Barry Garden Path

It is a great gift to be able to reveal myself, as am. Likewise, it is such a great giving when something or someone reveals themself to me, as they are.

The reveal is often by sight or sound. But the strongest giving and receiving of reveal is in touch. In touch there is the most powerful reveal of presence and essence. I touch the earth, I touch the tree, I touch someone’s arm, and their presence is revealed in the most abundant manner.

I have sometimes marveled how sight has been how reveal has unfolded. I also think that touch is more revealing than sight. I encourage kids to touch plants in my garden, one-finger touch, because that is how reveal takes place at a deeper level than what sight alone can provide.

I would never want to lose the benefit of sight and what is revealed through sight. Still, I am aware of how the greater wonders are revealed in touch. In touch I come closer, I feel deeply, I become more intimately aware.

I hope to allow enough space in my life to be wrong. For so very long, it has been important to be certain about many things. Then I started to let go.

The anxiety about being wrong gradually diminished. I began to relax about having things turn out as I wanted, intended or planned. I slowly realized there were few wrong ways of going. I accepted that all paths go somewhere.

My expectations of myself and others slowly faded. I accepted there were many ways to see reality and my view as but one out of infinite possibilities.

To see things as they really are became less of a pursuit of truth narrowly defined. Seeing things as they are became more of an invitation to see the infinite possibility in every thing and everyone.

Becoming a lover of the world has meant accepting my own fragmented, broken view of everything and everyone I come across. I have learned that seeing things and loving them as they really are means admitting I am mostly wrong. My notion of reality is flawed, misguided by my ideas about how things must be.

I am letting go of my learned narrow view of everything and everyone. I am accepting that I am wrong about most everything. It has become such a flight of freedom to escape being right all the time, any time.

“Lightly with intimacy” was written by the composer above the notes. So do I want my life to be played by me and all around me. I will play each passage of the hours as though they compose an improvised score.

Perhaps others will join me and the music will blend with thrilling harmonies. Lightly with intimacy seems how I want it to be, and in tender amazement and great kindness.

In my thoughtful moments, I wonder why I am so reluctant to fall down and adore each of my companions. It would be so simple, so fitting. Then I realize it is not an action to be taken just because I have become aware of their radiant presence.

Adoration, after all, is more an action of the heart. It is an opening of my heart to allow another to enter in, to mingle with my own essence, to feel in the most intimate way the common bond we share.

It is a mistake to try to adore an entity outside my human realm of experience. It is more appropriate to express adoration within my realm of experience. For the most part, it means that I truly adore each individual that makes up my small group of companions.

For some of them, I feel that they similarly adore me. Our adoration is not a falling down, submissive kind of adore. It is an ongoing openness to see one another as we are and share a deep joy in that awareness. For the most part, our adore is reciprocal, joyful, smiling, sometimes exuberant.

I think I adore plants in the same manner as I do my human companions. Our expression of adore is more subtle. When I adore in my garden, it is a similar form of recognition and shared joy I experience with humans.

I wish that I could say that I adore all beings I come across, but that is not yet my experience. There are so many learned reactions, so many taught barriers that keep us apart and prevent our mutual adoring. But I am learning to walk more with an open heart, ready to adore who ever comes into my presence.

The more I am able to see the radiance in others, the more I see the radiance we share. As I become more adept in seeing my own radiance, I am better able to adore.

Another day has begun and opportunity stretches out before me. How often will I respond today to open my heart to each rising opportunity? It will be a day poorly spent if I do not fall in love at least a dozen times. Or a dozen times a dozen.

My day will be filled with inviting opportunity and today I take the risk not to be so miserly protective of my heart that I do not welcome all that presents. I take in the watery warmth of a shower and allow it to draw my heart into its languorous stream. I step into the misty outside air and am swept away in the rapturous embrace of a chilly morning air.

Walking through the garden is a continuous falling head over heels with plants into a dance of amorous ecstasy. I talk or text with friends and share words that say ‘share with me the intimacy of being fully alive in this precious moment.’

When the day draws to a gentle close, I want to feel the lingering thrill of dozens of rapturous love affairs. I want to be drunk with the memory of dozens of opportunities where I fell in love again and again.

Come to me all you unique opportunities, sit with me, drink in all I have to offer. Reveal yourself in unfolding zeal to share the moments that will never come again.

It seems so common. As I look around, so many people carry “No Trespass” signs across their heart. I wonder if mine is so noticeable as theirs, a warning not to come too close.

