Barry Garden Path

Europeans brought alcohol to the Indians.   They also brought the other mind-bending elixir of religion.    Both bent the minds of people who already were able to see how things are connected.   Both alcohol and religion supported actions that caused the indigenous people to lose lands and perspective.

The loss of this inherited vision is still a struggle, a lost heritage, a distraction from what was an ancient understanding of reality.   Both alcohol and religion have been poisons that destroyed the fabric of a world that had nurtured the spirit off millions of people.   The Europeans brought gifts that took away a life of insight and connection.

Those Europeans stayed and stayed, and they still keep on giving.

I continue to gather insight in what it means to fully love someone and expect to live separate lives.   It seems to happen to me rather frequently with so many different levels of connectivity, and I can see that it is simply the way things are.

It is a lesson that I was initially taught many years ago, and my understanding of it has only recently gotten more clear.   My life is populated by people whom I love, people with whom I have an open-heart relationship.   I am clear that I will not have a “living close” relationship with any of them.    We are actually close, but also separate.

What a transformation it is to be fond of someone.    Fondness is what I have for my companions.   One might call it love, but “love” is such a loaded and misleading word, almost like “God”.   Fondness is more like the “love”  in “loving kindness.”  So you can call it love, but I prefer to think it of being fond.

Fondness may open doors in my heart I hardly knew were there.   Fondness is unplanned and almost unintentional, except it helps if I have a random openness to become fond of people I meet.

Each realization of fondness is unique.   Each fondness I experience expands my own awareness, and with it my heart.    The impact is lasting, permanent, unless I deliberately close my heart.

My life is not focused on a singular companion, but I open my heart to many fond companions.   For me fondness is not an expression of empathy, of my feeling what they feel.    It is rather a connection of compassion, of loving kindness.   I am open to an awareness that allows me to see with their eyes, to walk with their loving steps.

Sometimes it seems that I am almost moving inside their skin, aware as they are aware.  I may have my own identity, but it is no longer singular and totally separate.    I recognize the connection that is already there naturally.   My recognition and experience of the natural connectivity  with fondness allows it to endure.

With fondness, there is a joy in the companionship we share, but it is much more.    It is an expression of an enduring connection, an extension of the moments when we experience the sharing of time and space.   But only if I choose to allow the experience to occur.

Fondness is not a taking, not a possessing.   It is an allowing in.   It is an awareness that is shared and is always a part of me.

It is an evolving experience, and each day is a little different.    This morning I was especially aware of how I am beginning to think with my whole body.    For me, it is easiest when I am sitting on my cushion.     But it is what I experience as my fingers touch the keyboard and when the blueberries burst between my teeth.

My sense of presence, my consciousness, my awareness is no longer such a cerebral event.    It extends through my arms, torso and legs.    My body has never felt so alive with awareness.    Each tiny maple tree that I pull from my diminutive lawn has a feeling that sends a wave of awareness through my whole person.   The collection of roots in my hand is a tangled image that I see with more than my glancing eyes.

The more my body becomes involved in awareness, the less I am attentive to the passage of time.

This morning I was conscious of my diminishing grasp of time.   My connection with time is becoming less clear, less distinct.    I sometimes wonder if I am becoming cognitively impaired.   Is this a sign of creeping dementia.    I may be losing my grip on reality and slipping into a realm of lessened cognitive order.    I take some solace in my ability to be aware of this experience and reflect on it, but still I’m not sure.

I would like it if all this means that I am beginning to get a better awareness of what it means to be immersed in the un-anchored now.    It is inviting to be so totally absorbed in what is happening that my growing sense of awareness is all embracing and my connection with time is fading.

I am thinking these days about a relationship I had with someone in my younger days, and how I was so inept at entering into the present moment.    I could hardly see what was before my eyes, and could scarcely absorb the moment.    And that moment passed with minimal engagement by me.

This memory reminds me that there is no more important moment than now.   My desire is to embrace that moment without hesitation, without holding back, with complete vulnerability and transparency.    I see that I have begun to do that more and more.    I am beginning to understand what it feels like, and a little about how to do it.    I also think it must look a little crazy.

I am deliberately stepping out of a reality most humans around me have created and in which they live.    I am in a way becoming disengaged from what others consider the real world.    I am aware this must look a little crazy, disconnected, out of touch.   I sometimes wonder about it myself.

