Barry Garden Path

Past experience has been there to help me to make sense of future experiences.   It was meant to help me interpret new things, and it often did.    I suppose that is what the past has done for me for most of my life.   The past has served a real purpose and benefit.   Past experiences not only had a meaning of their own but they served as a means to interpret new encounters.

At some point, I began to notice that the past had become baggage.   It had become a suitcase no longer of use, out of place, a bit moldy.

Much like past purchases, once new fresh and exciting,  the past began to become the clutter surrounding me, limiting my movement, my perspective, my space.   The past at some point stopped being of use and became a collection of mementos, organic figurines kept on a shelf or behind glass.

The past has often even disfigured my experiences and caused me to misinterpret what was right in front of me.    My helpful past has become a distraction.

I have begun to value and appreciate what shows up in my every-day world with true presence and meaning.    I am learning to experience “now” things not because they fit into some pattern of past experience, but because they invite new, fresh insight.   Plants familiar in my garden still have that aura of the past, but they have more significance because they are here today.    And they are different.

Memories still have an influence on my perception and my awareness, but less than they once did.    There is sometimes comfort in remembering the past, but I seldom dwell there.    My attention and awareness is more on the present.    Slowly, I am leaving the baggage of the past, leaving it behind.  It sits on yesterday’s platform, no longer of great use.

Like most others, I would like to feel beloved.    Better yet, I would like to feel part of a beloved community.    It could be debated whether this results from an act of bestowing the feeling of being beloved on someone else or receiving it from another.    The experience of feeling beloved may be neither giving or taking but instead is both.

It is a great gift to be able to feel secure and stable when being alone.   It is an even greater gift to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty of existence.   That is the moment I most feel beloved.

Feeling beloved is, I think, unique to human experience.    In the midst of the deep uncertainty we share with other sentient beings,  I have the capacity to acknowledge and experience my relationship with the rest of existence.    I can know and experience the convergence of causes that determine how I am beloved and have every reason to be grateful.

Humans have this unique ability to give this as a gift to one another:  to declare and acknowledge that each of us is beloved.     It is especially a gift to the degree that it is freely given.

There is something almost perverse about the human conventions that seek to provide a safe refuge where we might feel beloved.   Humans surround themselves with assurances and conventions that would guarantee, affirm that we are beloved.     We are burdened with conventions developed over ages that seek to be safety vests,  life preservers, that will support the experience of being beloved.    They mostly don’t deliver.

Like existence itself, being a beloved is ambiguous. uncertain and beyond the guarantee of time.   It is what I choose.

 

There are many seeds in me, many not put there by my own choice.    These are all the bits of information put there through my experience since I first became aware.    That was some time around when I was born.   I am human, and I have the ability to put these seeds in me to help me make sense of the world.   Some seeds are from my deliberate experiences, some are there with little deliberate action by me.

The seeds are pieces of a giant puzzle that offer me my personal view of the world.   They are offered out of my subconscious whenever I experience something new, suggesting interpretations to help me make sense out of my new experience.

These seeds are little pre-judgments, interpretations that, because I am a highly developed human, help me to navigate the world.   Relying on these seeds have helped my ancestors rise above other beings and achieve such a dominant place in the world.

All the messages I have heard about the right kind of cereal to eat, the beer that will allow me to have a good time, the clothes that will project competence or conformity are all locked up in these seeds stored in my subconscious.

Since the time around when I was born, I have been methodically collecting the seeds of experience, and they have been tucked away in my subconscious, waiting to be put to use.     All the comments about black people who steal, who don’t work, who abandon their children are all part of my seed store of information.    The young boys who walk by my yard speaking a language I hardly understand except for the frequent crude and vulgar expressions are all part of the experience I have of black boys.

The collection of these seeds is not something I am typically aware of.    I have some control over what I will experience, which politicians I will listen to, which books I will read.    Most of the time, my seed gathering happens automatically just because I am human.     When my subconscious offers these seeds as an explanation of what is going on, I can have a choice of whether to use that information or not.    Unless I am choosing to be attentive and aware, that decision can also be almost automatic and without effort.

