Tag: Connection

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Living From My Heart

Things look different when I hold them in my heart instead of letting them roll and roll across the landscape of my mind. My worries, for example.

I worry about the state of the world, whether we are headed toward global conflicts that will engulf us; I worry about the economy and people’s jobs; I worry about the money in my IRA; I worry about my children’s future, will they fashion lives that make them happy; I weep for our democracy and wonder if we will come to blows in civil violence; I worry that our lives are already doomed by the spiraling climate; I wonder whether artificial intelligence will save the day, or run us into the ground.

I’m a mental person. My normal mode of operation is to think things through by turning them over in my mind. But the whole backdrop shifts when I settle into my heart. I literally allow my awareness to descend from my head to my chest. My heart becomes the center of gravity of my consciousness. Dropping into my heart doesn’t void my reasoning faculties (I don’t go into a trance), but my thinking mode is joined by other faculties, fresh channels of sensation and information. I start to feel my body, which I had forgotten entirely – its pulsing warmth, the pace and volume of my breath, the aliveness of the currents running through, from, and around my body. My heart is bigger than my head. Much bigger. Given room, the tired fragments spinning in my mind have a chance to come to rest.

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The Two Roots – Awareness and Love

The physical world rests upon a substrate, base components at the fundamental layer of existence. Electrons, protons, and neutrons swirl in a dance of atoms, combining to make hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, water, air, soil, and everything else. All that we can see or touch derives from these basic building blocks.

The metaphysical world rests upon a substrate too. At the fundamental layer are the irreducible forces of awareness and love, the base components from which everything derives. All that we can hope for in a spiritual life sprouts from this double helix.

Appearance, sensation, perception, attention, thought, reflection, insight, ideas – none of these are possible without the faculty of awareness. Its absence cannot even be described as a dark void, because darkness and emptiness can be sensed, and without sentience, there is nothing. Simply and completely nothing. Awareness makes the vibrancy of life accessible.

Empathy, compassion, affection, friendship, fellowship, community, generosity, mercy, union – these are the shades of love that give meaning to what arises in awareness; its absence would reduce sentience to the dry and motionless act of observance. Love makes the experience of life worthwhile.

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Meeting in the Crosswalk

I had never come this close to hitting a pedestrian. So close.

I was on 19th Street, a busy thoroughfare I’ve driven a thousand times. The light coming through the canopy seemed ordinary, the buildings familiar, but something felt off. The part of my brain that senses below the surface registered that something was amiss. The light was green, but the car in the right lane was stopped. I slowed down.

A slight motion flickered in front of the stopped car, and I touched the brakes. A man entered my field of vision, stepping directly in front of my car. Adrenaline exploded. I stood on the brakes with everything I had, my eyes flung open. I might have yelled, I’m not sure. The man was looking straight ahead, chin high, the look of someone who crosses against the light to show he can.

The instant I flickered into his vision, his eyes flung open too, meeting mine, locked. In that moment, time hung in the air, everything got close. There was nothing else on earth, just he and me sharing the same bolt of adrenaline. He might have yelled, I’m not sure, if he did, we shared that too. There were no words in that microsecond, but we were both wishing hard for the same nonresult. My bumper stopped a foot before his body.

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Writ in Water – The Ripples of Our Choices

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.“

John Keats

Keats asked that these words be engraved on his tombstone. A star among the Romantic poets, he burned brief and bright and then died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis.

What are the things writ in water? Our names, our reputations, our actions; certainly, the things we write; everyone we know, everything we can see and touch in the material world. Scientists tell us that even the Earth will someday end her spiraling course across the heavens and collapse into the sun. Caesar, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Elizabeth I – their names will be forgotten too.

But those are things written at the surface. Water is deep. A pebble dropped might fall forever, silent as a feather. And it is in the depths that the world is continually recreated.

Read a Keats poem and you are affected in some small way, if only for an instant, even if you don’t like it. Its presence has disrupted an atom of the mind. The same is true for every thought, action, or aspiration of you and me. Beneath the physical, the energy of a kind word or loving gesture ripples out, shaping the fiber of the universe like the grain of living wood. Cruel and selfish acts too, but their brittle force has far less power. Consciousness is a field, and we are all plowing furrows that run on and on.

What remains when my life is done? My body will die, of course, and my name will be forgotten, along with Caesar and Keats. Obvious but irrelevant. This does not change the core of who I am or why I make the choices I do. I’m part of a longer stream running below the surface, adding to the world’s recreation.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness…

John Keats

Photo by Nazym Jumadilova on Unsplash

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Greet the Morning

Fundamentally, the purpose of spiritual practice is to remind us of who we are, to connect us with the world beneath the shallow images at the surface.

The paradox of being human is that we are both separate and connected. We are separate beings with hopes and fears and agency, and we are also enmeshed in a deeper network of beingness. These two aspects do not have equal power. Our primary being is our connection to each other, to the world and to Source. The separate self is secondary and serves as the vehicle we use to learn, grow, and navigate the larger world of being.

But we forget. Daily life distracts. The pressures of the world press in and poke our fears, causing us to defend or promote our self-interest. In a panic, our sense of separateness pushes forward and our feeling of relatedness recedes. We contract and harden, the walls of defense go up, our focus narrows. The rich depths of our connection flatten to a two-dimensional surface. Our capacity to perceive the spacious, connected aspect of our nature throttles back.

