Barry Garden Path

Perhaps it was only a scripted part of an entertaining movie. But it left a lasting notion in my heart and comes to mind frequently. In the movie “Avatar,” the indigenous people greeted one another with “I see you.” What a wonderful way of meeting another person. What a wonderful thing to think and then say to another person, to plants, to rocks.

To be seen by another is such an affirmation and recognition of my presence. I know what it feels like not just to be noticed but to be experienced and acknowledged in such an open, unprejudiced way. I want to see everyone with those eyes of openness . I want to feel that experience of seeing and being seen.

In my culture we have a practice of shaking hands when meeting. It can be a real gesture, but it is so weak. I have heard that shaking hands means that “I am not armed,” I hold nothing in my hand that can harm you. I suppose it is a useful gesture, but I would rather it were more than that, more than a cautious letting down of shielding and protection.

I want my meeting someone to be more of an open exchange, a deep affirmation of presence. I want it to be an acknowledgment that we see one another without prejudice or assumptions. I want us to say that we see one another just as we are, and have that to be true.

Actually, I prefer that we go beyond words and that we hug one another deeply. I prefer that we become aware of one another more deeply than simply seeing one another. If I could, I would say with wholly open eyes and heart, “I am you.” Sometimes that is what I feel. I never seem to say it.

Those words, “I am you,” are not common, but they can be a part of me just the same. It would be a routine reminder to me how we are all intimately connected. Now, if only we could let it freely show!

Seeing each other is one opening to intimacy, an initial recognition of how we are connected. For me to affirm that I really see someone is the beginning of an affirmation of the intimacy we naturally share. Seeing is an initial invitation to enter into a heart-joined experience of intimacy .

Some would consider it a flaw in my person that I want so strongly to be noticed, but I embrace it. I want to be recognized as part of something or someone, as connected to them in some deep and mysterious fashion. When I walk among the shoulder-high plants in the prairie section of Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, I want those plants to be as aware of me as I am of them. I want to be noticed by them, acknowledged, confirmed.

I want my presence to be felt by people around me just as clearly and strongly as I feel them. I want the plants in my garden to direct their plant-awareness fully to me as I walk among them every morning and acknowledge them. Awareness cannot be a one directional street for me. I want there to be a constant exchange of noticing.

When I walk on the path down to the lake at my cabin, I want the ground to yield ever so slightly to my feet. I want the dirt and grass to feel my weight and my presence. They need not remember my passing, but I want them to notice and be intently aware when I am present.

For me it is about being reciprocal, of jointly feeling the connection we naturally share. I typically not only notice the presence of someone else, but I allow myself to feel their presence and acknowledge it somehow. There is nothing about the past or future involved, only the moment during which we notice that we are in a time of existing together. We are connected. I want to habitually be someone who notices that and is noticed.

Deep within my culture there is a framework that has been hidden from me. It is as hidden as the bones that make up my skeleton. And like my skeleton, it is essential to providing structure, support and shape to my culture. Knowing it is there, now helps me to understand the otherwise incomprehensible resistance I see daily to reasonable things like getting vaccinated and wearing masks.

I just finished reading “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson. I think I can better understand the deep and hidden energy source behind many people who are so strongly anti-vaccine and anti-mask in the midst of this pandemic. What seemed wildly unreasonable to me, now is a lot easier for me to understand. There is a deeply engrained and hidden force behind the resistance.

While not specifically about race, resistance has been made a hallmark of belonging to a certain caste that many white people are desperately trying to preserve. Many white people are trying to keep their position of privilege, even if it is only imagined. They want to maintain the caste system that racial injustice has supported for hundreds of years. It is the hidden agenda behind a wide assortment of cultural dynamics, and it is providing the energy that resists masks and vaccines.

The attempt to “make us great again” is deep and powerful. At its roots, the structural caste system is quite hidden. The manifestations, however, are very visible. Not wearing a mask or not being vaccinated has been made one of the symbols of belonging to a once-privileged caste. It has been made part of the culture of the caste. Caste identity gives the resistance energy.

I recognize that the issue of resistance to masks and vaccines is complicated, and the generalization about caste structure doesn’t always fit all individuals and specific situations. However, uncovering the hidden nature of caste and its role in our white culture has helped me make sense of what seems like wildly unreasonable resistance.

I don’t want to miss or underestimate the power of this deep and hidden caste system and how attached to it many people are. I also want to be aware how it affects decisions I make. I recognize that I have been born into the privileged caste by having white parents. It is the hidden structure underneath my white culture.

