Category: Uncategorized

As I deliberately move deeper into a world of solitude, I find myself thinking more and more about what my friends mean to me.    In a strange paradox, my growing comfort with my sense of separateness and being on my own is being matched by a deeper feeling of connection and closeness to my friends, my companions.

I’m not sure what the core of this is, but the more I relax in to accepting what “is”, the more I become open to myself and my friends.   I am who I am and who I am becoming.   While some of that is on the “wait and see” list,  I am grateful that I have companions who can witness my presence and my becoming.   I guess I am also grateful that they are willing to be beside me, to share so many things with me, to shower me with acceptance.

I think that is what being a deep friend is all about.   It is something my friends are teaching me.   It means being able to be transparent with one another.   No pretenses, no adjusting to fit one another’s designs or expectations.   Unconditional acceptance and affirmation.   It is more like loving one another than being lovers.   Lovers tend more to use their imagination, fueled by their wants.

It doesn’t mean that my companions and I don’t adjust in some ways to accommodate one another.  Those adjustments are made with honesty and are chosen with a strong loyalty to who we are.

Obviously a work-in-progress for me.   I am grateful to have companions who are working at it with me.

Many times during the day, I remind myself that my friends are there.  They are present in the periphery of my vision and awareness, a constant part of my heart, on the margins of my attention.   I am alone, but not truly isolated.

From time to time, we call out to one another, “Here I am,” and reassure one another of our continuing presence.   For me, it is comforting, supportive to be allowed to be a friend.   I am grateful that my companions  also carry me in their heart and allow me to be present in their lives, a meaningful part of their days as they are in mine.

We need not be physically present to one another, pleasant as that is.  But they are a felt presence in my world.   Just as I want to be a welcome presence in theirs.

My life has been a tense struggle between wanting to be the same and wanting to keep changing, between keeping and letting go, between permanence and impermanence.  I am so glad that change is finally winning out.   Each day is a truly new day.

I am no longer the person I was at 20 nor last year.   I am so glad.   When I see the friars I was in school with still doing essentially the same thing they did 50 years ago, I think “How sad.”  I feel like I have so far lived about four or five lives.   I have chosen to be the Dungeon Master of my life, and I have created multiple worlds to live in.    All are related, but not all the same.  I have been evolving through incremental ages.

It seems but yesterday that those two molecules joined together and began the march to the breathing, thinking person I am today.   That process has happened in me.   My life is truly an instant replay of the last 3.5 billion years.  It has seemed like 75 years by some reckoning, but it is all the same.

I am the latest effort of the universe to be what it can be, for the intelligence in me to reach toward perfect harmony.   Harmony with what, I’m really not sure yet. The sound and vibration of a bell shimmers and vibrates through all things, including the intelligence that expresses itself in me.   This is the thought and awareness that makes me what I am.

I lean expectantly into this day of change.

For most things, there really is no turning back.   Most of my life has been like  footsteps in wet cement.   My past is part of me, whether I choose to remember it or not.

Suffering happens when I try to forget, to deny awareness of my past.   Joy is in remembering.

This includes all the embarrassing things I’ve done, decisions gone wrong.   It includes all my loves, all the insights, all the loss of control, all the lack of judgment.   They are all there.

Common wisdom tells me that my present state of mind affects my recall of the past.   I think the past events are all there, like unworn shirts forgotten in the back of my closet, waiting for discovery on an inquiring day.   No longer actively worn, they are still there, in whatever shape I find them.

My today includes all my days, like a city built on the rubble of past cities.

I am slowly realizing how important it is to me to be a trusted companion. I want to be someone who can be totally present and aware, accepting and not judging.   I want to be able to listen without feeling compelled to respond.   I want to be attentive.

I will be a trusted witness who is openly aware of others, but especially my close companions.   I intend to affirm their pain and their accomplishments in whatever way I can.   This begins by paying attention, being aware of their pain and accomplishments.  I intend to be acutely attentive to anything they will trust to reveal to me.

I am prepared to be present, to be aware, to be a trusted witness.    This I also want from my companions.  I want it from any of my close friends willing to step into that circle of exchange.

