Barry Garden Path

“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.

I find it disturbing that I am one of those beings who have used their great power so recklessly.   It is hard to realize that I am part of a cluster of beings who are separating children from their parents at the border with Mexico, and only for political reasons.   I am sad that my fellow humans in the US still put tens of thousands of poor people in prison just because they can’t pay up.     They simply can’t afford to pay, so we put them in prison.

I feel powerless to go effectively against the will and choice of the many.   The power of the vote is mostly an illusion.    Replacing one group of officials who support the wealthy and powerful with another group who support the interests of the wealthy and powerful is such a minimal solution.

It is with a great sadness that I regard myself as human, part of a species that has not yet found or has lost the skill to live in balance with nature and with one another.

What can I do?

I will find a crevice between two hard building stones of humanity.   I will gently sprout and send my tender roots into the essence of nature.   I will breathe in the air and moisture that finds me.    I will quietly bloom in between the hard presence of my surroundings.  I will welcome bees.    I will be a bringer of wonder.

I will bring joy to whoever passes through my garden.   I will extend happiness and insight to all who pass by.   I will offer wonder to whomever I touch or who come in contact with me.   My roots will cling to my surroundings, and I will gently change rock to dirt.

The trace I leave behind on the world will be the essence of life, written in small script, left behind for the manifestation of life yet to come.    I will nourish the future with whatever I have become.

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.