Author: barryschade@gmail.com

I have been wrestling with repeated and vain attempts to understand time a little better.   I currently think it has something to do with movement in space, maybe because I measure time by movement: my own movement, the movement around me, the movement of the hands on my analogue watch.   Perhaps time is simply another aspect of something I call space.

An even more challenging concept is the notion of forever.   How can there be a forever if there is nothing that exists except now.   I am beginning to think that forever is at least irrelevant if not an illusion.

Why should I speak of forever if the only thing that makes any difference is what is going on right now?  Perhaps it is only my desire to be assured that there will be something beyond what is happening this moment.   There actually is no certainty that the next moment will ever come.   At best, there is some probability that the sun will rise tomorrow.   The future is hidden in a fog of ambiguity and uncertainty, so how can I even begin to reach some conclusion about forever?

It is perhaps nice and kind for me to assure someone I love that I will love them forever.  Our culture has been bold enough to build whole institutions and ceremonies around that illusive assurance when in reality I can never honestly make that promise.   There is no love story with no end.

At best, I can assure someone of my intention, at this present moment.   In human relations there is no forever.    I think it is actually dishonest and unkind to offer an assurance of forever love when there is no possibility I can deliver on that promise.

Facing this reality and living in it makes the present moment richer, more intense, and full of love.   It is my one chance to act.

I think that forever is a notion that humans have created because there is such a deep gap in our understanding of time.   Like the idea of God, the idea of forever  attempts to assure us that there is something  out there beyond our understanding.   In reality, I have limited vision, and I really can’t see beyond now, that that may be as good as it gets.

Fortunately, the are many moments I can be comfortable with that.

 

 

Every day, I am reminded that I am no longer innocent.    There may have been a moment when I was just born that I had abounding innocence.    I had a freshness, an openness, an uncontaminated experience of the world, at least for a few moments.   Perhaps my conditioning had already begun at the moment that I got genes from my mother and my father.   But it is easier to think of the moment I was born.

Then things started to change as I began to get conditioned by the world around me.   My parents had a large part in that because they had the good intentions of preparing me for my entry into human civilization.   They began to shape me so that I might fit into my tribe, something they did consciously, aware as they were of what it meant to be their kind of human.    Often they shaped me unconsciously, unaware of their own conditioning that prepared them for this task as parents.

Today it is my prime intention to rid myself of much of that conditioning that has shaped me for over seven decades.   My parents were my first artisans but I have been conditioned by so many other relationships in my life.   I want to reclaim my original gift of innocence and see each day as though I have never seen a day before.   I intend to put the apparent sequence of time aside and meet every thing for the first time.

For me, this is one of the gifts of aging, to be able to begin again without fear, with complete trust and acceptance.   Each hour is its own beginning, and I want to enter it as though I have never before known what an hour is and what it will be in the future.

I am slowly putting aside most of the constructs that have guided my life and my imagination.    These are the conditioning that have shaped how I have experienced the world.    I want to keep only those aspects of me that help me see things as they really are, which means no preconceptions.

I am trying to strip away nearly everything I have learned, and rely on the constructs that open my senses and my mind to the world as it truly is.   Each step I take is my first step.   I rely on the memory embedded in my muscles as a toddler to keep me upright and balanced.   I touch the ground with the excitement of discovery.    This is what the earth feels like.   This is what it feels like to move through space and time.   This is what the air feels like against my skin as I move.

Reclaiming innocence is not easy.   Not only do I have to unlearn much of what I have learned.   I  also have to resist new learnings that attempt to shape me each day.   It is a struggle I  am routinely aware of.   It is the reason I refuse to listen to reports that feed my imagination with images of fear.

I choose instead the pursuit of innocence.   I love the experience of drifting into each new moment uncertain of the outcome.   The ambiguity of each connection I make fills me with wonder.    I know I cannot control the outcome, but neither can it shape me without my choosing.

I often struggle to explain what meditation or mindfulness is when I try to tell someone that “I meditate.”   I’m almost apologetic because meditation  sounds so cerebral and lofty, and it is nothing like that for me.