More than anything else, I am a gardener.   My world is a garden, and it changes from season to season, from year to year.   All the while it remains the same garden, and welcomes anyone who cares to enter it.

I ask my garden to be both a whisper and a shout.   I invite all visitors to be carried away by its abundance, variety and beauty.   I summon  blooms to erupt with surprise, delight and excitement.  I nurture secrets to lurk at every turn, ready to reveal subtleties for the curious and daring.

I want to live in a world that welcomes poets, mystics and lovers.   This would be a world that values people who see beyond the obvious, people who are not distracted by illusion and fantasy, people who penetrate to the hearts of matter.   For them it would be a routine and normal occurrence to want to see what is really present and who their companions really are.

I want to live in their world and be able to look behind the curtain of appearances and find the gold at the root of the mountains.   I want to be comfortable with and very aware of the unseen reality hidden in the flesh of my companions.

Perhaps if I learn to live in this world of people who see with their hearts, I may just be able to become one of them.

For me, loving other people is best done from a position of solitude. I mean this from the ground up, from the very beginning.   I think that it is in this manner that authentic love comes in its genuine form, gentle, caring, not controlling .  When solitudes border one another, they offer a magnitude of mutual support and protection.   From solitudes, the ability to greet and welcome are magnified.

The path of solitude avoids the great disappointment so many lovers experience.   Disappointment arises when lovers leave their own solitary orbit and begin to orbit around one another.   The border and distinction between them weakens and, having entered the space of the other, they want the other to be just like them.

Without my place of solitude, it is easy for me to begin to expect others to change.  This is true of the most casual relationship through the most intimate.  Respecting the solitude of others supports an open-hearted manner of loving.  To achieve this, it is important for me to be grounded in my own solitude.

I am grateful that my world includes a variety of friends whom I love in many ways and degrees.   I think we are free to love one another in the manner we do because we do so from a place of solitude.   We support one another, acknowledge one another, care for one another in a full-hearted way.   Our differences can enchant, not disappoint.   We share a mutual respect for one another’s solitude, and our love is more authentic.

 

I’m counting on my friends to be a lifeline as I venture into some unknown territory.   I have clearly been changing, and my sense of reality is no longer what it once was.   It is as different for me as when I first went snorkeling, breathing air but very much in a new watery world.

Sometimes I seem to be living in a new and different body.   Maybe it is the same old body, but my relationship with it has dramatically changed.  It is both distinct from me and yet very much me at the same time.   I find myself trying to juggle a paradox.

I can be in my body and at the same time I have a real sense of being my body.   It is like I am living in a mirror.   Everything is a true image of the original, but they are also distinct.  Which is real?  Is the image any less real than the original, does it make any difference?   Are the two images part of the same reality, two aspects of me?

I do have a strong sense that there are these two aspects of me only when I am totally paying attention.   They are real aspects only when intentionally seen.   Like layers peeled apart, they take on a certain amount of separateness only when I am being mindful, when my awareness is excited.   Still there is one whole.

This is why I need my friends to be a lifeline.    This is a world of mirrors, and I don’t yet dare to become separated from friends.

A bus ride for me is more than transportation.    It is a social adventure.   For me, it has become a world populated by many people that I fall a little bit in love with every time I ride the bus.

I suppose I look around a lot, see who is on the bus, notice their presence, invite their furtive glance.   I watch all the men get on at the stop by the shelter, men rumpled and roughed up by life.   They are the ones I have conversations with the most.   Usually brief exchanges but we acknowledge one another without embarrassment.   They ask me questions.

I sometimes watch everyone who gets on, try to understand a little about who they are just by looking.  Funny how each one carries their own presence a little unhidden.   I secretly open up to and absorb that presence.   Sometimes they know.

I sit next to the woman who has had a severe face in a book on past days, and we soon have an animated discussion about the MIA and the Walker.   I meet neighbors on the bus, stand next to them at the bus stop and we verbally usher one another into our unknown days, a little better for the experience.

I like my bus.    It is a world I like stepping into.   Not a foreign world, but one that is becoming more familiar and hospitable.   I am choosing to claim it as part of my world.