Barry Garden Path

I once heard someone say that she doesn’t really write songs.   She simply pulls them out of the air.   When she is ready and receptive, they come to her.

That seemed strange to me at the  time, but I am more aware now that creativity can’t be forced.   It simply happens when I am ready and receptive.  I have to be relaxed and open to catch a passing image that I apply to my garden or an idea that I put into writing.

I am really not actively working to be creative.    These are not images and ideas that I have actively put together.    They are nothing I could honestly say that I created.   They simply show up out of the clarity of my mind, and I catch them to make them mine.

I don’t know where they come from.   I think that my memory has a role to play because it is such a storehouse of raw material.   My imagination also has a role because it can conjure a field, a place, a white board where something can come into virtual existence.  My discerning mind is also active when it is engaged as an editor.

The creative process for me is not a pursuit, but more like a relaxing and an allowing of the creativity to happen.  It is the letting go that brings awareness or mindfulness.   Before I can be creative, the memory, mind and imagination have to quiet down somewhat.   They have to sit on their hands for a moment, stop waving them in the air.

That is when the space is opened for new images and ideas to appear out of thin air it seems.   I sometimes think that the images and ideas are “out there”, some place beyond my senses.   When I invite them, they show up, but only if there is room for them to slide into my consciousness.

One of the reasons I think that they have a “place out there” is that I can recognize them when I see them or hear them come from someone else.   They appear in things that people make or in things they say.   When someone is being creative, I seem to recognize that the creativity is happening.    I can see it in other people or in the work they produce.   It is like being able to see the beauty in a natural scene if I relax and just allow the beauty penetrate my awareness.

I think that I, like all humans, have a built-in ability to recognize art because I have the ability to become aware of a pattern.   It is a pattern that I have come to recognize as beauty.   It is a natural, built-in response that is at the core of my being an intelligent being.

The outcome of creativity can be felt, observed and captured only by me when I have relaxed my forms of awareness, my categories, my active imagination.   Art and beauty come to me in their fulness when I have entered the shapeless depth of relaxed awareness and mindfulness.   That is where I engage in my own creative process or recognize the creativity of others.

My empty mind is a caldron of creativity and recognition.   It is where, if I want, I can capture the pattern of beautiful images or ideas.

Happiness, to be experienced, must be sought, pursued and embraced.   To  be happy, I must want to be happy and take the risk of opening myself to joy.   Happiness is not a companion of fear.

So it is similar for suffering.   I must have my eyes open, then I can recognize suffering.   To accept suffering is to embrace it, envelope it, absorb it in the depths of my senses.

There is no sting.   The result is a quiet peace not unlike my experience of happiness.

I wonder what it would be like to be a plant, like a daisy.   What would it be like to experience the world, all reality, as a daisy experiences it?   My roots would be penetrating into the ground, searching for water and so many other things in the soil.    I would experience the sun warming and energizing my leaves.    Wind would blow me from all directions, mostly giving me the breath of carbon dioxide.

What would it be to simply be alive, with no sense of time, only the moment that is now.  I would have no memory of what I did yesterday or any imagination of what tomorrow might unfold.   I would only feel the exhilaration of being alive, all systems engaged.

It has been hard for me to come to terms with the realization that my body really is who I am.   I’ve listened to so many messages throughout my life that split me into body and spirit, body and mind.   So I have not really been alive in my body.    I’ve only been partially aware of its sensation and functions.   Sometimes, I think I only felt the functions I imagined were in my head, and that is where I lived.

What a joy it has been to discover not only that I have a body that extends to the tips of my fingers and toes.   My body is the interface I have with reality.

Because I have this body I am able to relax into a deep awareness of the world of which I am a part.   Once I settle into the full extent of my body, I can experience the joy of being aware.   I practice this awareness when I take time to sit and meditate.   I settle into this awareness when I  experience the joy of walking from my car across a parking lot.  I feel this joyful awareness when I sit and talk with a friend.   My body is happy, top to bottom.

I have always been suspicious of the warnings about the “pleasures of the senses”, even while I lived by the rules.    Now I know I was correct to be wary of those old men who preached sensory abstinence to me and to youths throughout the ages.   I honestly don’t understand the caution about the senses.  The body is what we have that allows us to experience joy.

Joy is not some abstract pleasure in my mind.    It is something my whole body absorbs and radiates when I  am aware.

Life may be a gift, but for me it has not been freely given.   As generous as it may seem, life demands that I seize it with all the strength I can muster.  This is the courage I attempt go bring to each morning.   Every waking morning, I feel I must choose life, embrace it, run with it.   Life may lie before me as a gift, but I must grab it to make it mine.

It may take me many tiny steps, but gradually I get there.    I become alive.

Living is not for the faint of heart, something I realize more clearly as I get older.   I want to live boldly without the certainty of how things will turn out.   The more I surround myself with protections and guarantees, the more I resist the inherent uncertainty of the moment.   Fear rather than living can become a daily routine.

I want to be as courageous and fearless as a trapeze artist who flies through the air without the security of a net.   There is no certainty of the outcome, only the awareness of the moment.   Promises of rewards, success, or forever love are both false and distracting.   There is no net, only the acute awareness of flying.

