Author: barryschade@gmail.com

It was a risky thing to do, but I think it was a calculated risk.    More important, I embraced it with only a little anxiety.

Yesterday evening we were in the midst of an April blizzard.  There was lots of snow on the ground and more coming.    A friend of mine and I had tickets to a performance of “Lovett Or Leave It” downtown and she was stuck north of Minneapolis, unable to get out to the main road.    I was looking out my window at the bus stop across the street and thinking of the bus I had seen pass an hour or so ago.

A bus might take me downtown, and there might be a bus to bring me home again after the performance.    My whole body jumped into the decision:  Yes, I’m going to do it.

Unable to convince several others to join me, I waited for the bus by myself.    The bus finally came.   I could hardly see what was happening outside the fogged windows of the bus, but I did notice another bus stuck in the snow a few blocks from my home.    Other passengers and I exchanged light conversation about the uncertainty of bus service being available the rest of the evening.

I stepped off the bus downtown into deep snow, attended the performance, then made my way to the bus stop a couple blocks away, fully aware that there might be no bus showing up.    I had vague contingencies in my mind, but I was focused on a #9 bus suddenly appearing on the nearly-vacant street.   And it did!    I joined a handful of people on the bus, which slowly took me to within three blocks of its usual stop.     I walked thru deep, unshoveled snow to my home.

My risky decision to rely on the bus had paid off.    However, I thought it had been a relatively close call.   I very easily could have been stranded at the bus stop downtown.

Unlike last evening, I really think I am normally a risk-averse person.    I don’t like uncertainty, unpredictable outcomes.    Much of my life has been very cautious and somewhat calculated.    I often plan in some detail.    Being able to consider and predict likely outcomes actually helped me in the work I use to do.

I also have this unpredictable, almost intuitive response to risky situations that sometimes propels me outside of my comfort zone.   When I say “Why not”,  it is not a real question but the first move in a bold leap.    This sometimes confounded my co-workers who expected more calm caution, my routine safe approach.

I don’t pretend to understand this embracing of risk.   I do know it has added savor to my life, and for that I am glad.   Except for a few injuries I still carry with me, I have survived intact.

It also helps me that I am becoming more immersed in the notion of impermanence.    I think that uncertainty actually rules my life, in spite of any effort I make to make life predictable, so I might as well embrace it.    I am actually becoming more flexible and yielding to the many outcomes that I can hardly predict and even less control.

Basically, life is very risky.    I hope to enjoy the ride, without regrets.

Out of billions of alive  humans, there are but a handful that I share my life with.    There is my book group, there are those familiars who pass by when I am in the garden, there are the few with whom I drink tea or wine.

All of them are but a very small percentage of all the humans with whom I might have shared time and space.    These are the relatively few people I have encountered, and yet they are my lucky life line to my own kind.

They are the ones I share stories with, the ones with whom I react to the happenings of my life.   These are the people I tell about my plants, my discovery of Alzheimer cures, my plans for the next week.

They are really not many, only a few out of the many people I sit with on the bus or in the large classroom at the University.   These are the few with whom I make genuine contact.

There are also those dozen or so people with whom I share a truly loving relationship.    They may be few and it is hard to define the chance happenings that have brought us together.    My relationship could have taken so many other turns, yet this is how it has turned out.

As few and chancy as these connections are, they are my portal to the rest of humanity. They have become open to me and I to them.    And because of that I am aware of what it means to be human.   I am connected to the many, by chance.

I often hear talk of nature as if it is something “out there”, something separate and in need of care and appreciation.   Having a garden reminds me that nature and I are not separate and distinct.   I am part of nature as much as are the Snow Drops coming out of the ground this morning.   We have much in common, and their presence reminds me of that.   I am part of nature, and I share a common fate and future with the plants in my garden.

I think I bring something special to the world of my Snow Drops.    What if they bloomed and no one noticed?  Would nature and the whole universe somehow be different if no one were aware of their presence?  I think that my awareness actually adds something unique to nature and the whole cosmos.

To me it seems that something different began happening once humans began observing the world in a manner different from their primate ancestors.  There were no humans there when the first flowering plants arrived in all their new glory.   Just as the world changed when a human first looked through a telescope, the world was adjusted when a human first stared at a blooming plant.   The cosmos was experienced as it had never been before.  Humans took a changed place in nature and nature changed.