Then a dear friend told me about her meditation having juice.   What a great way to describe my experience.   For me, awareness is all about experiencing juice.   It is something that happens not just in my mind but in my whole body.  Meditation is full of juice.   Juice flows through and around my body and mind without barriers.

Juice is such an apt metaphor because of its multiple meanings.    The expression brings together a feeling of earthy stickiness and flowing essence.  Juice is a common expression I use for the flow of electricity.   There is juice in a wire when it is powered up.  Someone is juiced when they are drunk  out of their mind.

A tree has juice from roots to leaves, its vibrant life force.   I experience this juice when I touch its bark, when I listen to its moving leaves, when I hit its roots with my digger.   There is juice in a rock that I lift and move to another place.    I sense the vibrations within its hard surface, pulsing with energy that has been in motion for billions of years.   There is juice in the handle of my cup and in the tea that I sip slowly into my mouth.

I am becoming aware that my ability to feel the juice is not always the same.    Much of that, of course, has to do with whether I am paying attention or not.    When it comes to other beings, especially humans, it also depends on whether they are able to share their juice.   I have juicy connections with certain people, and not so juicy encounters with others.   Sometimes we share energy, sometimes not.

I am grateful for my juicy friend who introduced me to the notion of juice. The expression has already infected my vocabulary.   It expresses so well what I experience as awareness or mindfulness.

I am almost gushy about how happy I am to be aging.   I’m not thinking about the ripeness of great-tasting cheese or wine that has matured in taste and texture.    I am thrilled about the newness and freshness that can rise with each new day.   For me being older is a new world and a new life.

I am quite familiar with the physical pains of aging.   Medical complaints seem to be a common topic of conversation when I get together with my older friends.  I admit that I haven’t fully accepted this reality.   But isn’t that part of what aging is about?   It is a time that I can recognize things as they actually are, and accept them.   Making friends with pain is part of that process.   I become even more aware of my body.    It reminds me to pay attention to it, I enter into it more routinely, I exercise it more intentionally, I judge more carefully what I am putting into it.

If I had paid this much attention to my body when I was much younger, I might even be more pain-free right now.

Aging for me has been an opportunity to put aside my concerns about social conventions.    I am fortunate not to have to earn money at this point in my life, and I feel free to pay little attention to what society demands of me, such as work.   I’ve probably never been “in  step” with social conventions, but I feel even less constrained now by what society might expect of me.   I do what I choose.

It is a time for me to reclaim wildness.    I was born wild, and I learned to conform to the norms of my culture.   This is not the wildness of shaggy hair, but the wildness of being born powerfully noble.   I am reclaiming that splendor, that wild energy deep inside of me that is my heritage.   It is a new beginning as I more easily put aside my preconceived notions about my life, my world.   I am taking the place that is rightly mine.

It is a time I more easily fall in love.   Loving has always seemed rather risky to me.    Now it is a routine part of life.   The focused awareness and open transparency of a lover is much easier for me to conjure and maintain.   It seems no more difficult than taking three deep breaths.

My brain still functions, so it is a time of intellectual curiosity and depth.   I cannot remember when I was more intellectually alive.   I know this is because the emotional constraints on my mind have been lessened.  I  am so much less afraid to be unaware, to question and to explore.  Aging gives such freedom of thought it seems a waste not to take advantage of it.

I am rejecting the image of being dumpy and frumpy just because I have lived a long life.   Instead, I accept that old age can be a time to free up natural powers that have been under wraps and social constraints.   It is a time to feel resplendent, if I choose.

I am more than an aging body.   I  am claiming my place as a manifestation of an intelligence and a reality that extends thru the universe.   This is a good time for me to come home to my own place in reality.

 

I recently read that Robert Bly said something like Make your choices then pay the price.   Though not exactly a hero of mine, I think Robert Bly has often gotten things right.    This quote is something of an exception.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what he said and how it fit into the view of my life.    There have been so many roads abandoned, so many people and activities have slipped beyond my reach.   These are mostly choices I have made, not many of them have been forced on me.

