Barry Garden Path

For me, loving other people is best done from a position of solitude. I mean this from the ground up, from the very beginning.   I think that it is in this manner that authentic love comes in its genuine form, gentle, caring, not controlling .  When solitudes border one another, they offer a magnitude of mutual support and protection.   From solitudes, the ability to greet and welcome are magnified.

The path of solitude avoids the great disappointment so many lovers experience.   Disappointment arises when lovers leave their own solitary orbit and begin to orbit around one another.   The border and distinction between them weakens and, having entered the space of the other, they want the other to be just like them.

Without my place of solitude, it is easy for me to begin to expect others to change.  This is true of the most casual relationship through the most intimate.  Respecting the solitude of others supports an open-hearted manner of loving.  To achieve this, it is important for me to be grounded in my own solitude.

I am grateful that my world includes a variety of friends whom I love in many ways and degrees.   I think we are free to love one another in the manner we do because we do so from a place of solitude.   We support one another, acknowledge one another, care for one another in a full-hearted way.   Our differences can enchant, not disappoint.   We share a mutual respect for one another’s solitude, and our love is more authentic.

I’m counting on my friends to be a lifeline as I venture into some unknown territory.   I have clearly been changing, and my sense of reality is no longer what it once was.   It is as different for me as when I first went snorkeling, breathing air but very much in a new watery world.

Sometimes I seem to be living in a new and different body.   Maybe it is the same old body, but my relationship with it has dramatically changed.  It is both distinct from me and yet very much me at the same time.   I find myself trying to juggle a paradox.

I can be in my body and at the same time I have a real sense of being my body.   It is like I am living in a mirror.   Everything is a true image of the original, but they are also distinct.  Which is real?  Is the image any less real than the original, does it make any difference?   Are the two images part of the same reality, two aspects of me?

I do have a strong sense that there are these two aspects of me only when I am totally paying attention.   They are real aspects only when intentionally seen.   Like layers peeled apart, they take on a certain amount of separateness only when I am being mindful, when my awareness is excited.   Still there is one whole.

This is why I need my friends to be a lifeline.    This is a world of mirrors, and I don’t yet dare to become separated from friends.

A bus ride for me is more than transportation.    It is a social adventure.   For me, it has become a world populated by many people that I fall a little bit in love with every time I ride the bus.

I suppose I look around a lot, see who is on the bus, notice their presence, invite their furtive glance.   I watch all the men get on at the stop by the shelter, men rumpled and roughed up by life.   They are the ones I have conversations with the most.   Usually brief exchanges but we acknowledge one another without embarrassment.   They ask me questions.

I sometimes watch everyone who gets on, try to understand a little about who they are just by looking.  Funny how each one carries their own presence a little unhidden.   I secretly open up to and absorb that presence.   Sometimes they know.

I sit next to the woman who has had a severe face in a book on past days, and we soon have an animated discussion about the MIA and the Walker.   I meet neighbors on the bus, stand next to them at the bus stop and we verbally usher one another into our unknown days, a little better for the experience.

I like my bus.    It is a world I like stepping into.   Not a foreign world, but one that is becoming more familiar and hospitable.   I am choosing to claim it as part of my world.

I have a friend Jack who brings me both joy and sadness.   I truly love Jack, and I feel his love for me, though that is a word he would never use.  We can laugh together and reminisce about the experiences we have shared.   He is transparent enough with me that I an truly a witness to him and his life.   He listens well to me and probes into my life in a way that affirms my presence and his interest in me.

I am sometimes sad when I talk with Jack because he seems to have so little hope.  He seems to be open to so little of the future and is pained with the uncertainty.    His world sounds like a threatening disturbance, not a place of curiosity and interest.   He seems to be the source of so much of the pain he is trying to avoid.

I want him to be able to take delight in what he does, rather than see it as a burden, something he has to do.   I wish he could take over his life and choose what he does .   Sometimes it seems that he is the pawn of his life and those around him. He has a choice in so many things, yet he seems to be stuck in a mode of damage control.

I want so many things for Jack, but especially for him to experience delight and joy.    I want him to feel the thrill of looking out the window and seeing the glow of blue lights on a Fir tree.    I want him to feel the rush of excitement on the adventure he is about to take.    I want him to look forward to the new day when he gets up in the morning.   In short, I want to share with him the joys of being alive.

To my dearest friends, “I want to unfold in your sight.”   I want to be clear, I want there to be no doubt about me.   There should be no hidden corners.   I will be as transparent to you as I am to myself.   I think there is no reason to be otherwise, and there is all the incentive to unfold before you.