It is the way that my human brain works.  When I experience something new, all the seeds of my past experience spring to life to give meaning to that new encounter.   It is simply natural that when the electrical cord is stolen from my back yard, my subconscious instantly offers the image of a young black male to explain what has happened.     That is the image I have most often experienced in the past.    That kind of seed dominates my subconscious, not by my choice but by my exposure.

It is beneficial to my seed storage when I listen to an articulate, insightful black man or woman speak.   It is a helpful seed to place among all the contrary seeds I have gathered over the years.

I am a little surprised to realize how my brain works, and now I want to gain the insight to see people just as they are.   I want not to rely on my storehouse of past experiences to explain who they are.   I want to have the insight I need in order to be critical of what my seeds tell me about the world, especially about my fellow humans.

I realize that I am struggling against a dominant, very successful feature of my human nature.    My ability to store and use seeds of experience to allow me to be dominant and in charge, is not likely to make me the kind of human I choose to be.    I am more critical of what my seeds tell me.   Also, I now know I can choose experiences that are likely to form seeds that can be of good use.

 

For me to forsake the world is to turn my back on all the elaborate plots humans have created to obscure the reality of their experience.   I recognize that I have been part of that effort.    I  have been occupied with and supported assorted vain attempts to make enduring edifices to capture what has been but a passing experience.   So much of this effort has been misguided, misleading, and, as I now realize, a mistake.

Learning from experience is not the same as preserving experience.    Yesterday’s rose may be pressed  and preserved between pages,  but those same pages blur the beauty of today’s garden.

I forsake the world of this morning’s newspaper headlines, an unending recital of our failure to come to terms with our experience.    At best, it is a gleaning of shallow observations of what has occurred.   I am daily invited to live in a fantasy social environment that does not exist except in the imagined edifices of country, state and city.

I struggle daily to forsake my identity as a white male, an identify littered with the privileges, rights, expectations and fears of days long disappeared. Every day, I realize more deeply the mistaken and misleading veneer of religion that I have identified with.    Old structures hardly give meaning to a world that is constantly evolving.    On balance, the religion identity of Monday is the pressed rose of Tuesday.    More is obscured than revealed.

The more I forsake of human invention and fantasy, the more clearly I can see.    The moon glows more brightly, the birds sing more sweetly, and the Bloodroots shine brilliantly with white petals that will be gone by evening.

Message to self:   Get rid of all your baggage.   Get rid of all those things you don’t really need and actually impede you.    I don’t mean only the physical things, like old shirts in the recesses of your closet.    Git rid of anything that does not offer intimacy and deep connection.   Ignore attachments and choose only what seems impermanent.

Discard all the baggage that humans have invented or that came from the forge of human imagination.   These are not only distractions but actually obscure the presence of real things.    Learn to see first whatever has its own internal reality and not the worth and meaning attained through human association.

Begin by getting rid of notions of self, of God and of country.    These are all huge artifacts of human invention and rise from the effort to impose meaning and limits on the world.   They all keep us at a distance from what is.    They keep us separate  from what is potentially intimate.    They are baggage that keeps us bogged down and apart.

Because I have a human brain, it is so easy to see my day as one obstacle after another.   There is something very natural for me to see time as littered with a series of challenges to be met and overcome.   Yesterday there was the line of on-coming traffic that kept me from making a left turn.

There were the two people in front of me at Target who kept me from quickly advancing through the check-out.   There was the son whose casual approach to time kept us from leaving when we had planned.    An unusually chilly day kept me from working in my garden.    One obstacle after another.

Actually, this was a rather typical day.    It is almost a reflex response to resist what is in front of me, what seems to impede me.    I am confronted with what is there, and I am challenged to sort it out.    Sometimes it seems that practically every moment is an invitation to yield or confront what is in front of me.

I am learning how to yield more often.    When I do yield, I step into the cosmic forces, the convergence of causes that set up this obstacle.   If I can simply become aware of he obstacle, I step into all the forces that seem to confront me, and I become part of them.

Aligning with the converging forces that seem to present an obstacle doesn’t mean that I opt out, that I do not choose to move in one direction or another.   It may even mean that I change the direction of the forces, but from the inside.    What has changed is how I internally align or resist the forces, and I am learning how to become part of them.     They also then become part of me.