This is what comes to me in stronger and fuller waves when I move through the day with awareness.   Acceptance and immersion in the here and now is my way of flying.   For me it requires a courageous act to let go and plunge into the empty, relaxed space of the moment.   Once I take that leap, all fear is gone and the courage takes charge.

Twice this past week, I visited with friends with whom I easily leap into the moment.   There is no apprehension about the moment or the future.   Only the joy of leaping into the moment.

There have been other times I have heard friends speak of disappointment, uncertainty and fear.   Those times remind me of the great courage it takes to grab life and run with it.   It is not easy to muster the courage that comes from acute awareness and acceptance of the moment.    However, it does seem to get easier with practice.

I have been wrestling with repeated and vain attempts to understand time a little better.   I currently think it has something to do with movement in space, maybe because I measure time by movement: my own movement, the movement around me, the movement of the hands on my analogue watch.   Perhaps time is simply another aspect of something I call space.

An even more challenging concept is the notion of forever.   How can there be a forever if there is nothing that exists except now.   I am beginning to think that forever is at least irrelevant if not an illusion.

Why should I speak of forever if the only thing that makes any difference is what is going on right now?  Perhaps it is only my desire to be assured that there will be something beyond what is happening this moment.   There actually is no certainty that the next moment will ever come.   At best, there is some probability that the sun will rise tomorrow.   The future is hidden in a fog of ambiguity and uncertainty, so how can I even begin to reach some conclusion about forever?

It is perhaps nice and kind for me to assure someone I love that I will love them forever.  Our culture has been bold enough to build whole institutions and ceremonies around that illusive assurance when in reality I can never honestly make that promise.   There is no love story with no end.

At best, I can assure someone of my intention, at this present moment.   In human relations there is no forever.    I think it is actually dishonest and unkind to offer an assurance of forever love when there is no possibility I can deliver on that promise.

Facing this reality and living in it makes the present moment richer, more intense, and full of love.   It is my one chance to act.

I think that forever is a notion that humans have created because there is such a deep gap in our understanding of time.   Like the idea of God, the idea of forever  attempts to assure us that there is something  out there beyond our understanding.   In reality, I have limited vision, and I really can’t see beyond now, that that may be as good as it gets.

Fortunately, the are many moments I can be comfortable with that.

 

 

Every day, I am reminded that I am no longer innocent.    There may have been a moment when I was just born that I had abounding innocence.    I had a freshness, an openness, an uncontaminated experience of the world, at least for a few moments.   Perhaps my conditioning had already begun at the moment that I got genes from my mother and my father.   But it is easier to think of the moment I was born.

Then things started to change as I began to get conditioned by the world around me.   My parents had a large part in that because they had the good intentions of preparing me for my entry into human civilization.   They began to shape me so that I might fit into my tribe, something they did consciously, aware as they were of what it meant to be their kind of human.    Often they shaped me unconsciously, unaware of their own conditioning that prepared them for this task as parents.

Today it is my prime intention to rid myself of much of that conditioning that has shaped me for over seven decades.   My parents were my first artisans but I have been conditioned by so many other relationships in my life.   I want to reclaim my original gift of innocence and see each day as though I have never seen a day before.   I intend to put the apparent sequence of time aside and meet every thing for the first time.

For me, this is one of the gifts of aging, to be able to begin again without fear, with complete trust and acceptance.   Each hour is its own beginning, and I want to enter it as though I have never before known what an hour is and what it will be in the future.

I am slowly putting aside most of the constructs that have guided my life and my imagination.    These are the conditioning that have shaped how I have experienced the world.    I want to keep only those aspects of me that help me see things as they really are, which means no preconceptions.

I am trying to strip away nearly everything I have learned, and rely on the constructs that open my senses and my mind to the world as it truly is.   Each step I take is my first step.   I rely on the memory embedded in my muscles as a toddler to keep me upright and balanced.   I touch the ground with the excitement of discovery.    This is what the earth feels like.   This is what it feels like to move through space and time.   This is what the air feels like against my skin as I move.

Reclaiming innocence is not easy.   Not only do I have to unlearn much of what I have learned.   I  also have to resist new learnings that attempt to shape me each day.   It is a struggle I  am routinely aware of.   It is the reason I refuse to listen to reports that feed my imagination with images of fear.

I choose instead the pursuit of innocence.   I love the experience of drifting into each new moment uncertain of the outcome.   The ambiguity of each connection I make fills me with wonder.    I know I cannot control the outcome, but neither can it shape me without my choosing.

I often struggle to explain what meditation or mindfulness is when I try to tell someone that “I meditate.”   I’m almost apologetic because meditation  sounds so cerebral and lofty, and it is nothing like that for me.

Then a dear friend told me about her meditation having juice.   What a great way to describe my experience.   For me, awareness is all about experiencing juice.   It is something that happens not just in my mind but in my whole body.  Meditation is full of juice.   Juice flows through and around my body and mind without barriers.

Juice is such an apt metaphor because of its multiple meanings.    The expression brings together a feeling of earthy stickiness and flowing essence.  Juice is a common expression I use for the flow of electricity.   There is juice in a wire when it is powered up.  Someone is juiced when they are drunk  out of their mind.