Where are the others? Some mornings, like today, I stumble around and wonder “Where are the others like me?” Am I so unique that there are no other beings who think and feel like me? Where is the natural linkage we think we have with other individuals? If it is real, why is it not at all obvious? Why is it not perceptible by me?

I sometimes think that I feel more of a connection with the tree in my back yard than I feel with other humans. My tree I can feel and touch, I can see its bark and limbs, I can hear the movement of its leaves. Is this supposed connection with others something I simply think, but don’t really experience. I have a memory of what that kind of experienced connection might have felt like. I also wonder if that is simply an imagined memory. Where are those others now?

Why is it that we hardly ever brush up against one another in the forest of existence as I do with my tree whenever I pass it, touch its bark, feel its solid presence. I walk in a forest of others and get only fleeting glimpses of movement, see shadows of unclear presence, hear a furtive rustle that does not repeat.

It sometimes seems that we are sitting next to one another on a giant airplane rushing through space. I may be so close to others, and yet we sit in our own unique and isolated bubbles. We are scarcely touching or looking, even while we are dimly aware someone is there. The others seem more like shadows than a manifestation of the extraordinary beings they are. So it seems to me, and I suspect it is how I seem to the others as well.

We remain aware of one another, but in an oblique and sadly distant way. We are only slightly aware of the other person sitting next to us on the imagined plane. We are so close, but never touch. And so we remain apart.

I sit and wonder “Where are the others” as I stare into my book. And they sit and stare into theirs.

I’ve been thinking of how, in the vast expanse of the universe, would I recognize myself. What distinguishes me in such a way that anyone could answer me: Who am I? Among all sentient beings on this planet, what distinguishes me from all others?

I am, first of all, a man who wants to be fully alive no matter how many times I have traveled around the sun. I want a deep intimacy with the world, and that is characterized by my being an attentive gardener. I want to be a guardian of the world I see when I wake in the morning.

I am someone with an open heart and I welcome anyone wanting to join me in my adventure of plunging into the world. I am curious and an avid student of the world, living and not living. I teach about plants to anyone who seems attentive and I participate in discovering geology through classes at the University of Minnesota.

I love to read, and I am currently nestled between the covers of: Caste, My Grandmother’s Hands, Until The End of Time, Mindfulness And Intimacy, Fidelity and Educated. I am engaged in four book circles with other readers.

Currently, my favorite poet is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer whom I read daily along with Rainer Maria Rilke. I have a daily meditation practice and exercise program.

The question is still: Who am I? I am a man who is determined to be deeper and deeper in love with life. I stumble in that pursuit, I recover, I turn corners frequently. I do my best to turn away from the desire to possess or be possessed. Instead, I try to experience myself as part of all that is. A unique part.

It is such a circular kind of thinking. It is a circular way of seeing things that I often find myself following to define and describe what is real. All I know, all I have to go on is what I perceive with my senses. My senses alone tell me what exists. My senses connect me to what I determine is real. It is often a circuitous route, but it always comes back to what my senses tell me, what I learn through my senses. It is a circle.

It is typical that physicists fabricate laws to explain and define reality. Those laws and definitions have constantly changed as perceptions have changed. Even those explanations and laws are based on sensory observations.

For me, the laws of physics describe what is real and project what can be. They all are ultimately based on sensory experience, on what senses have perceived. It is a circular way of thinking that I say what is real only based on what my senses pick up. Anything else that is real is beyond my knowing. It would be foolish to say that nothing exists outside my bubble of perception and the thinking based on it.

The tools that physicists use all are extensions of the senses. Even the tools that look into what happens inside atoms and how small particles perform convert it all into sensory data. All my knowledge is based on this way of gathering information.

It makes no sense to me that some people limit reality to what they can perceive with the senses. It is a circular way of thinking. Of course, their reality is limited to what their senses perceive because that is how they define what is real. That is a circle.

I realize what it is a gift for me to feel useful. It is something I want. In any setting, I want to be of use and to feel useful. I have my own notions about how I can be useful. I am aware of my potential to be useful. But from a practical side, I am only really useful when my usefulness is accepted and received. I can think of myself as a potentially useful gardener, but I am actually useful to my garden when my gardening is effectively received.

The same is true of my human interactions. I am effectively useful only when what I have to offer is accepted and received. This morning, I am aware how that applies to my presence on the Annex Board.