The more I become able to be immersed in the now, the more I feel I am stepping out of the common reality.   I am convinced that things are not what they seem.   More importantly, I have begun to experience a different kind of world.    It is an alternate reality.

I only hope I’m not actually going crazy.  The looking glass is a two-way mirror, and I am stepping beyond the typical reflections into something different.   I’m not about to step back.

There is a very human part of me that struggles with being alone.   It has been a lifetime of learning as I have tried to find how to be alone and yet be absorbed by my world.    There is no more obvious example of this than how I have reacted with my fellow humans.   I look back, and I realize how I have often reached across the divide and gathered companions while at the same time I was holding onto something that kept me separate.

It happens even now.  It may only be a passing glance, or a long and intimate conversation.    The connection may only be subtle, but we touch one another’s aloneness and we are connected.

There are times that the presence of another seems such a familiar place.    Someone is so similar that I am almost seeing a reflection of myself and whom I have become.   Other times the difference is strange and foreign yet inviting.   For the moment we are companions and we dance away a time of passing opportunity.   Polarities sometimes attract and sometimes push away.

All my life, my experience of aloneness has been a mystery I have cautiously explored.   I have never really understood or absorbed what it means to be alone and at the same time stand side by side with my companions.     I only know that I am less cautious and restrained than I was half a century ago.

It is so human to make things mine.    I love to capture things in my mind.    I constantly make the world I encounter somehow fit into the concepts I have already developed.  My life is full to the brim it seems with remembered experiences, and everything new I encounter is neatly  tucked into those stored memories.     My days are so packed with the familiar.

This is my way of taking possession of each experience.   I attempt to make familiar each item that otherwise would be a complete surprise.    Plants are given names of recognition, people are recognized or put into categories, streets are becoming familiar avenues.    I capture each encounter in the framework of my mind.    It becomes understandable and mine to the degree I can make it fit.

What if I was able to completely turn this around!  What if I became possessed by my garden every time I walked out the back door.   Each time I saw the moon move from behind a cloud I would not capture and recognize it but instead reach out and be totally captured by it.   The tree would not be possessed as an old familiar, but it would be the tree that absorbed and captured me.    I would hand myself over rather than have it bend to me.

Everything I passed would be a new encounter without the sense of familiarity that arises every time I fit something into my life time of experiences.

That would be my future.   I would wander the world without a map, no sense of where I was or what I saw.     I would be amazed at each new and ‘unfamiliar’ plant I saw, every person I touch would be a ‘first’, every smell that stirred my nostrils would be ‘new’.

I would no longer be the captor gathering the world into my net of categories and familiar identities.   I would be the captured.    I would become prey and be taken in, absorbed.    I would slowly know no longer who I was.   I  would no longer recognize my world.    I would instead be totally absorbed by it.

I want to be present the moment something happens.   It could be anything, and I don’t want to miss it.   It is the sound of a distant lawn mower.   It is the twitter of a bird.    It is the movement of a leaf and the brushing of a branch against the screen.

I don’t want to miss anything.   My walk through the garden is a succession of happenings and revelations.  What seems a passing of time is simply one happening after another.     It is one now after another now.

I don’t intend to miss out on any of them.   I will always be ready to raise my hand and, once again, shout “present!”

Race is a very complicated thing for me to sort out.    It is hard for me to think or talk about race without being provocative.    The word itself, “race” is so loaded.    For months, I have stopped checking the “white” box when I am asked for my race identification, just because I think using the term is a not so subtle claim for a privileged position.

Skin color is just a substitute for what most of us really mean.    When I say that I am “white”, I think I am saying more than my skin pigment is rather light.    “White”  is a signal word that I am part of an honored group of people.     In fact, it would be a lot simpler and more honest if we just called ourselves honored.   The color of my skin is an accident of birth.   The special honor given to me is a decision of society.

If I had been born in another part of the world, it is likely that my skin color might not bestow on me a mark of honor.     There is a good chance that I would be considered an outsider,  not “one of us”.     The decision of my society to give me a position of honor because of the color of my skin is hardly different from another culture’s decision to tattoo my face as a mark of special distinction worthy of privilege and respect.