A tree has juice from roots to leaves, its vibrant life force.   I experience this juice when I touch its bark, when I listen to its moving leaves, when I hit its roots with my digger.   There is juice in a rock that I lift and move to another place.    I sense the vibrations within its hard surface, pulsing with energy that has been in motion for billions of years.   There is juice in the handle of my cup and in the tea that I sip slowly into my mouth.

I am becoming aware that my ability to feel the juice is not always the same.    Much of that, of course, has to do with whether I am paying attention or not.    When it comes to other beings, especially humans, it also depends on whether they are able to share their juice.   I have juicy connections with certain people, and not so juicy encounters with others.   Sometimes we share energy, sometimes not.

I am grateful for my juicy friend who introduced me to the notion of juice. The expression has already infected my vocabulary.   It expresses so well what I experience as awareness or mindfulness.

I am almost gushy about how happy I am to be aging.   I’m not thinking about the ripeness of great-tasting cheese or wine that has matured in taste and texture.    I am thrilled about the newness and freshness that can rise with each new day.   For me being older is a new world and a new life.

I am quite familiar with the physical pains of aging.   Medical complaints seem to be a common topic of conversation when I get together with my older friends.  I admit that I haven’t fully accepted this reality.   But isn’t that part of what aging is about?   It is a time that I can recognize things as they actually are, and accept them.   Making friends with pain is part of that process.   I become even more aware of my body.    It reminds me to pay attention to it, I enter into it more routinely, I exercise it more intentionally, I judge more carefully what I am putting into it.

If I had paid this much attention to my body when I was much younger, I might even be more pain-free right now.

Aging for me has been an opportunity to put aside my concerns about social conventions.    I am fortunate not to have to earn money at this point in my life, and I feel free to pay little attention to what society demands of me, such as work.   I’ve probably never been “in  step” with social conventions, but I feel even less constrained now by what society might expect of me.   I do what I choose.

It is a time for me to reclaim wildness.    I was born wild, and I learned to conform to the norms of my culture.   This is not the wildness of shaggy hair, but the wildness of being born powerfully noble.   I am reclaiming that splendor, that wild energy deep inside of me that is my heritage.   It is a new beginning as I more easily put aside my preconceived notions about my life, my world.   I am taking the place that is rightly mine.

It is a time I more easily fall in love.   Loving has always seemed rather risky to me.    Now it is a routine part of life.   The focused awareness and open transparency of a lover is much easier for me to conjure and maintain.   It seems no more difficult than taking three deep breaths.

My brain still functions, so it is a time of intellectual curiosity and depth.   I cannot remember when I was more intellectually alive.   I know this is because the emotional constraints on my mind have been lessened.  I  am so much less afraid to be unaware, to question and to explore.  Aging gives such freedom of thought it seems a waste not to take advantage of it.

I am rejecting the image of being dumpy and frumpy just because I have lived a long life.   Instead, I accept that old age can be a time to free up natural powers that have been under wraps and social constraints.   It is a time to feel resplendent, if I choose.

I am more than an aging body.   I  am claiming my place as a manifestation of an intelligence and a reality that extends thru the universe.   This is a good time for me to come home to my own place in reality.

 

I recently read that Robert Bly said something like Make your choices then pay the price.   Though not exactly a hero of mine, I think Robert Bly has often gotten things right.    This quote is something of an exception.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what he said and how it fit into the view of my life.    There have been so many roads abandoned, so many people and activities have slipped beyond my reach.   These are mostly choices I have made, not many of them have been forced on me.

Sometimes it is hard to remember just why I made  change of direction, why I “broke up” with someone, changed career,  never pursued the deepening of a relationship.  Would I make those same choices now?   I truly have paid the price of lost opportunities, never explored so many turns around a bend.

I’ve slowly come to recognize that the option is not there to redo my choices. Those opportunities are truly gone, beyond my reach.   What is more, I now examine those options from a vantage point created by the decisions I made.   Those choices look different now because I have been changed by my own decisions.

My garden is being planted and rearranged for the summer of 2017, and it is no longer relevant to re-examine what was done in the summer of 2016.     My choices may be different in 2017 and many of them are based on the fruits, perhaps the price being paid, for choices made last summer.  Today I am making choices in my garden.

My life has been filled with choices much more significant than  the ones I make daily in my garden.    I have been changed dramatically, perhaps paid the price, but certainly enjoyed the benefit.   Within less than five minutes I walked from the University Zoology department building across the street to the Botany building.    I  became a botanist in those moments and my dreams of zoology went up in smoke.

I chose to leave the comforts and assurances of religion to step into a world of constant exploration and uncertainty.   I gave up a career I had prepared for during a decade and a half.   I paid the price as I left a shore I could never find again if I wanted to.   It has been a real bargain.   While I have paid dearly, I have discovered a world of abundant treasure and joy.

Robert Bly is insightful in describing an experience that I have recognized by looking back over my shoulder.   I think I am just more excited about experiencing what adventures my feet are feeling as I take each step along the path I have chosen.