Category: Uncategorized

I certainly never saw this coming.   I find myself making decisions that draw me more and more into the life of a contemplative.   The focus on my inner life is taking on more and more importance, more and more of my time.

I am aware of this deepening that is taking place.   Sometimes it is like walking thru a dark, moon-lit forest at night.   The shadows around me are both real and just out of sight.   I am mostly aware of what is happening in me.    That seems more real than the shadows.

I am sorting out what it means to relate to that world around me, particularly the people.   I still value and want companions.   But I do not want the immersion of coupling.  I have come to value my friends more and more.   I savor the moments we spend together.

Being a contemplative is simply part of my nature, but only part.   While I may be choosing the world of a contemplative, I am still very connected to the world around me.   In fact, I find the time I spend with friends is more engaging than ever.   I can be present to them, with them in intimate ways I never could before.

I am so much more aware of them and feel so much more able to share the intimacy of who we are.   It gives me joy.  If becoming more of a contemplative means being less connected to my friends, or to my world, I want nothing of it.

I’m learning.  It seems that the more skilled I become in being “present”, I am better able to be “present” with other people.   As I go deeper into my meditation experience and related practices, I am able to be more intimate in other settings, and still keep my balance.

This is not easy.   Staying balanced, staying centered in the midst of intimacy is a challenge for me.   It is a work in progress to be sure.

I am grateful that I have a group of friends, men and women that I am comfortable being intimate with.   With them, I can both be very present and be part of their presence.   These friends I truly treasure, and look forward to the times that we can talk and be together.   With then I have an intimacy that grows with my personal practice and my own ability to be with them in an intimate way.   I am happy to be friends with them.

There have been times when I got messed up with intimacy.   I think I grew up in an atmosphere of deprived intimacy, and somehow came to crave it.   I don’t think I have known how to manage the desire because as I became able to enter into someone else’s presence, I lost touch with my own.   I slipped off center, I lost my balance.   Their agenda became my focus.

It has been good that I have lived alone for about 2 years.   I have been able to live without the distraction of interaction for much of that time.   I am so grateful that during this time I have been able to become more contemplative, more meditative, more mindful, more present.   I have a new sense of balance.    I am so much more able to share intimacy with my friends.   I am a better friend.

I don’t think I have ever felt more alive than I do now.  There have been passing moments, even extended times, when I felt this awake.   But it was nothing like this wide-eyed awareness that seems to be expanding day by day.

My experience of the world seems so much more real.   That is so apparent in my being with friends or people I randomly meet.   I seem better able to see them as actually “being there”, perhaps in part because I am more “really there.”

I do see a difference when I sense that someone else is really there and is attentive to my presence.   This is what I experienced in a joyful way recently and it nearly swept me away.

That is my challenge, to stay focused on what is real.   To stay awake to the present moment and not be seduced by my imagination of what might happen, either pleasant or not present.

I may be starting to be awake, but I know I will be in training for a long time.   Being awake to the present is thrilling, but it is not always easy for me to stay there.  I have an active, planning mind.

Every day I wake to new surprises resulting from meditation and mindfulness.   My world is evolving from black and white to rich, vibrant color.   And it isn’t over yet.

I wonder why it took me seven decades to find this out, to find out that the world is so rich, deep and wonderful.   I spent more than a decade as a contemplative monk, and I remember hearing nothing about this enlivening way to experience the world.    There was, of course, the occasional reference to mystics.    But they were weird, odd, maybe out of touch.

I think I may be getting a little weird, a little out of touch with the world I have been accustomed to.   I am experiencing a different world that has been there all the time, and I hardly knew it.   I don’t remember anyone telling me about it, except perhaps in some indirect, obscure  way.

Now I want to spread the word, but that may not be easy.   Encountering mindfulness is a little like an altered state.   For me, it has been like waking up and discovering that I’ve been dreaming.  It is a little like the first europeans who saw Yellow Stone.   They had a hard time convincing people that wondrous place really existed.    I know it only because I have been there.

I experienced an understanding this morning that was reinforced by Rilke when I picked him up to read his words for today.

There was a shadow over me that I recognized yesterday morning    I now realize how much energy and reality I was giving to imagined future developments in my life, one pleasant and one unpleasant.   That was drawing me out of the present into my imagination.   I lost something of my connection with what was actually going on around me.   It felt strange, but I didn’t know why at the time.