If I remove my “No Trespass,” will anyone notice? I am not even sure I’ve been aware it has been there, but I think I will be aware when it is gone.

Perhaps then the flood of goodness will begin to flow, flow in both directions.

It is why I train so often. It is why I spend time meditating, why I pause often throughout the day. Meditation, deep concentration addresses a basic problem for me by allowing me to become unfettered. It is my practiced way of becoming unattached.

Unfettered, I am better able to release my grip on all the conventions that shape my thinking, that guide what I do. It is my way of relinquishing cherished beliefs, fantasies, roles, ideals. It is my embraced invitation to become unfettered. I am able to let go of attachments.

I want to let go of all my expectations except to one: the expectation to become unfettered, to become unattached. Even my grip on that singular expectation will ultimately go. Then I will experience what it is to be free. I will be home.

My mind is easily attracted to passing dangers, but I might not notice the greatest danger of all. I take care when I step out of the shower lest I slip on a floor lightly splattered by errant water. I take my time descending the stars, focused on the banister in case I should need it. I pull back as I begin sliding out of my car in to the street as a vehicle flashes by just outside my car’s door.

While I pay attention to these passing dangers, it is easy to ignore a greater danger. There is a danger that I might never be aware of what it is really like to be alive, to thrive as a human, to enter into another day of existence.

If I were to become truly aware, it would be for me to enter into a deep understanding of how I function. For me, this means being attentive to my mind and observing how I react to the world around me and inside me.

I have some awareness of my solitary self, and that is part of my insight into what it means to be human. There is another aspect that is also important for not to miss. I want to be deeply aware of how I relate to the world around me. How do I fit into that vast realm of limitless possibilities.

I think I have a danger of not paying attention to how I am related to other humans who are dealing with this same vast mystery, maybe as inattentively as I. There is a danger that I might not fully grasp how I am related to all other humans struggling to understand just as I struggle.

The friends who sit with me on my deck, the kids visiting the fish in my back yard, the passers-by who are chatting with one another in their own small realm. I am related to them all, and there is a great danger that I might live with little awareness of how we collectively are part of the vast mystery.

I seem alert to so many life’s dangers. The radio voices and the printed news remind me routinely of the vast dangers surrounding me. The real danger is that I might never become fully aware of how we all fit together in a vast wholeness, that I might never understand how we are intimately connected.

There is a danger I might not fully see my connection not only to the flowers that bloom in my yard, but also how I am connected to all those other humans who see those same blooms. There is a danger of not living in that realized connection.

Is there room in the world for a Wild Barry? Wild Berries grow outside the cultivation constraints developed by our culture. What if there were a Wild Barry growing outside the limits and constraints of society.

Limits make living much more complicated than it need be. I know because I have been pushing against limits all my life. But not always.

I have been fortunate to have companions all my life who have invited, sometimes pushed, me beyond my limited comfort zone. For that I have no regrets. I have done things I likely would never have done on my own. Thanks to them, my experience of being alive has been expanded and I ignored the limits placed by a cautious culture.

Maybe this is one of the things we do for one another. We encourage and invite one another to go beyond the limits we put on ourselves. I am grateful for all the companions who have supported me to venture beyond my limits in thinking and acting.

For several years now, it has been my first-light ritual to combine a reading of Rilke with another poet as soon as I turn on the lamp. This is been a heady concoction that almost always prepares me for a unique day. I drink in the words and felt experience of a poet, captured now on a page of a book. It stirs a reflection of what the new day might mean. The reading sends me off with a first-light, fresh view of what it means for me to be alive in this new and wonderful day.

Besides Rilke, Ellen Bass has been a frequent contributor to my daily first-light experience in recent years. I have recently discovered Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, a poet who lives in Colorado, and now she often shows up when the light goes on. Within the pages of “Naked for Tea,” I am certain to find a new depth and freshness any morning I choose. Her skill as a poet invites a pleasant plunge into reflections cultivated in a life apparently lived in awareness.

There is an almost unsettling intimacy in sharing her observations. Similar to my reading of Ellen Bass, Rosemerry has a way of writing that is close to common human experience. Always penetrating, she writes in a way slightly less individual and personal than Ellen.

Rosemerry writes from a place of personal insight I think is available to us all. It certainly is available to me, and she coaxes it to emerge especially when I read her poetry at first-light.