Sometimes it is hard to remember just why I made  change of direction, why I “broke up” with someone, changed career,  never pursued the deepening of a relationship.  Would I make those same choices now?   I truly have paid the price of lost opportunities, never explored so many turns around a bend.

I’ve slowly come to recognize that the option is not there to redo my choices. Those opportunities are truly gone, beyond my reach.   What is more, I now examine those options from a vantage point created by the decisions I made.   Those choices look different now because I have been changed by my own decisions.

My garden is being planted and rearranged for the summer of 2017, and it is no longer relevant to re-examine what was done in the summer of 2016.     My choices may be different in 2017 and many of them are based on the fruits, perhaps the price being paid, for choices made last summer.  Today I am making choices in my garden.

My life has been filled with choices much more significant than  the ones I make daily in my garden.    I have been changed dramatically, perhaps paid the price, but certainly enjoyed the benefit.   Within less than five minutes I walked from the University Zoology department building across the street to the Botany building.    I  became a botanist in those moments and my dreams of zoology went up in smoke.

I chose to leave the comforts and assurances of religion to step into a world of constant exploration and uncertainty.   I gave up a career I had prepared for during a decade and a half.   I paid the price as I left a shore I could never find again if I wanted to.   It has been a real bargain.   While I have paid dearly, I have discovered a world of abundant treasure and joy.

Robert Bly is insightful in describing an experience that I have recognized by looking back over my shoulder.   I think I am just more excited about experiencing what adventures my feet are feeling as I take each step along the path I have chosen.

 

I consider it a successful day when I have dispelled yet another untruth taught me by my culture.    I have spent so much of my life unlearning what I have been taught.   And yet, I continue to be surprised, then disappointed, when I discover that yet another thing I have been told is a lie.

Almost nothing is as it is made to appear.  I feel I am living in a cultural world that has been shaped by the unenlightened  interests of humans around me.  Sadly, so much of that cultural world denies access to the beauty of who we are, the grandeur of reality, the wonder of what it means to exist.

I only can trust what I have directly experienced, and that routinely contradicts what I have been taught by my culture.

I could make a list of examples, but that would sound like the rant of someone who has been disappointed by life.   Actually, it is just the opposite.    I am so grateful that I have lived a life that has slowly but surely separated me from the grasp of what I have been told.   I have made my own choices, eventually, based on my own grasp of reality.  For that I am very glad.

I so so grateful that I have lived these seventy and five years, allowing me time to unlearn so many untruths.   The world I have discovered is beautiful and so much more vibrant and full of joy than I had been told.

 

 

 

I use a small gong to begin and end my meditation.    For me it is more than a simple ritual to identify a beginning and an end.   The sound of the gong has for a long time been an audible voice “calling me home,” in the words of a Sangha member.  My experience of that call has taken an interesting turn.

It begins with my touching the gong, feeling the cold and silent metal forged from brass.   I lift the striker, feel its weight and hard handle.   I touch the gong lightly with the striker then bring it to life with a sharp blow on the side.    The metal sings out, flowing through my whole body.   I feel its vibrations in my head, in my torso, in my hands and feet.

The gong is inviting me to a home that use to be tiny and inside of me.   My home was confined to the space defined by my body.   Now my gong invites me to a wide and spacious world, much larger than tiny me.    I feel the summons to a limitless universe, an ocean of reality.    I enter the timeless world of no time.    The metal of my gong vibrates and I follow where it leads me.

The sound of my gong fills the room and carries me to a widening expanse beyond me and my room.   When it is finally quiet, I have expanded beyond the limits of my tangible world.   I find myself settled in a place far beyond my limited vision.   This truly is my home, and I have been brought here by my gong.

My home extends to all that is, and I am carried there by the sound of my gong.   This is where I belong.   This is where I let go of everything I think sustains me, all the things I think I need to survive.   Here I can abandon all my security, all my certainty.   I can yield to the lack of assurances that shape my past and future.

My gong allows me to find joy.  I love its sound and what it may bring.

Every day, I still pass up opportunities because of my caution.   On top of it, every day I also seem to miss opportunities because of the caution of others.   Where is the boldness to be in the moment?   I sure would like to live out each moment to its fullness, but hesitation seems so stifling for me and my companions.

