Barry Garden Path

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.

Out of billions of alive  humans, there are but a handful that I share my life with.    There is my book group, there are those familiars who pass by when I am in the garden, there are the few with whom I drink tea or wine.

All of them are but a very small percentage of all the humans with whom I might have shared time and space.    These are the relatively few people I have encountered, and yet they are my lucky life line to my own kind.

They are the ones I share stories with, the ones with whom I react to the happenings of my life.   These are the people I tell about my plants, my discovery of Alzheimer cures, my plans for the next week.

They are really not many, only a few out of the many people I sit with on the bus or in the large classroom at the University.   These are the few with whom I make genuine contact.

There are also those dozen or so people with whom I share a truly loving relationship.    They may be few and it is hard to define the chance happenings that have brought us together.    My relationship could have taken so many other turns, yet this is how it has turned out.

As few and chancy as these connections are, they are my portal to the rest of humanity. They have become open to me and I to them.    And because of that I am aware of what it means to be human.   I am connected to the many, by chance.

I often hear talk of nature as if it is something “out there”, something separate and in need of care and appreciation.   Having a garden reminds me that nature and I are not separate and distinct.   I am part of nature as much as are the Snow Drops coming out of the ground this morning.   We have much in common, and their presence reminds me of that.   I am part of nature, and I share a common fate and future with the plants in my garden.

I think I bring something special to the world of my Snow Drops.    What if they bloomed and no one noticed?  Would nature and the whole universe somehow be different if no one were aware of their presence?  I think that my awareness actually adds something unique to nature and the whole cosmos.

To me it seems that something different began happening once humans began observing the world in a manner different from their primate ancestors.  There were no humans there when the first flowering plants arrived in all their new glory.   Just as the world changed when a human first looked through a telescope, the world was adjusted when a human first stared at a blooming plant.   The cosmos was experienced as it had never been before.  Humans took a changed place in nature and nature changed.

How sad it would be if the Snow Drops bloomed and no one noticed.   The cosmos would miss a certain awakening

After over 13 billion years, I have become a portal into the consciousness of the universe.    All the converging causes and conditions of the cosmos have conspired to form this portal to awareness that I conveniently call “me.”

This has been a real and substantive process, evidenced in the experience of humans and defined by careful scientific observation.     This is more than a simple metaphysical concept.   It is no figment of philosophy or religion.    It is no notion conjured by a lively imagination.     It is my experience.    I am aware that I am a portal to consciousness.     I am an entrance and expression of the cosmic mind.

When I walk in my garden, I am aware that I am being bathed in a mist of plants.    This is not a figurative, imagined mist, but a broth of plant substances being released throughout my garden.    For the plants, it is  one way that they communicate.     For me, it is an emergence in the essence of plant.

I have been aware that the oxygen I breathe has originated in plants, and much of it from the plants that grow close to where I live.   When I breathe in, I am taking in the expiration of my  plants.    They are sharing with me the oxygen which they create, even as they absorb gases from me to incorporate into their forms.

In addition to oxygen, plants release a variety of substances including terpenes.   These create an atmosphere of floating plant material in my garden, in my woods, in the parks.   It is  bath of plant essence, ready to be absorbed by my body.

This is a real, physical connection with plants that goes beyond my senses.   My plants do not remain a separate entity, but become a part of me as concretely as the  avocado I ate yesterday became part of me.   I take in plant bits as I breathe.   I absorb plant bits through my skin.

I became aware of the harmful effects of being physically connected with plants the first time my body came in contact with secretions from poison ivy.    My body didn’t like the exchange.   How unaware I have been of all the friendly sharing I have had with plants, all the breathing in of plant essence, all the absorption of plant bits.

All my life, I have been walking through the plant mist and absorbing part of a world my species co-evolved with.   I have a co-dependent relationship with plants as concrete and real as the relationship I have with them because they supply the oxygen I breathe.

I think I understand why my spirits rise when I walk among the plants in my garden and in the woods.    What a treat to be greeted with plant essence from so many of my companion beings.     They create a mist that waits for my immersion.     I step into the mist and I take a deep breath.     I take them with me.