How sad it would be if the Snow Drops bloomed and no one noticed.   The cosmos would miss a certain awakening

After over 13 billion years, I have become a portal into the consciousness of the universe.    All the converging causes and conditions of the cosmos have conspired to form this portal to awareness that I conveniently call “me.”

This has been a real and substantive process, evidenced in the experience of humans and defined by careful scientific observation.     This is more than a simple metaphysical concept.   It is no figment of philosophy or religion.    It is no notion conjured by a lively imagination.     It is my experience.    I am aware that I am a portal to consciousness.     I am an entrance and expression of the cosmic mind.

When I walk in my garden, I am aware that I am being bathed in a mist of plants.    This is not a figurative, imagined mist, but a broth of plant substances being released throughout my garden.    For the plants, it is  one way that they communicate.     For me, it is an emergence in the essence of plant.

I have been aware that the oxygen I breathe has originated in plants, and much of it from the plants that grow close to where I live.   When I breathe in, I am taking in the expiration of my  plants.    They are sharing with me the oxygen which they create, even as they absorb gases from me to incorporate into their forms.

In addition to oxygen, plants release a variety of substances including terpenes.   These create an atmosphere of floating plant material in my garden, in my woods, in the parks.   It is  bath of plant essence, ready to be absorbed by my body.

This is a real, physical connection with plants that goes beyond my senses.   My plants do not remain a separate entity, but become a part of me as concretely as the  avocado I ate yesterday became part of me.   I take in plant bits as I breathe.   I absorb plant bits through my skin.

I became aware of the harmful effects of being physically connected with plants the first time my body came in contact with secretions from poison ivy.    My body didn’t like the exchange.   How unaware I have been of all the friendly sharing I have had with plants, all the breathing in of plant essence, all the absorption of plant bits.

All my life, I have been walking through the plant mist and absorbing part of a world my species co-evolved with.   I have a co-dependent relationship with plants as concrete and real as the relationship I have with them because they supply the oxygen I breathe.

I think I understand why my spirits rise when I walk among the plants in my garden and in the woods.    What a treat to be greeted with plant essence from so many of my companion beings.     They create a mist that waits for my immersion.     I step into the mist and I take a deep breath.     I take them with me.

 

The way to tempt joy into my  mind is to invite it first into my body.   My mind is drawn to peace once it is realized in my body.   The longing of my body draws my mind into the empty space that exists at the margins of my senses.   Joy is there, in the space between, in the emptiness.

My longing for the touch of the warm tea cup at my lips tempts me into that space that exists between my lips and the surface of the cup.    My whole body cascades into that space, pulling my mind into a well of peace and joy.

I am tempted to enter the formless space between the warm tea cup that I press against my lips.    My body and my mind open to receive and enter into the emptiness that is hidden by the touched surface of the cup.     I yield to  the temptation of that emptiness and find myself in shared space with the cup.   There is joy and peace for my body and mind.

My whole body / mind is tempted into surrender to the emptiness of the touch of the warm tea cup.   Surrender is joy-filled acceptance.    It is acceptance without emotion, it is the simple joy of touch.     There is no anticipation , no aversion.    The simple longing for emptiness draws me against the rim of my tea cup.

There is only peace and joy of touching the empty space, the true object of my longing.    Once again I have been tempted and succumbed.

It helps me to see all reality as a net.    My consciousness is a node on that net.    As a node, it is unique and also part of the whole.    It is a manifestation of the whole and an entry into the whole.    All nodes are where convergent causality meets, and all nodes are connected to one another.   The net is the reality of inter-existence.

The world is populated with manifestations of this convergent causality.    The reality I know is based on my ability to relate to those convergences.   All my senses and imagination connect me, and I can become aware.

I am aware to the degree that I can maintain a relationship with the net.  Because any one aspect of the net is part of the whole, I can be aware of the whole if I have insight into any singular part.   Insight comes by going beyond the simple sensory encounter with the net.

Having insight is in the realm of the sensory being known.    It allows me to become connected to what appears, in a sensory way, to be emptiness.    Insight allows me to experience the net as it is, not as it appears.

True reality is in the sphere of the net being known.    All else is an illusion or simply sensory.  The net is the unseen reality beyond sense and imagination.

I’ve only had a couple of foxes meet with me in the woods.    I really don’t know how many have seen me, but I am aware of only three times that we were aware of one another’s presence.