I believe I am developing a sense of what it is like to be present.   It is exciting, it is energizing, it is filled with awareness.    It is almost like an altered state.    I get a taste of it when I spend time practicing in meditation.   I can bring it up when I am moving through my day.

My grasping for a future that was both pleasant and unpleasant took me away from the present.   Desire can come in many forms.

There once was a time that I imagined myself as some kind of reincarnation of Francis of Assisi.    It was an image that was encouraged by my living in a monastic setting and wearing the robes of a franciscan friar.

I remember thinking that this was a bit pretentious.  It all seemed incompatible with humility.    At the time, I probably would have described my bold fantasy as a form of imitation of Francis, not in all things but certainly in his connection to Nature.   I think I also envied and perhaps wanted his deep connection with Clare.

I now see this connection with Francis as much more than simple imitation.   Regardless whether there is true reincarnation, I think I experience something of Francis living in me.   It is a little like knowing, recognizing his presence.   The centuries melt away, and I feel a real connection with his spirit.  In some ways, he is alive in me.

We do share the same essential spark, we are joined in the Humming.   But it is his involvement with the natural world that I identify with and can most recognize.    I am beginning to think that his mysticism is equally attractive to me, but that realization is still unfolding.

There is no statue of Francis in my garden, but I think he lives there when I walk thru it.   He is not a model, not a patron, not a protector.   He is here.

For me, it is a constant challenge to stay in the moment.   It is hard to maintain the habit of living in the “what is” without yielding to the urge to live in the future of “what might be.”

The future imagined is even more of an illusion than the experience in which I live moment to moment.  It is the fabrication of an active heart and mind. It delights me with thoughts of wondrous things that might happen and frightens me with specters of scary future events.  It stirs up the desire of how I want things to be.

How much better for me to stay with the “now” and savor its sweetness.   How much better not to attempt to eat next years apples.

There is a great storm coming.   It will be like nothing I have ever seen.  So far I have seen practice events, yet they are only a warm-up for what has yet to come.   It is interesting to me.   I am curious about how it will unfold and I am hopeful about the outcome.   I might as well take it all in, because the gears are in motion, and the storm will come.

We have already changed the balance of the atmosphere and a resulting change has begun.   It is good and respectful that we try to change the thoughtless things we have done to cause this change.   But the coat-hanger approach to releasing energy from inside the earth continues to change our world even while we slowly amend our ways.

However, no matter what we do, there will be great human suffering.

I am comforted that there people in my life that are preparing to face the same winds of change.   They give me hope.   I am not in this approaching change alone.  There are those who will be able to bend with the wind and yield to its power and force.    We will be carried along into a new future if we do not resist.

I will help them prepare to welcome the wind with awe, and they will help me.

Some people have reacted to my un-coupling as though they had just witnessed a train-wreck.  I have to reassure them that it is not so odd, we had simply completed our task.   In many ways, we all could have seen it coming as a normal consequence of events.   Nothing that surprising.    In some ways it was predictable, and we might now anticipate it with the vision of hindsight.

I once said, “We will be together for a long time.”  And we were together for a long time.   We worked together as a couple to raise two boys into young manhood, to create a thriving garden, to expand and beautify a house.   But there came a time when there was no longer a light in my partner’s eyes when I looked into her face, when she began to avert her gaze.

When did that light disappear?   I think it was so many years ago.   We  went through the motions of a couple, often with joy and enthusiasm.   But we no longer exchanged the glances of lovers, as we set our eyes to the tasks at hand.

I now can see a flicker of that open expression of connection in the eyes of people I encounter on the bus.   These are the people who do not avert their eyes when I look into them.    There came a time when my partner could not bear to see me as I actually was, when I no longer reflected her sense of herself, when I was no longer as she imagined I should be.   Then she averted her eyes.   We had become co-workers, connected only to the task.   And sometimes I didn’t even measure up to that.

So am I involved in a train-wreck?   Perhaps that is what normally happens when you put two lovers on the steel path of a contracted relationship.   It is easy then to predict where this train is going.   Eventually the task of working as a couple runs out of steam.

For me, un-coupling is not really a train wreck, but an acknowledgement that the work is done.

It has begun.  It is a new day.   It is a day with all the promise of uniqueness.   I hear the sound of a bird chirping.  A dog barks.    A car passes by.   None of this will ever be repeated again.   None of this will be exactly the same.    And so it will be all during this new day.

The mystery for me is that all these things are happening in the eternal now.   And had I not had my window open just a little, would they have occurred in my world at all?