I not only want to be effectively useful, but I also want my usefulness, my useful presence to be recognized and sometimes acknowledged. I want what I say to be listened to and be heard. I want my involvement to be accepted and maybe even valued, and not routinely resisted. I want to feel useful in just about every setting I enter.

For many years I have watched it happen to others as they were dismissed as not being of use. Sometimes I have intervened to affirm their usefulness when it was not being recognized by others. Today I am especially aware how this dynamic happened to me last evening. This time it was I who felt aware of what it feels like to not feel useful, and I am reminded how I am resolved not to cause others to feel that way.

I also learned that I must either find a way to shield myself from the experience of dismissal, or remove myself from the situation where I am not effectively useful.

For years I lived in a situation at home where I did not feel of use. I am now recognizing that my involvement with the Annex has run its course. I realize that I am not considered useful enough, not effectively useful. Most important, I no longer feel of use.

My days lately have been clouded by gray. My common instinct is to resist. Everything requires more effort than I remember. The gray has woven itself into my typical feeling of being connected. Everything seems to have wrapped itself in a soft and obscuring cloud. Shapes are less vivid. Everything is remote.

More than anything, I am missing my feeling of being connected to other people, my companions. So many gestures to connect hover in the gray mist without encouraging response. The feeling of separateness grows around me, insulating me in gray.

What I am able to succeed in doing is to turn my focus more inside myself and become more aware of what I am experiencing. I observe the grayness. I am convinced that what at times feels like a gray dead end is not what it appears to be. There is a reality lurking beyond, and it will unfold.

At the moment, however, I am not sure about how to penetrate my gray ambience. I know there is no dead end, only a time when the path seems not clear, the footing less secure.

I walk slowly in grayness, patiently, expectantly.

On one level, I believe that what I have is enough. Those reassuring moments of deep connection, however, do not seem to linger. Again and again, I am faced with wanting to go deeper, to spend more time, to linger, to be intimately connected.

Today I have settled deeply into the embrace of the woods where my cabin is nestled. I am surrounded by a familiar natural spot I so deeply love and to which I am tenderly connected. Then the moments come when that seems not quite enough, and I want to share this woodsy intimacy with others, or at least with someone. I text, and a small amount of that sharing happens. But it is not enough.

It actually is easy for me to identify individuals with whom I would want to share this special spot. But I think it is unlikely to happen. It will never be enough.

So I am faced with the intimacy of this place and what it means to be alone here. I wonder if this enough. It is a question I have when I think of the intimacy I want to experience with the world. Will it ever be enough? Will the intimacy I have learned and experienced with the world ever be enough, regardless how much I have absorbed.

When, if ever, will it really be enough? For now, it may have to be what it is. It is all I have.

As I walk through my home, it is like passing through a time capsule of the world. My home is a museum of relics that tell the history of the world I inhabit, the past and the current.

Nothing is older than the granite I touch as I lean on my bathroom sink or my kitchen counter. So cold to my touch this morning, it holds an ancient memory of such high temperatures that melted rock to form this pattern of colors I enjoy.

The age of my granite is unknown to me, but it easily could be of precambrian origin, formed more than 500 milion years ago. It is a thrill to touch such an accumulation of years, allowing me to reach back into earth’s history before there were creatures crawling and swimming about.

All the rest of my home has a much younger origin. The wood of my window frames and bed could be perhaps a hundred years old. The glass of my windows was surely formed in my lifetime. Though made of ancient organic substances taken from the earth, the synthetic fabric of my carpet is younger than me. There is leather in my couch and cotton on my bed that are from animals and plants so recently alive.

There are many objects in my home older than me: drinking glasses my parents received at their wedding, photos of ancestors taken in the early part of the past century and hanging on my hallway wall. My other walls have framed objects that range from the thousand year old Peruvian fabric to a South American ceramic plaque made just a couple years ago.

If I could put a date of origin on everything, I would find myself surrounded by an amazing record of passing time, from hundreds of millions of years to a couple of weeks or days. It would extend from the ancient granite surfaces to the flowers that were growing in my garden this week. It would include fruit and vegetables only recently growing somewhere in the world as well as the newspaper printed just this morning.

I find myself fitting somewhere, perhaps everywhere in this chronology laid out in my living space. I have shown up alive today, and parts of me have been around for decades, having traveled around the sun for decades. Some parts of me appeared over night. I love living in this wonderful kaleidoscope of time.