By not resisting the forces of the universe, by not regarding events as obstacles, I allow myself to change and and transform.   Then I can reshape the obstacle.    For me, it is all a matter of what goes on inside of me, not so much what I do on the outside.

I choose to be satisfied in what stands before me, even if it appears to be an obstacle.     It presents as an obstacle only if I resist.    It is an obstacle only if I am dis-satisfied.

I yield, I do not resist, I engage.    I become part of what had before been a mere obstacle.

 

It is a  daily struggle for me to discern what an authentic life means for me.   Mostly, I have relied on the vision and insight of others to help me determine what it means to be truly alive.    Some of them have been partners with whom I felt more secure in sorting out what I want to be at any given time.

I am aware that this desire to have partners still lingers, but it has changed in how I live it out.

More and more I am bent to seek my own experience and counsel.    I rely more on what is genuine to my own eyes.    All my life I have been resolute in doing what I chose and wanted.    The input and guidance of others has been a significant factor.

I seem more at home now in the solitude I have chosen.   While I am very willing to allow others to enter that solitary space, it is not so much to shape my life as to share and enjoy.     What a difference solitude makes.

Mindfulness and meditation seem like such cerebral affairs.    There is so much emphasis on controlling my mind, focusing on what I want to pay attention to, and avoiding distractions.    Even the word “mindfulness” seems to put the main activity above my shoulders.   The whole organized effort of understanding what is going on is sometimes called “a science of the  mind.”

I think it is more of an affair of the heart.    While mindfulness and meditation count on the work of the mind, their real essence is the work of the heart.    The open awareness, connectedness and penetration that mindfulness offers me is an experience of the heart.    The mind has only a helping role to play.

When I attempt to be mindful,  I first of all put my mind at rest.    Like I would do for a puppy in training, I give the command “stay.”   More than anything, I want my mind to be at rest.    It must be attentive, but it has no job to do except be in a state of high readiness.    Only then can my heart take over, and the real affair can take place.

Mindfulness and meditation are not a mental exercise except to the degree that they are a mental discipline.    It is time for the processing mind to step aside and allow the heart to move forward.   The curtains part, are held to the side, and the heart has the full stage.    The awareness that only the heart can achieve is truly the affair of the heart, not of the mind.

Perhaps there really is no duality of mind and heart.   Just as breathing in and breathing out are aspects of the same breath, mind and heart may be aspects of  the same awareness.   Mind and heart may even need and require one another to achieve the kind of deep awareness I savor.    I may be wrestling with the same problem I face when I ask if a photon is a particle or a wave;   it depends on what you are looking for.

Just the same, I know that there is a different experience when the heart is  very involved.    I can embrace the world or a person with an openness not there when only simple mind awareness is occurring.    For me, my mind is like a conduit.    It is a twisted tunnel that allows experience to flow through, but not without altering the experience.    My mind gives shape to experience, makes it make sense to me  because of what I remember from my past.

When I relax my mind, tell it to “stay,” my experience flows into me with few of the obstacles and forms offered by my  mind.    When I have an affair of the heart, there are few filters that affect my perception.    I see with soft eyes and hear with uncritical ears.    I can touch without putting words to the experience.

It seems that much of my life is still an affair of the mind.    I struggle to make sense of experience, to understand, to put perceptions into frameworks.    I have discovered, however, that there is a deeper way to be part of the world.    Loving kindness is more than an attitude of the mind.   It is a relaxed disposition that makes living an affair of the heart.

 

So much of my energy is spent on shedding what I have become.   The words of advice I have heard throughout my life have been telling me what I could or should become.   “Become all that you can” has been a common theme, one that I still hear from time to time.

I’m beginning to suspect that this is just plain wrong advice.    It is especially wrong for someone my age.

I am noticing that I give more and more attention to un-becoming what I have become.    I’m noticing the sad shallowness of much of what my culture has taught me.    I ardently want to unlearn it, put it all aside.

In some ways this is nothing new to me.     For much of my life, I have been resisting the forms and standards placed on me by my culture and my social inheritance.    I have not wanted to be a typical male.    As recent as this week, I found myself saying to someone that I really don’t pay much attention to sports.   More than indicating a lack of interest, I think I was making a declaration that I don’t conform to the social norm of being a Vikings fan.