I am getting much better about simply acting, trusting impulse, leaping in.   Sometimes it feels like a dam has just broken when I allow the energy to rise from some deep spot inside me, and I just “do it.”

But I am finding it is hard to find other people who are able or willing to reciprocate that energy flow.    Allowing the moment to flow, not resisting what the moment brings is hard enough to do on my own.   Finding others who are able to do the same, without caution about the future, seems nearly impossible.

How often have I heard or sensed a caution because of what they think “I expect” in an interaction   I wish people would just do what they want to do, and I will do what I want to do.   It is best not to meddle in one another heads.

Maybe that is part of the curse of my being on the autism spectrum:   I am much more inclined to take things on face value, and I don’t try to adjust to what I think is in someone else’s head.  I try to pay attention to what is in my head, not theirs.  Frankly, I find what is in my head much easier to understand.

I know that being able to interpret or anticipate someone’s malicious intentions may have been an aid to my survival.   However, I prefer to use that skill very infrequently.   It’s not the way I want to live my life.

Trying to interpret what is in someone else’s mind is such a stimulus of caution.   It means living in my imagination and not in the reality I actually experience.   Imagination, especially the imagined future, is such a fertile ground for fears and caution.

I am trying very hard not to live in my imagination, especially not to live in an imagined future.   I find that I experience caution a lot less and joy a lot more.   I seem to have survived just fine.

 

Every day I make an abundance of decisions.   At least I seem to.   Some are huge, but most of them are trivial and small.   I wonder how free I am in making those decisions.   They seem like they are truly MY decisions.   Nothing or no one is forcing me to act.    Yet the debate over whether we have free will has been around for a very long time.   I also think about it.

I no longer think that I make decisions in a totally “free” manner.    But I also think that my decisions are wholly mine.   Any decision I make or action I take is an accurate expression of who I am.    My so-called “free will” arises as an impulse deep inside of me.   It is a convergence of many factors that define me.   My history is there, my biology is there, my habits are there, my aspirations are there.   Above all, and having the most influence,  my awareness is there.

In a real sense, I am not free to make whatever decision I want.   My decision options are limited and defined.   Even my choosing is defined and somewhat predetermined.

I think that my decisions and my actions are a convergence of all the factors that define me.   Most significantly, they are an expression of my evolving awareness.   They are an expression of the order, the information, the intelligence present in me, in whatever state that happens to be at that moment.

My decisions are an energetic impulse coming out of my core self, and are rooted in a raw form of eroticism.   They are an expression of the energy that constantly stirs in my living self.   Probably, my decisions are the most reliable and transparent manifestation of my true self.

So do I have free will?   I don’t think that anything I do is totally “free” in an isolated way.   Everything ultimately comes from within, and is an expression of me, so it is shaped by who I  am at that moment.   Nothing I do is totally isolated because I am connected in so many ways to the world around me, my past and my future.

So I am not free.   But I do think that the decisions I make are truly mine, and an expression of who I have chosen to become.

As I look at the bench on my deck and feel its presence, feel its  color, feel its woodiness, I experience an intimacy with the bench.    Another day, I might describe this as I am aware of the bench.   I think they are two words to describe the same event.

Whenever I am aware of something or some one, I am taking down the mental barriers that separate us.    When I am aware, I am relaxing the shield that protects me.   I am experiencing a certain vulnerability in order to see something or some one just as they are.    I have to put aside all imagination and expectation.   I abandon a safe place and ignore caution.

It seems to me that when I describe awareness this way, I am also describing intimacy.   When I am aware, there is a certain energy that seems to flow both ways between me and the object of my awareness.   We are connected.   A oneness is affirmed and recognized.   We effectively merge.

Awareness is not an activity as much as it is a state.   Being mindful is not an effort, it is a letting go in order to be a receptive sponge.    If anything, it is a cessation of all activity, all mental effort.    Awareness is a blending, a connection, a relaxed state of no barriers.   Mind and senses become one.

There seem to be many ways to speak of intimacy and it takes many forms.   For me, it seems that one thing they all have in common is a heightened level of awareness.