Once I was climbing slowly down a barren hillside along a denuded pipeline route, into a small ravine at the bottom of two tall hills.     I looked up from my feet and at the rising slope before me.    Half-way to the crest, there was a red fox, looking back over her shoulder, watching me.    She had paused part way up the hill.    Our eyes met for a brief moment, staring at one another for seconds that opened into boundless time.

For me it was a pin-hole, instant vision into a world I have never forgotten.  I can still sense her redness, her cautious curiosity.   She paused, then in tense haste, she vanished.    For an instant we had been in one common mind as we both lingered and  wondered who this was who had seen us so exposed.

I was riding down the paved road leaving my cabin in Wisconsin.    There was movement in the trees along the road on my right.    Suddenly there she was, running through the trees thirty feet away.     She was almost  a blur, but clearly a red fox.    There was no pause this time, no curious stares.    Only running feet, a bushy tail and red haste.

There were young foxes, I was told, in a den up a wooded hillside not far from my home.  I looked up the hill anxiously, hopefully and I saw movement around where there was disturbed soil.    I am not sure what I saw, but I know I had been in the presence of young foxes.

Perhaps they were too young to be aware or wary of me.    Maybe they simply became invisible once they sensed danger.   But for me they made this a special spot and a unique moment.     It was another fox-time to savor and remember.

I have struggled with the feeling of indebtedness that I have to the Franciscans with whom I spent twelve years of my life.   They are a community of men who educated me, shaped me and prepared me for a life in their community.   Then I dis-robed, I left.

I was discussing this with a friend recently, and he insightfully said that the Franciscans had given me as  gift.   I think that is true.     I have had an effect on my world in ways I never could have had if I had continued, as Neruda said, with cassock and biretta.

While I can take some satisfaction in the traces I have left on the world in the past half century, it is the training and education of the Franciscans that shaped much of that work.    My roots, to this day, show their monastic origins.

Every morning I dedicate myself to be a ‘guardian of nature,’ a role I typified during the years I spent in governmental policy dealing with the environment.    I routinely describe myself as a ‘gardener,’ an identify I began to take on as a novice with the Franciscans.    I was always the one who created and tended the flower gardens, wherever I went.

I see myself as a ‘healer of misery,’ an attitude that was cultivated by my years as a Franciscan.    For me, that often meant releasing people from the legalistic burdens imposed by the Catholic Church, a role that eventually nudged me into leaving the official role of a priest.

I daily pledge myself to be a ‘messenger of wonder,’ a role that continues to unfold with each exciting new day.   It was as a Franciscan that I learned to look beyond the ordinary and the expected and focus on dreams and untested realities.    It is a habit that I  took into the work place and into the St. Stephens community.    In a simple manner, I helped others to reach out beyond the obvious and trust their own sense of wonder.    My experience in the world of wonder allowed me to tell others that it is rewarding to trust their own heart.   I learned this from the Trubadour Vagabond known as Francis.

As much as I daily aspire to be an ‘architect of peace,’ I am not aware that I have yet learned that skill.    People tell me of my calming presence, but I am not sure.     I have begun to experience an inner peace, but it has been many years developing.    There are still many sharp and rough edges.    The Franciscans may have nudged me to become an Instrument of Peace, but it is an instrument still being fashioned.

I am grateful to the Franciscans who have given me as a gift to my community.    My community is unaware for the most part, but there are some who can recognize the Franciscans for what they have given.    I wish the Franciscans could be as aware themselves of what a gift they have given.

I sense that most of them look inside and see what they have lost by my leaving their community.      When I have reached out, they have not been able to respond.    They have not yet raised their eyes to see what a gift they have given.    That would be very hard.

 

 

Wanting things to be different causes me the most turmoil.    I just chased two rabbits out of my yard because I don’t want them to be there.     I’m not sure if I caused them as much turmoil as I felt.    I hope I did.     I hope they will want to be some place else  and the turmoil will cause them to move out of my yard.

The things I want are exemplary of the many feelings of dis-satisfaction I experience.     I want things to be different than they are, I am dis-satisfied with what is.     I want the snow to melt and plants to start coming out of the ground.   I want my injured leg to be stronger.

I think I notice more how the dis-satisfaction creeps into my life.   I am more aware of the powerful influence it has on my contentment.   As much as I want the rabbits to be gone from my garden, I am not as disturbed by their presence as I once might have been.    I am simply and reflectively looking at my options and deciding what to do.   I may want the rabbits to be gone, and I also plan that they no longer will  hang out in my yard.