Barry Garden Path

What if I never get it right. Could it be that I will never completely empty out my sense of self and allow myself to pour out without the constraints of doing it right.

I wonder if there will ever be a time I can finally let go of all control and expectations, relaxing into the moment, anticipating no particular results, seeking nothing in return.

I want to let go of any notion that there might be a perfect outcome, an ideal relationship, a satisfying garden walk, an orderly kitchen.

I simply want to be the wave that rushes at the waiting shore again and again. I want to be totally yielding to the shore. Repeatedly, I will alter and be altered without any design whatsoever. I want to do nothing but yield to the forces that hurl me constantly against the shore.

I only want to know if it is the moment for me to rush at the shore again. I want my answer always to be yes.

Is there anything more holy than the tree in my yard on whose rough bark I place my hand? I know that in this moment the tree I touch is standing in the unlimited now. There is no past or future, only the eternal unlimited now. Nothing could be more holy.

If I must think about it, the tree has a history. Every particle in it has been around since what I imagine to have been the beginning of time. I think that is something over 14 billion years it has existed, but that is simply the limit of my imagination. Even though every part of me was also there at the beginning of what I know as time, my memory of that presence only goes back a relatively few years.

I can also imagine that this holy tree has a future, but that too is outside of what I am knowing right now. As this tree has an unknowable beginning, so does it exist as far in the future as I can imagine. I can see no beginning and no end, and that must be something like eternal. I know that some speak of the tree and my touching it as impermanent, but there is some aspect of this tree that is permanent, something that extends beyond time. That seems holy to me.

When I experience the tree in all its holiness, I know that the same applies to my hand. It too is holy, has existed as long a time as I can imagine, and will persistently be present in whatever future I can imagine will arise. The holiness of my hand extends to whomever and whatever my hand touches. Everything I perceive has rested on the altar of eternal timelessness. All I perceive is holy.

So I walk into the sunshine of another day, aware that all I see and touch is grounded in holiness. There is nothing I perceive that is not holy. I move my holy body forward, enjoying the holy union I share with everything around me.

It is so wonderful when I get to reveal myself just as I am. It is one thing to experience myself, know myself so well that I am aware of myself just as I am. It is a gift that another gives when they make the reveal of that self-awareness possible.

Those are the times when the sun rises once again inside of me and I not only understand myself as I am but also have that moment to reveal the awareness as well.

I find it amusing how much of my life has been shaped by my imaging what might lie beyond. Sometimes I think I gave more weight and concern about what significance things had in the beyond than the significance they had in the present, here and now. With others, I questioned so many times what happens after death. Then I weighed and judged the present based on my imagined beyond.

Sometimes, I think I allowed my notion of the present to be shaped more by the imagined beyond than the reality I experienced right now.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time living in an imaginary world that exists beyond what presents before me and I have followed the rules of that world. I’ve worried about future consequences beyond any thing available to my experience. I remember fearing that I would suffer damnation in the beyond if I ate, even accidentally, a hot dog on Friday or went to a “B” movie.

I participated in a serious graduate school discussion of whether ordinations were valid if conducted by a bishop who had been baptized with cream rather than water. Only the beyond could give meaning to those kind of rules. I lingered over weighty and consequential questions rising from the reality that I supposed existed beyond.

Now I think that everything that matters is happening right now. Everything is connected to here and now, not some reality that exists beyond. My walking across the room, the sounds of birds singing, the smile of another person are all significant in themselves. For them I am grateful. They are enough for me to ponder, to enjoy, to experience fully. I am in touch with all that matters.

When I can grasp and appreciate the meaning and value of what is before me, that is enough. The meaning and value is not based on some unknown and imaginary beyond but on the knowable now.

What might lie beyond, after life, now seems so out of touch when I can actually touch and enjoy deeply what is here and now.

This could be my last day. The world as I know it could well disappear. This could be my last awareness of the rising sun, and perhaps its settling into quiet repose. I have been aware of many rising and settings of the sun, and this could be the last time I am enveloped by that streaming light.

If this is my last day, I want to embrace it with deep attention and an open heart. I want to fall in love again and again, especially with any one I am privileged to have as a companion today. My last day will be spent walking through the garden that envelopes my home, tending to all those small things that invite my attention. I will see every plant just as it is, not as another recognized name on my botanical framework.

On this last day, I will once again visit the fish, and share with them a mutual awareness as we stare and feel what it is like to be a fish. We will have yet another mystifying encounter of one another. I will invite others into my magical garden and share with them the excitement and loveliness of this plant mayhem enfolding all who enter.

On this last day, I will drink warm tea and feel it descend into my inner self. I will cut slices of a ripe mango and allow the juices to drip down my chin. I will taste the salty delight of corn chips and drink the tangy, fruity essence of kombucha. Cashews will be ground into nutty delight in my mouth more than once today.

This could be my last day to be a refuge and comfort to my companions and to seek the same in them. I will not miss this wonderful chance to tell them once again, perhaps in obtuse ways or maybe not, how much I love them and cherish their presence. I will walk with them just a little farther.

