnected. The words I mouth encourage the disconnection. The first breath I take as I sit on my pillow is an initial gesture of retreat into a place of deep disconnection. The unfettered darkness embraces me, sometimes lights flash, sensations become muted.

Later, I walk through the garden and sometimes I remember what has become a joy of disconnection. Suddenly I am walking through a sea of plants, feeling both intimately connected to them, and also strangely disconnected.

Being disconnected seems to take to me a place somewhere in-between. I am very curious where this is going to take me. It seems a friendly place for me to be and I probably won’t mention it to my doctor again.

I’ve heard it said that there are only two people in the world that understand gravity. I certainly am not one of them. So I’m not quite sure where this writing is going……..

I think that I have gotten glimpses of what gravity must be like. Still, I don’t know if my impressions of gravity are based on anything real. Perhaps they are the result of our collective imagination, certainly of mine.

I think that gravity has something to do with my own mass and how close I am to another entity with greater or less mass. Gravity possibly has something to do with our relative mass.

When I saw astronauts bouncing around on the Moon, I became aware that I might weigh less on the moon. My own mass might not change, but the mass of the moon is less than the mass of the earth. The effect of moon gravity might be less than what I experience on Earth, if ever I should go to the Moon.

A poet has told me that I would also weigh less on some of the planets circling the Sun along with the Earth. However, on Jupiter I would be as ponderously weighty as an elephant. Is this all about the effect of relative mass or are there other factors at work?

I think that distance is also related to the effect of gravity. If I would ever climb a mountain, I am convinced that I would weigh slightly less than if I were at the seashore. I would be slightly removed from the mass of the Earth, and the effect of gravity would be less.

Astronauts in the space station are not only removed from the mass of the earth but they are also moving at great speeds relative to the earth. They float and seem to be beyond the effect of gravity. The space station meanwhile seems tethered to the Earth, its speed not being sufficient to move its mass beyond the reaches of Earth gravity.

The speed of the space station is a lot less than the speed of the earth around the sun. The speed of the earth around the sun is four times the speed of the space station. The mass of the Sun and the Earth are both great, and though the Earth is orbiting the sun at slightly over 66,000 miles per hour, it is still adequately attracted to the Sun that it doesn’t shoot out of the solar system.

This attraction between bodies, large and small, is something I see in how gravity affects how those bodies relate. Each body bends space in its own way, and that affects how the bodies relate. Sometimes bodies run into one another because of this attraction, as when my feet hit the ground any time I am no longer suspended above the Earth. The grip of the attraction lessens if one of the bodies moves faster relative to the other. I no longer have a static relationship with the Earth if I take off running. By running, I seem to lessen a tiny amount of the attractive force between the Earth and me.

I wonder if this attractive force between bodies exists between bodies that otherwise seem to be static, at rest. Does a kind of gravity exist between a tree and me, between another person and me? Is gravity, this attractive force a “given” through all entities in the universe. Do all things have a desire, a yearning, an attraction to all other entities in their vicinity?

I think that, like gravity, desire is a universal law and it applies to all things. It is a characteristic woven into the fabric of the universe. Desire, like gravity, is the underlying force field in which all of us, and all entities, are involved. It is the force that draws all things to constantly try to move together and become one.

Is it too much of a reach to say that gravity is simply the desire that exists between all things? As I am constantly affected by gravity, I am also constantly affected by the desire of all things around me. We are constantly locked in the embrace of desire.

I’ve spent a lot of energy on avoidance. It all began in my early life when I learned how important it was to stay out of trouble. So much of my younger years was structured on avoidance. I did so much more than avoid doing the wrong things, getting hurt, causing people to get upset. But I also got pretty good at avoidance. It was an appealing strategy to avoid undesirable things.

My early spiritual guidance was in a Catholic grade school, and was mostly based on sin avoidance. Already as a seven-year old, I had learned the importance and urgency of avoiding anything that would send me to hell. I was grateful for the opportunity of Confession and the chance to be forgiven for all my failures to avoid sin and the occasion of sin.

I recognize that the important theme of avoidance didn’t stop as I got older. It has continued into today, but has less of a hold on me than it once did. I still buy insurance to avoid the consequences of future perils, real or imagined. My reading yesterday was full of admonitions to avoid anything that resembles racism. Being anti-racist has a different kind of avoidance urgency than Black Lives Matter.

Even the five Mindfulness Trainings used by my Sangha and by my Arise group are dominated by cautions of avoiding unethical behavior. Especially the third Mindfulness Training on Love and Sex is a serious recitation of behaviors to be avoided.

I take some comfort in knowing that I have learned an approach to deep concentration that does not focus on avoidance. My teacher has identified five hindrances that might interfere with concentration. They are acknowledged as stupor, doubt, aversion, restlessness and sensual desire. Rather than attacking or avoiding these hindrances, the teaching is to develop positive antidotes that promote concentration and insight. I like that approach.

I appreciate the value of avoiding whatever leads to undesirable consequences. I am all for avoiding what leads to suffering. Just the same, I prefer a path that is more about embracing life than avoiding life’s perils.