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My Dad Is Telling a Story

My dad is telling a story

I feel a quiet joy in sitting with my dad today. On many days, he mostly sleeps, and my visits are a reminder of his continuing decline. But today, he is talkative and deeply engaged in telling me a story from his past.

What he is talking about is not clear. Parts of it sound like a story I have heard him tell about how, as a young man, he would help an uncle gather his small dairy herd for milking. It’s hard to follow the thread. Dad’s words are sometimes garbled, his train of thought is broken into pieces that don’t connect. His phrases repeat or trail off into soft sounds. If I ask a question, it’s too much for his brain to process. He looks at me blankly, my question floats past, and he returns to telling the story.

There is, of course, great sadness as I watch my father wander in his dementia. There is also acceptance that this is what the last phase of his life looks like, a life that was blessed in many ways. And there are also moments of warmth and connection, like today when he is awake and active. I have taken to cherishing these days. 

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Always Forgetting, Always Remembering

Maybe the world ends when I do.

(Go with me on this thought experiment.) Maybe it all evaporates at the instant of my death, the sun and all her sister stars spread across the eons snuffed out in a whisper.

Maybe my consciousness is the sum total of consciousness. All the events and people I have known or heard about, all history, literature, language, science, culture, were just props in my stageplay. Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, the Great War, quantum theory, Impressionism, migratory birds, interstate highways, ice cream cones, and all the rest were curated artifacts presented to me so I could craft this one life.  

And when my eyes close for the last time, the final curtain falls on everything. No more thoughts or fears, no symphonies or street crime, no conversations in coffee shops or late night bedrooms, no playing children, no morning sunlight. Maybe it was all a parade hung in the sky for this one small spark of light that was me.

Pause and consider for a moment; what is your reaction to this scenario? I have two thoughts.

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Finding My Father

“Dad, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

I strain to hear my father’s voice. He exerts himself to speak, wrinkling his forehead and the muscles of his face. He has something important he wants to convey, but his speech is garbled, a burble of feathery sounds with only an occasional word I can recognize. I move closer, listening to his whispers, scanning his face, searching his expression to garner some sense of what he’s trying to say.

My brother found dad on the floor of his apartment, incoherent and unable to get up. A CT scan at the ER showed that his brain was bleeding from a subdural hematoma, the blood pooling inside his skull, squeezing his brain to the side. Emergency surgery drained the fluid and relieved the pressure, but the damage has accelerated my father’s dementia. I flew into town to visit him and spell my brother, who lives nearby and handles the lion’s share of his care.

Dad’s dementia journey has been an up-and-down biplane ride through the clouds of the wild blue yonder. Synaptic waves climb and descend through different altitudes of lucidity. Sometimes he recognizes us, other times not. When he is occasionally clear enough to realize where he is, what is happening, that his wife of seven decades died three months ago, he demands to return to his old apartment, forcing us into heart-crushing arguments with him about why that can’t happen.

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Wise Words – By Our Love, Not By Our Thinking

By our love not by our thinking

“By our love the Sacred may be touched and held; by our thinking, never.”

The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 6

Thinking is not wrong, it just gets too much air time in our hyper-productive, over-stimulated society.

When applied to problems it is good at, its answers seem complete:  How many grams are in a cup? When is the next solar eclipse? How much weight can this bridge design hold? These are questions with definite answers, and logic is ideally suited to deliver them. This leaves the false impression that thinking is a superior pathway to understanding. 

But we humans are multi-dimensional. For all its usefulness, logic cannot reach the parts of life we hold most dear:  the waves of love we feel holding our newborn child or grandchild; the subtle smile in the eyes of our spouse or partner; intuitive bursts of creativity; an inspired refrain of Bob Dylan or Beethoven; the upswept majesty of entering a cathedral. These are sacred experiences and no logical explanation of them is complete or fulfilling. They need to be embraced by another dimension of our being.

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Thirty Dollars and Forty Cents

“Thirty dollars and forty cents,” the checker tells the couple. I’m third in line, and the carts are backing up behind me.

“Your debit card is declined, balance too low.” The couple is using the state system for food assistance. The woman looks at the ground and shakes her head. The man offers his card instead. We wait for the checker to reset the system. His card is rejected too. We wait for the reset again.

People are being polite, no one says anything, but I feel an impatient tension rising. I only have three items. The young man in the jean jacket in front of me has one.

A tangle of emotions forms a knot that threads back and forth in a small loop between my shoulder blades. I feel empathy for the couple who don’t have enough money to buy a meager parcel of groceries. And I have to admit, I’m irritated at the delay. And, I’m also a little ashamed that I’m irritated. But I know you can’t unfeel emotions that are present, so I stand there and try to pay attention to my knotted shoulders while I wait.

The woman starts pulling items from the bag, picking out what to return. The knot at my shoulders sinks lower like a lead weight. I take a long breath and try to soften the knot, but it sits there, prickly and heavy. I wonder if I should pull out my wallet and pay for the groceries. Would the couple be grateful or offended? I would have to squeeze past the guy in the jean jacket. Would that call more attention? What’s more important, saving embarrassment or providing food? Am I doing it to relieve my discomfort, or to hurry things along? I stand there watching, stuck.

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