I do not know whether this will be my last day to experience the world. But I do know that it is my last chance to be aware of it as it is right now. I don’t know if I will experience tomorrow, but I know that today is slipping away minute by lovely minute. I want to savor it as a day that will never return. I want to know it and love it as the last day it is.

Today it is my job to hear the birds chattering to one another outside my window. My work is to watch the sun’s light slowly creep through my neighbors yards and bring their texture into existence for me.

There is a time when I walk through my garden feeling the vibrant greenness of emerging plants as I arouse them from their early spring slumber. I summon the sound of splashing water as I stand by the pool enlivened by my attention. Fish swim in delight to my daily discovery of their game of hide and seek.

I walk accompanied by an awareness of passing time flowing all around me. The world opens new space as I become aware of unfolding never seen before. I create a connection to past and future that has no bounds beyond those I choose to imagine.

The world needs my work to fashion what is to become. Nothing would be the same without my work I have to do, my animating passing by.

I open my heart again and again to every newly minted moment. I summon and conjure up every appearance of things as they have never been conjured before. I embrace every companion I brush up against as we compose our daily dance.

I flutter through the day doing my job, gathering the nectar of a thousand moments. I do my job of creating the honey of a day well lived.

Jan Brett knew how to make “The Mitten” have room. She made the mitten expand to hold all the animals who would show up.

Why do people constrict rather than expand and make room? We seem to make less room the closer others get. To protect intimacy, we constrict in a way that excludes others, rather than make more room. It is the way of our culture.

The urge to restrict and form boundaries is our learned response rather than welcome and expand. I want to learn how to expand and make room.

Flowers have been teaching me all my life. It began when I was young and I gradually learned to recognize individual flowers and call them by their proper, given names. I spent hours in graduate school, learning the names of hundreds of flowers that bloomed in the woods. It continues even now, as fellow gardeners teach me to recognize and name new flowers I have not paid attention to before.

Young children often stop by when I am busy in the garden and want to know what I am doing. Sometimes they are more interested in seeing the fish, but I don’t miss a chance to point out the individual flowers, the trilliums or the bloodroots. For parents, I point out the Fritillaria, a new-found delight of mine. For those who want to know, I name the Scilla and the assorted varieties in the garden.

Then one day it happened. All those names faded into the background. I still recognized their individual traits, but for me they all became flowers. Like the children visiting the garden, I simply saw them as flowers. It was their commonness that moved to the front. I saw them more by what they have in common, how they are all part of a whole. They are flowers.

Isn’t that how it is with all things? I spend much of my life learning to distinguish one thing from another. Then one day it happens. Everything takes on a unifying commonness. All things become part of one huge whole. Like flowers, every thing can be distinguished and be named. But the beauty is in the unity, how everything is connected and part of a whole.

I think I learned this from flowers.

What I seek and what I offer more than anything else is deep comfort. The Buddhist speak of freedom from suffering, but in my idiom freedom from suffering is the same as comfort. I am a refuge, a loving oasis, a place of comfort. I seek the same.

I offer freedom and release from suffering. I give escape from the essential discomfort of life. I am a window that flies from a lack of ease, from the disquieting mark on the forehead of us all. This is what I give, this is what I see.

The comfort I give comes with many faces. I offer myself as a guardian of nature, a healer of misery, a messenger of wonder, an architect of peace, a release from suffering, a fountain of loving kindness.

Finding and giving comfort is not the same as freedom from struggle, conflict or turmoil. Comfort is being at ease in the midst of difficulty, accepting things as they are. It is a refuge from all that might trouble me and others at the base. Comfort is the shore that surrounds a tumultuous sea. I would be that shore. I would be comfort.

Perhaps some day I will forget all the things I think I know. All my notions of how I think things are will have disappeared. I will find freedom in forgetting.

Some day, all my reasons to be afraid of certain people will have vanished. I will see the familiar tree in my backyard as something never seen before. It will appear in total newness, in spite of my having seen it and touched it many times before. I will forget what that was like.

At first, it seems a frightening thing to imagine a day when I forget. But there may be an unseen gift in no longer remembering what things and people should be like and I will see them as totally new.

It make me wonder how much of my experience of the world is based on memory, based on how I remember and think how things once were. The memory is so strong, it sometimes keeps me from seeing things and people just as they are right now. I am often not able to see them without any preconceived notions of what they might be like right now.

Memory can serve me well in preparing me for everything I meet. I do not have to relearn what I might have already known. Perhaps memory also keeps me from having a beginners mind, a fresh view of things. I see them more as I remember them, as I think they might be, as they aught to be. I fail to see them as they are right now.

I am not ready to totally forget, to lose my memory of everything. For now, it is enough to let go of a small part of memory, to no longer presume what things are or how they exist. I can open a small window that gives me a fresh and new view every moment, every day. It would be nice to forget just a little.