Where I am closed, I am false.   I am less real than I can be, and that is neither good for you or for me.  I have the ability to be an illusory figure, but that is not what I want.  I have been taught and warned to be a calculating illusionist.   That is not a role I chose to play.    I want to be a reality you can rely on and not a wispy apparition rising from your imagination or mine.

All this I expect of myself and want from you.

I am in awe of my experience of touch.   It is the closest thing to being in the same space with a person, a tree, the floor.   There is something enlivening that transpires when I touch anything mindfully.   It gives me pleasure, it gives me delight.

That point of contact is where I can seem to put my whole essence, my entire being.    It is the focus of my attention and the life force in me.   I like to think that whatever I touch has the same experience.    It knows me in a way that I experience it.    Our essences pass back and forth between us.

This is the experience I have when I put my palm against the large maple in my backyard.    I know it in a way that is so much more real than what I know though my other senses.    It communicates its presence, its essence in a way that I would otherwise miss.

This is equally true when I touch with another human person.  Sometimes it is touch I do not want and it is terribly unpleasant.    That was the experience I had of being pinioned in an airplane seat, pressed against the massive arm of a corpulent man who flowed from his seat into mine.

Mostly, however, touch is an experience of pleasure and delight.   It is a communication I welcome and treasure.   It is a hand on my shoulder as my Son thanks me for something I did for him.    It is the warmth of a hug with a friend I am happy to have in my life.    It is the passing touch in a lively conversation that deepens the communication.

Touch can be so nourishing.    I share who I am, and I partake.

I am only beginning to know what it feels like to let go, and I am grateful that the experience is creeping invitedly into the hours of my life.   I know what it feels like because I am slowly becoming accustomed to meditating, even for brief periods of time.    As my mind becomes emptied, my whole body becomes charged with a sensory awareness independent of a specific stimulus.    It is the feeling of floating in salt water.   I can feel my muscles relax, one by one, as I let go of my body.

I feel a vibrant energy, a life force throughout, an all embracing warmth, a glow.   I feel un-attached.   I am all-accepting.  I have let go.

This is the feeling I want to have when facing death. This is the letting go I want to bring to encounters that threaten me with inner turmoil.   This is what I experience as awareness.   This is the openness and total acceptance that is my chosen path to loving someone.  I am beginning to think it is part of all of these, and I have much to learn about each.

It is the deep feeling of letting go that I hope allows me to open my heart to the young man with drooping pants shuffling past me down Hennepin Avenue.   It is the same letting go I want to give to my Son when he sets out on a path that only he can choose.   It is the letting go I want to bring with me when I walk with a special person in my garden.

I never want to be so old that I no longer continue to unfold.    I am in wonder at all the new possibilities that continue to present themselves.   Unforeseen and unpredicted.   There are even new physical improvements that I never dreamed possible.

Mostly I am awed by the possibilities of my inner space.   As I discover new insights and mental skills, I can only wonder at what might lie ahead.   I am discovering that I have many more human skills within me that I never knew about before.   I am slowly learning to use my mind in new ways and manage myself in a strange new way.

I am concluding that humans have great adaptability built into their genetic code, but we only make use of a small part.   There is so much there, but we limit ourselves by so many pre-conceived notions about what the world is about.  We constantly miss the opportunity of discovery.

For so long I have tried to uncover the meaning and identify the pattern of things, and what I missed is the fundamental randomness and ambiguity of everything.    There is no certain pattern and reality exists only in my encounter.   There is no static world, all is evolving.   Equally important, my awareness is evolving too.

Even this life-form we call human has constantly changed for 3.5 billion years, becoming something “not quite the same” with each passing moment.   I am the result of a roll of the genetic dice.   I am a little different in my make-up, my inner pattern from my ancestors who lived a hundred years ago.  Even my consciousness is evolved.   I can unfold possibilities not available to them.

The randomness of this continuous change is exciting.    The stream of existence is constantly not the same and is unpredictable.    I am sad that religion has misled me into thinking that I would find certainty if only I believed.  I grasped for certainty when I needed to let go of certainty.  All the while, I needed to embrace the uncertainty, randomness and ambiguity of all things.

So this new day presents itself to me.   It is another opportunity to delve deeper, to unfold another layer, to discover another possibility.

In the unfolding of this new day,

In the waking eyes of morning.

I commit that I will not dishonor my heart with hatred.

I humbly offer myself as a Guardian of Nature,

A Healer of Misery,

A Messenger of Wonder,

An Architect of Peace, and

A Fountain of Loving Kindness.