Barry Garden Path

Becoming aware has resulted in my heart being open much more than it has in the past.  I have known this for at least a year, that situations and people enter into my heart more readily as I learn to see them in deeper ways.   I’ve thought of this a lot, practiced, noticed how my feelings about people touch me on a deeper level the more I am absorbed by this awareness.

What I haven’t thought about much is how this makes me much more vulnerable.  Having an open heart doesn’t necessarily mean a wise heart.   I haven’t practiced much on how to become wise about how I handle that vulnerability, the exposure to pain.   The enthusiasm a puppy feels doesn’t come with a dose of wisdom.

I am glad that I can take myself to a place of repose.   Usually it is a few breaths away.   But I have to know it is time to “breathe.”   I don’t always recognize when it is important to breathe.   It is the breath that helps me stay.   When I remember to breathe, I can stay in the present much easier. The vulnerability and pain are still there.   But when I accept them, not try to make them go away, I suffer so much less.

I want to recognize and accept my vulnerability, not make it go away.    I want to look boldly at my pain of separation and imagined loss, and breathe in the pain.    I want to accept it as part of me.    I choose to keep my heart open.

It has been my intent to share the same orbit with my close friends but not be drawn into an orbit around them.   I think I now recognize what it feels like to get wobbly in my own orbit and begin to yield to the gravitational pull from someone else.   I had the concept;  now I know what it feels like.   Now I think I am recovering my own stability in my own orbit.   Letting go helps.

I am amazed how the morning brings me clarity.  Sometimes, like today, the clarity comes on a silver platter.   I think my heart is like an puppy, overcome with enthusiasm.   I have learned very well how to open my heart up, something I seem to do with increasing ease.   Sometimes my enthusiastic heart runs around, jumps up on people.   Probably makes them uneasy.

Staying is as hard for me as it is for a puppy.   Staying in the present is a skill I have begun to learn, but the puppy sometimes gets out.

My ability to keep a distance in a relationship, to keep to my own orbit, to restrict my engagement is still being formed.   There is a pattern.    I engage, I stumble, I assess, I adjust.    Fortunately there are mornings, like today, when clarity prevails.    Now to get thru the day with that focus.

One of the best times for me to live in the present is when I am standing in front of the mirror in the morning, stirring up the courage to turn on the shower and step into the warm but very wet spray.  The experience of staying in the present, at home inside my body, acutely aware of where I am is best felt in the first hour of my day.   It is my cocoon from which I eventually emerge and attempt to carry that experience of being present, here and now, through the rest of the day.     It gets a little ragged by the end of the day, soI refresh it.

I am living more and more of my life where I am and not so much where I want to be.   While I still do some planning, I do it without so much emphasis on the details.    Above all, I try to stay away from any emotional content of that imaginary future.

I am learning how to do this with my closest and dearest companions.  I am finding it easier to get deeply involved in what is happening right now, not thinking or feeling much of what could be happening in the future.   Not am I more present with them, able to look at them with a much more open heart.   I also find it more satisfying and wonderful.

My life is so much more enjoyable when I stay in the present.   If I put much attention and energy into what might happen or what has already happened, I think I miss a lot of what is going on right now.    My planning for the future is becoming more and more about setting guideposts, not drawing a detailed roadmap.

I recognize that I don’t always life this way, even though it is what I want to do.   However, I am finding that I am able to do it more and more easily and frequently.   I am simply more skilled at living in the present.

I think this is becoming more achievable because I get to do it with great focus and concentration twice a day.   Those times I spin my cocoon around me and become very, very much in the present.   The training works.   I emerge much more focused, and carry that experience with me through the day with growing skill.

As I deliberately move deeper into a world of solitude, I find myself thinking more and more about what my friends mean to me.    In a strange paradox, my growing comfort with my sense of separateness and being on my own is being matched by a deeper feeling of connection and closeness to my friends, my companions.

I’m not sure what the core of this is, but the more I relax in to accepting what “is”, the more I become open to myself and my friends.   I am who I am and who I am becoming.   While some of that is on the “wait and see” list,  I am grateful that I have companions who can witness my presence and my becoming.   I guess I am also grateful that they are willing to be beside me, to share so many things with me, to shower me with acceptance.