Over many years, I have been peeling  back the veneer and discarding my religious identify.    I’ve not only survived this gradual abandonment, but been surprised and saddened by the shallow emptiness I have uncovered.    What once I considered realities I now see as stage props, aids in stirring my imagination.  I have so un-become religious that I am now suspicious of anything that appears to be religious.   I constantly look beyond the trappings and see mostly the emptiness inside.

I am slowly un-becoming white.    Being white is an identity that subtly influences so much of my world view, and I never realized it.   It is not enough to resist all the aspects of being white in our society.   I am trying to find ways of un-becoming what I have inherited.

I have been taught well on so many fronts, and I have been an eager student.    So many teachers, so many aspects of society have shaped me like the hands of a potter, and I have often yielded like soft clay.    I am fortunate that I have discovered that I can remain soft and flexible in some ways.    I have grown suspicious of the potter’s hands.

Being soft means that I want to be familiar and relaxed with what is, not try to shape it into what gives me comfort.    I especially have no interest in giving comfort to my culture.

I, only now, realize that I can truly know the world and myself when I soften my edges and allow myself to blend into what is real.   I do not want to continue to reshape the world or myself into something I have learned might be satisfying.

First I have to un-become what I have become, allow my margins to melt and no longer try to give shape to the world around and inside me.    I want to let go of all the images I have created of myself and my world.    Unlearning is not resistance, it is becoming soft and yielding.    Un-becoming what I have become is my way of understanding.   I see things as they really are.     Softness leads to true awareness and understanding.

When I un-become, it is easier for me to ignore the past and future.    I can better focus on what is here and now.

It was a risky thing to do, but I think it was a calculated risk.    More important, I embraced it with only a little anxiety.

Yesterday evening we were in the midst of an April blizzard.  There was lots of snow on the ground and more coming.    A friend of mine and I had tickets to a performance of “Lovett Or Leave It” downtown and she was stuck north of Minneapolis, unable to get out to the main road.    I was looking out my window at the bus stop across the street and thinking of the bus I had seen pass an hour or so ago.

A bus might take me downtown, and there might be a bus to bring me home again after the performance.    My whole body jumped into the decision:  Yes, I’m going to do it.

Unable to convince several others to join me, I waited for the bus by myself.    The bus finally came.   I could hardly see what was happening outside the fogged windows of the bus, but I did notice another bus stuck in the snow a few blocks from my home.    Other passengers and I exchanged light conversation about the uncertainty of bus service being available the rest of the evening.

I stepped off the bus downtown into deep snow, attended the performance, then made my way to the bus stop a couple blocks away, fully aware that there might be no bus showing up.    I had vague contingencies in my mind, but I was focused on a #9 bus suddenly appearing on the nearly-vacant street.   And it did!    I joined a handful of people on the bus, which slowly took me to within three blocks of its usual stop.     I walked thru deep, unshoveled snow to my home.

My risky decision to rely on the bus had paid off.    However, I thought it had been a relatively close call.   I very easily could have been stranded at the bus stop downtown.

Unlike last evening, I really think I am normally a risk-averse person.    I don’t like uncertainty, unpredictable outcomes.    Much of my life has been very cautious and somewhat calculated.    I often plan in some detail.    Being able to consider and predict likely outcomes actually helped me in the work I use to do.

I also have this unpredictable, almost intuitive response to risky situations that sometimes propels me outside of my comfort zone.   When I say “Why not”,  it is not a real question but the first move in a bold leap.    This sometimes confounded my co-workers who expected more calm caution, my routine safe approach.

I don’t pretend to understand this embracing of risk.   I do know it has added savor to my life, and for that I am glad.   Except for a few injuries I still carry with me, I have survived intact.

It also helps me that I am becoming more immersed in the notion of impermanence.    I think that uncertainty actually rules my life, in spite of any effort I make to make life predictable, so I might as well embrace it.    I am actually becoming more flexible and yielding to the many outcomes that I can hardly predict and even less control.

Basically, life is very risky.    I hope to enjoy the ride, without regrets.