Critical-thinking has typically been a significant part of how I have maneuvered through the world. Notions of logic and analytical thinking have been a part of my mind repertoire. I am now wondering about how much the wisdom of the heart has actually been playing a role in how I approached life. I am trying to learn more how a wise heart can guide me. I am trying to listen more to my wise heart.

Wise heart may be what some people mean when they talk of intuition. But I think my wise heart is more than simple intuition. Definitely more than a vague feeling. I’m not sure it has a lot to do with feeling at all. Not the emotional kind of feeling.

For me, a wise heart requires a relaxed body and an undistracted mind. I allow my mind to be at rest so that my wise heart can be active. This allows concentration on a singular aspect of reality, and that is the realm of my wise heart. There is a fullness of attention that is more than a simple cognitive event. My body and mind, all of me becomes directed to something. If there is a feeling of sorts involved, it is that I can feel that something. This for me is becoming heart wise.

In those moments, I understand in a way that is more than cognition, more than knowing with my mind alone. Being heart wise is a wisdom, a way of knowing that energizes my whole self, and I am aware from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. It is something close to absorption.

I think that I can have heart wisdom, I can be heart wise without the experience of absorption. For me it is like standing on the threshold of absorption, looking in without yet entering. Absorption is still out of reach, even as it is inviting.

Being heart wise is a calm way of knowing, it is a way of understanding that settles in my muscles and bones. To be heart wise, I have to be intimately connected to those muscles and bones. They are integral to my being heart wise.

Heart wisdom is not light and fluffy. Understanding things that are difficult in a heart wise manner is a heavy burden. Heart wisdom means being aware just how difficult and heavy a situation can be. For me, when I recently became more aware of the history and story of the orchestrated imprisonment of Black men, I was nearly overwhelmed with the heavy burden. Being heart wise creates an opening to grasp the gravity of a difficult situation.

At the same time, being heart wise of a difficult situation makes it more manageable to grasp, easier to absorb. I find this is true whether the difficult situation is part of my life or appears to be apart from my life. The difficulty may be more deeply felt, but being heart wise builds a resilience that can better support a difficult, painful awareness.

Being heart wise may actually not be totally new for me. I suspect it has been there all the time, as it is in all of us. I just haven’t know how to pay good attention. I am very slowly learning to have a fuller grasp of heart wisdom, how to pay better attention. For me, this means giving it room. It means not allowing mental distraction or body agitation to eclipse my heart wisdom.

To be heart wise, I need to pause. I need to relax my body. I need to quiet my mind. I welcome my heart wisdom when I set my intention to listen. Sometimes I invite my bell. Sometimes I simply sit. I concentrate.

I have difficulty with scarcity. Scarcity is not my friend and I am not sure what the basis is. It isn’t clear to me where the trauma lies in my life that has made me as sensitive to scarcity as I am. I don’t think that I have a strong desire or concern to acquire much beyond what I have. I don’t rush out to get new things. But I am anxious about running out of things that I routinely use. One of those things I normally rely on is the kind of food I eat.

This is on my mind today because I made my first early morning trip to Cub since the beginning of March. Two items that are part of my routine are distilled water for my CPAP and imitation crab for salads. I like to have them available and neither of these items are carried by Trader Joe’s, the one grocery store I go to once a month.

I am very aware of their scarcity. Every morning when I refill the reservoir on my CPAP machine, I think about how much distilled water I have left. I feel the sensation of scarcity in my body. My mind goes to a quick review of how much is left in the container. A friend of mine has consistently gotten two gallons of distilled water for me when she goes to Cub and I request a refill. She is a reliable supplier. Yet,I have a deep concern about my scarce distilled water.

I haven’t figured it out, but there is a deep unease about being dependent on others to make adequate distilled water available to me. The feeling of scarcity has a deep hold on me, and I cannot see the roots of it all. Today, my solution was to give myself permission to venture out into the COVID world and visit Cub early in the morning. I brought home four gallons of distilled water. Those four gallons are strangely reassuring to me, but it is more reassuring to know that I was able to do it, and can do it again sometime in the weeks to come.

I also brought home a good supply of imitation crab and an assortment of other items it is nice to have in my pantry should I need them. But none had the same hold on me as being able to bring home the scarce distilled water. Nothing else motivated me, almost irrationally, to show up at Cub at 7:15 this morning.

The roots for this anxiety about scarcity are not at all clear to me. My family was poor and we lived a life of scarcity, but there was nothing I would call painful want or need. We had an adequate supply of food. While I learned not to waste food or anything else, it hardly seems like I experienced anything traumatic because of our normal experience of scarcity.

So I think about my current, on-going relationship with scarcity. I try to keep a moderate supply of items, particularly food, that I want to have on a regular basis. I am a little surprised about the satisfaction I feel about my adequate supply of food. I am grateful that I have the option of maintaining an adequate supply. But I am still far from becoming a friend of scarcity.

