Barry Garden Path

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.

I can’t help but think it is what we all want. Everyone I pass on the sidewalk or in the parking lot at COSTCO wants it. We all want to love and be loved. It is a natural force stirring inside and between us all. For the the most part we resist it or attempt to ignore it.

I think of all the people I’ve sat next to on an airplane. Not the overweight ones who forced themselves into my narrow seat. Rather I think of all those from whom I felt the warmth of their close presence. I remember the light chatter as we talked, as we exchanged small tidbits of our lives.

For the duration of the flight, we allowed ourselves to experience a small pForced into closeness, we wanted to be allowed to drop our external guard and genuinely love one another, for just a little while. It would only be for the duration of the flight we knew. But we got a small taste of what we really wanted.

Once, and regrettably only once, we went beyond when I sat next to someone in the airport while we were waiting for a flight. We actually extended that brief encounter and became friends for a longer while. We were never lovers in the common sense. But we allowed ourselves to extend and savor what should have been by design only a brief chance encounter, sitting next to one another under the aura of flying. We dared to pursue a little bit more of what we really wanted.

What about all those other people with whom I rubbed shoulders during a concert or discussed what we thought of a painting in a museum. Every one a small gesture of what we wanted, to see and be seen, to love and be loved. My life is full of the memory of these small gestures of want. I was part of an exchange of gestures of acknowledgement and recognition how I and someone else is profoundly lovable.

Only our cultural constraints kept us rom plunging into an outpouring of affirmation of what we see. How many missed opportunities I had to exchange how we were each infinity beautiful and lovable. My life is littered with situations of love that was so easy to feel but equally restrained from expression except in subtle and small ways.

We all are meant to be lovers and be loved. It is what we want. We want to share one another’s burdens and be thrilled in one another’s joy. Yet we resist. Too often we briefly reveal who we really are then rapidly retreat into a place of hiding and seclusion. If I have any regrets of my life they are all about the times I said “No.”

I hope I can change that, and honor what I really want. I want to add time to the brief encounters. I want to ignore cultural constraints. I want to be more of a fountain of loving kindness and a reservoir of the same.

I don’t think I was born this way, but in this culture I learned to form sharp edges. I learned to be competitive, how to be better than others, a habit hard to break. I learned that sports are about winning, which I did little of. Grades were for me about ranking. That I did well.

Critical thinking was taught more about rejecting than about developing insight. I learned the lessons of how to avoid or dominate others, especially those who could cause me harm.

It is so easy to develop sharp edges in our society. It takes hard work to resist the sharpening wheel. It is challenging to become soft, caring and cuddly, especially if one is male. I choose to be tender, not sharp, with anyone I meet.

I walk across what seems to be a stable and unyielding floor made of wooden strips. And I am reminded that there is more. This platform that keeps me from plunging into the basement is only part of what is there. There is more.

The bottom of my feet press against the solid maple planks, but there is more beyond what my sensing feet perceive. Things have shape and form that I can touch and see. Everything I can contact presents a sensory platform for my experience. But I know there is a deeper reality beyond my senses.

Even physicists speak of a space, a kind of emptiness our senses cannot yet perceive. This apparent emptiness exists between the particles of matter that we and our instruments can detect.

What my senses detect is only a very small aspect of what lies beyond my senses. I know there is more. It is a vast emptiness, a formless something I do not yet know directly. There is more reality than the reality my senses experience directly.

Sometimes, people speak of a reality behind our perceived reality as a spiritual realm. That to me sounds like something separate, something other, something beyond experience. I prefer to think of what I sense is just the surface, the shape of what lies below.

What I perceive is real, but it is only a small manifestation of the foundation reality. There is more. The sensory world may be spoken of as an illusion but it is illusory only in that there is much more than what the senses perceive.

There is much more.