The provocative part of race for me is my conviction that when we talk about race, the emphasis is on people who have dark(er) skin.  What is really going on has more to do with my being white than their being black.    It’s about whiteness or the absence of whiteness.   The practice of racism in all its perverted thinking has more to do with asserting that I am white than asserting that someone else is black.    I am protecting my status of whiteness, my status of honor.    “They are not  like one of us.”

I think there are a lot of people who have white skin who think they are white, that they are honored.     They are white wannabes.  They don’t realize that the truly white, the truly honored people are an elite group.    The rest of us with white skin are a suck-up buffer strip around them protecting their real position of honor, of whiteness.

Many of us attempt to live with the illusion that we are part of the honored group, and we do that by affirming our whiteness and separating ourselves from all those who were not born with whiteness.    Skin color is a convenient way of keeping straight who want to be honored, and who are not to be honored.

Anyone who thinks they are born into a culture because of their skin color is buying into the illusion.    There is nothing special about being either white or black.   However, in our culture, we have created the myth that being white bestows a position of honor, just as though a tattoo was etched into our face as an infant.    Being white is a signal of honor.   I am working to distance myself from that way of thinking.

“Foolish.   Incredibly foolish.    Dumb.   Dumb.  Dumb.”     Claudia Schmidt

It’s actually rather nice to realize that I have begun to awaken from being so foolish.   What a fool I have been not to see what has been so obvious and right in front of me.    For most of my life, I have lived in an interior world of categories, a world defined by my very human mind.    My culture has helped that definition a lot.   So much has been an illusion.

All around me, a  perception-ready world presented itself.   Yet I have mostly experienced it all through a filter of my own fabricated ideas.   I had so much more to be aware of, to work with.

It has been the nature of my human mind to see all the world through a pixelated lens that broke all existence into small bits of categorized data.   All along, it could have been so much simpler.    Everything simply is.   I have struggled and worked hard to make it something that reflects my own notions and ideas rather than the other way around.

Concretely, I live in a city created by people, defined by concepts arising out of creative minds.   At the same time, all around the real world goes on, ignoring what we humans have created.    So it will continue long after we humans are gone.

Nature follows its own laws and patterns, oblivious of what humans have done and what they dream.    We attempt to control and harness nature according to our own ideas and notions, but nature follows its own mind.

We destroy forests to plant crops in rows to fit our ideal of what providing food is like.    We employ chemistry to attempt to manipulate the growth of plants.   But nature has a mind of its own.

I tend my own garden and attempt to shape it according to my own notions and ideas.    It is best when I yield to the desires of plants and we dance a waltz of close interaction and intimacy, following one another’s lead.    I have mostly been a fool to fail to see the plants as they really are and not as reflections of my own ideas and dreams.

They have been here before I came and will likely prevail when I am gone.    All this will change, ignoring what I might dream or imagine.    It is a joy to see what I am able with eyes of one who is part of the world and not apart from it.   What a joy it is to begin to wake up and no longer see with foolish eyes.

And all I have to do is yield to what is.

The practice may be called mindfulness but it involves a lot more than mind.   Mind is only part of it.    The practice is really  one of the heart, and of the whole individual.    The mind is a kind of gateway that can limit or allow access for the heart.    It is a gateway that I want to keep open.    In my case, that means my mind must  be kept quiet and calm.    Only then can my heart be involved and engaged.   Then the heart- fulness can be felt and experienced.

As a first step, my mind must be paying attention.    Mindfulness means that the mind is fully present.    That is how I operate.   First, the gateway of the mind must swing open.    Then the heart can enter in and unfold.    It is hard for the heart to be present when the mind is shouting orders and stomping about.

I often tell my mind to be quiet, relax and allow my heart to beat slowly.   I lighten up, I allow lightness to emerge.   I feel my presence and feel the space around me.    This is the realm of the heart.

I sometimes like to give my mind something to do, like pay attention to my feet, or my hands or my breath.    It is my choice what to experience, and that allows my heart to unfold.    In this light and relaxed place my heart is less tentative, more able to reach out,  to embrace, to accept.

First, my busy mind must come to a rest.    I know that is happening when my arms, legs and head all let go of their isolation and allow the world to enter.     My mind can often be a barrier, telling me about the world, not allowing me to experience it directly.   My mind can populate my world with its own scenery, obscuring the reality.

I want to empty my mind, live with the lightness of mind-emptiness and allow heart-fulness to occur.