I think that is what being a deep friend is all about.   It is something my friends are teaching me.   It means being able to be transparent with one another.   No pretenses, no adjusting to fit one another’s designs or expectations.   Unconditional acceptance and affirmation.   It is more like loving one another than being lovers.   Lovers tend more to use their imagination, fueled by their wants.

It doesn’t mean that my companions and I don’t adjust in some ways to accommodate one another.  Those adjustments are made with honesty and are chosen with a strong loyalty to who we are.

Obviously a work-in-progress for me.   I am grateful to have companions who are working at it with me.

Many times during the day, I remind myself that my friends are there.  They are present in the periphery of my vision and awareness, a constant part of my heart, on the margins of my attention.   I am alone, but not truly isolated.

From time to time, we call out to one another, “Here I am,” and reassure one another of our continuing presence.   For me, it is comforting, supportive to be allowed to be a friend.   I am grateful that my companions  also carry me in their heart and allow me to be present in their lives, a meaningful part of their days as they are in mine.

We need not be physically present to one another, pleasant as that is.  But they are a felt presence in my world.   Just as I want to be a welcome presence in theirs.

My life has been a tense struggle between wanting to be the same and wanting to keep changing, between keeping and letting go, between permanence and impermanence.  I am so glad that change is finally winning out.   Each day is a truly new day.

I am no longer the person I was at 20 nor last year.   I am so glad.   When I see the friars I was in school with still doing essentially the same thing they did 50 years ago, I think “How sad.”  I feel like I have so far lived about four or five lives.   I have chosen to be the Dungeon Master of my life, and I have created multiple worlds to live in.    All are related, but not all the same.  I have been evolving through incremental ages.

It seems but yesterday that those two molecules joined together and began the march to the breathing, thinking person I am today.   That process has happened in me.   My life is truly an instant replay of the last 3.5 billion years.  It has seemed like 75 years by some reckoning, but it is all the same.

I am the latest effort of the universe to be what it can be, for the intelligence in me to reach toward perfect harmony.   Harmony with what, I’m really not sure yet. The sound and vibration of a bell shimmers and vibrates through all things, including the intelligence that expresses itself in me.   This is the thought and awareness that makes me what I am.

I lean expectantly into this day of change.

For most things, there really is no turning back.   Most of my life has been like  footsteps in wet cement.   My past is part of me, whether I choose to remember it or not.

Suffering happens when I try to forget, to deny awareness of my past.   Joy is in remembering.

This includes all the embarrassing things I’ve done, decisions gone wrong.   It includes all my loves, all the insights, all the loss of control, all the lack of judgment.   They are all there.

Common wisdom tells me that my present state of mind affects my recall of the past.   I think the past events are all there, like unworn shirts forgotten in the back of my closet, waiting for discovery on an inquiring day.   No longer actively worn, they are still there, in whatever shape I find them.

My today includes all my days, like a city built on the rubble of past cities.

I am slowly realizing how important it is to me to be a trusted companion. I want to be someone who can be totally present and aware, accepting and not judging.   I want to be able to listen without feeling compelled to respond.   I want to be attentive.

I will be a trusted witness who is openly aware of others, but especially my close companions.   I intend to affirm their pain and their accomplishments in whatever way I can.   This begins by paying attention, being aware of their pain and accomplishments.  I intend to be acutely attentive to anything they will trust to reveal to me.

I am prepared to be present, to be aware, to be a trusted witness.    This I also want from my companions.  I want it from any of my close friends willing to step into that circle of exchange.

More than anything else, I am a gardener.   My world is a garden, and it changes from season to season, from year to year.   All the while it remains the same garden, and welcomes anyone who cares to enter it.

I ask my garden to be both a whisper and a shout.   I invite all visitors to be carried away by its abundance, variety and beauty.   I summon  blooms to erupt with surprise, delight and excitement.  I nurture secrets to lurk at every turn, ready to reveal subtleties for the curious and daring.

I want to live in a world that welcomes poets, mystics and lovers.   This would be a world that values people who see beyond the obvious, people who are not distracted by illusion and fantasy, people who penetrate to the hearts of matter.   For them it would be a routine and normal occurrence to want to see what is really present and who their companions really are.

I want to live in their world and be able to look behind the curtain of appearances and find the gold at the root of the mountains.   I want to be comfortable with and very aware of the unseen reality hidden in the flesh of my companions.

Perhaps if I learn to live in this world of people who see with their hearts, I may just be able to become one of them.