No one really knows for sure. However, I like to dwell on the notion that we all share intimately in the vast ocean of air we call our earthly home. We are air breathers, and it suggests to me a close connection I have which I might otherwise never notice or might even ignore.

Air is made of so many molecules that they might be considered almost limitless, or certainly not measurable. Each breath I take brings in and sends out so many molecules of air that only an advanced theoretician might be able to estimate their number. Perhaps someone has actually done that, and I am sure that it is a very big number.

The breath I take in is also constantly mixing with the air around me. The shifting wind whisks those molecules of my breath off to many far and exotic places. The vast sea of air that forms earth’s atmosphere is constantly moving. The molecules of air are constantly being mixed with a turbulence that may be invisible to my eyes, but it is something I can nevertheless know and often feel with my skin.

The air I breathed yesterday might well be t in the nostrils of someone in Wisconsin today. Because of the constant movement of air, space puts no practical limits on my breath except for the upper limits of the atmosphere. Neither does time put many constraints. The breath I took a moment ago might well contain molecules I once encountered as a young boy.

That same breath might well contain molecules of air that were in the lungs of ancestors I have never known. Air is such a biological, real world connector. It brings all breathing beings together in one common encounter. We are all connected by the air we breathe. I cannot sustain an illusion of being separate as long as I breathe out and breathe in.

I have been told that I am constantly sharing the same air once inhaled by the likes of Julius Caesar and William Shakespeare. Just by breathing, I am connected with all the beings who have ever inhabited this earth and once drew molecules into their lungs.

This causes me to have a snarky thought. I wonder if the white supremacists are aware that every breath they take connects them intimately, inside their bodies, with countless People Of Color. Those they despise have shared breath with them countless times. They are so very connected. with those they would hold at a distance.

Air is but one way I know I am intimately connected with all beings, and ultimately to the stars from which we originate into which we return. However, it is a nearly tangible expression of the links of existence that joins me to everything. Air is just one expression of the network that joins all things, it is an example of the manner in which living things are connected. It is a connection that we ignore at our peril.

Besides the sharing of air, there is more to this network, but I like to remember frequently how each breath I take binds me intimately with every breath ever taken. I breathe in and I feel the intimate oneness with every being that has ever lived or ever will live on this planet of ours.

Living white, I have been a prince all these years and hardly knew it. I have lived in the ancestral home of my parents and many others who were just like them. I’ve had a general sense that I was a prince. Something made me special, and I was better than those living outside. But it also has seemed so normal and nothing out of the ordinary. Being white has simply been who I was. It has been so easy being white and being a prince.

Now it isn’t so easy being white. I thought I liked being a prince, but now I’m not so convinced. I notice that when I assert that I am white, even in small ways, I suck the air out of the room. I take the air others need to breathe. Non-white people have a harder time breathing just because I am acknowledged and recognized as being white. The prince gets a bigger share.

As I search my memories, I realize how, even though I was born a prince, I was also taught what it means to be a prince. As a young person, I was taught what it meant to be white, and I absorbed that lesson in my muscles and bones. The lessons were deep and lasting.

I learned at an early age that those non-white people smelled funny. They used vanilla to cover their offensive body smells. It was something I would notice when I rode the bus, just as I was taught to observe.

I remember learning that the non-white people made everything unclean by coming into contact with it. As a prince, I needed to be careful that I did not come into contact with anything they might have touched. They themselves were unclean, because that is the way they were naturally. In addition, they were the ones who did the dirty jobs. As a white youngster, it gradually became obvious to me, and I absorbed my lessons well.

As a youngster, I learned that we were white, and the non-whites were “other”, they were not of the same princely lineage. Mostly they were dull and not too smart, although there were some who were exceptional. Some of them could be jovial, and they were occasionally a form of entertainment for me. Mostly, however, they were a source of caution and fear.

By the time I became an adult, I was intimately aware that being a prince was more than having white skin. Being white was something that penetrated my whole body and it was an awareness that flowed through my veins. My whole body responded to non-white people with an awareness that signaled that I was different, I was special. It was like an aura that surrounded my presence. With no effort at all, I had learned to carry it with me at all times. Those who were like me, routinely reinforced my identity as white. We all liked being princely.

Now I am in the uncomfortable situation of learning how to become less white. I feel like I am trying to answer the question of whether the leopard can change its spots. My body constantly reacts to non-white people by reminding me that I really am a prince. My head has to learn and absorb new realities. I have to become aware of new history that explains the foundations for my being a prince. I have to remember the lessons I wrongly received as a youngster and that my white companions constantly reinforced.

My heart and my body have learned the princely lessons very well, and they constantly resist my attempts to become a little less white. Apart from experiencing fear, tension and anxiety, being white has been a fine princely role. But I know it is time to give up that role. It is time to let non-white people breathe.

It is time to give up the pain that accompanies the deep feeling of being separate. The myth that we are separate has been the cause of a wound that I share with other white people. The more I surrender the princely assertion that I am white, the closer I get to closing the gap I feel between me and all the others. Perhaps my body will learn that I may be special, but no more special than others.

Perhaps if I no longer call myself white I will slowly stop living white.