I Confess
I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
watching
the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her
basket,
beaming peace like the North Star.
I wanted to ask, "What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years or how to live
alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to
possess
some knowledge that makes the earth turn and
burn on its axis—"
But we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, "I love your hair.
Alison Luterman
A man stopped his truck alongside me as I walked along the country road on a brisk fall day. He rolled his window down and said it was a pretty good day.
He was not in a rush, nor was I. Neither of us were distracted or suspicious, leaving lots of room for a sweet encounter. “It’s a pretty good day. I like the simple things, like being above ground and that the mosquitoes are gone,” he tells me.
Whether it be a simple and passing moment between two strangers or a lingering and deep encounter with a loved one, being alive within nature . . . or for that matter, a meeting of oneself in an open way . . . we all know the joy of being present.
Being present is encountering . . . fully taking in the essence or the state of whatever or whomever is in the field of awareness in that moment. Encountering without the meddling of our mind. It is living from the deepest place within; being, the marvel of simply being, unburdened being . . . easily and naturally attentive to life living itself. People in their cars, on the sidewalk or country road, shopping for groceries, sharing a meal, walking their dogs. Squirrels running up a tree, gathering acorns, and scampering back down the tree to bury their winter food in the ground.
Everyday life is full of things, activities, tasks, people, critters and nature available for that encounter with its essence.
Encounters coming from presence, arising from still silence, are sacred. Sitting in the vast open space of presence we meet the sky and the moving clouds and savor its beauty; maybe even lose all sense of anything else happening in that moment – the sky and clouds showing off and communing. Just because and for no reason.
This depth of encounter takes us beyond our illusion of separation; there is no distance between – the lines have blurred and vastness takes over. When the obstacles of personality and egoism have dissolved, we experience everything . . . everything, as one seamless whole. There is no this and that, no me and other, no form and formless.
Encountering feels like the earth has opened up and swallowed you whole, leaving you with a shimmering sense of the eternal. Engaging in the pure felt sense . . . the touch of experience, not abstractly or from a distance, but feeling the timeless now with ever-increasing sensitivity reveals to us ITS actual condition . . . directly! And reveals, in its jaw dropping radiance, we are that. Whole, undivided.
Encountering heart break upon hearing how drought-dry trees are literally falling over and dying, encountering children’s laughter, encountering a friend’s grouchiness or hostility. Encountering the lush orange, inside a persimmon, its star radiating out from the center; the lyrics of a Stephen Sondheim song. (Presence does not discriminate nor does it have any preference. In fact, it is unburdened and unaffected by whatever shows up).
Being aware of whatever is showing up in awareness, without judgment, fear and agenda both leaves us wide open to this deeper reality and requires us to be wide open, indiscriminately taking anything and everything in. To our minds this is heresy; you’d have to be nuts to not put-up buffers.
Look deeper and then deeper still. We are invited to slow down, slow down, sinking into sweetness, away from the conditioned mind; allow stillness to be felt, to be heard, tasted and savored. The movement of slow and deeper are connective threads; they are entry ways to getting and staying connected. . . genuinely connected . . . to yourself and to the world you move in. When we slow down and sink deeper our energy will naturally go towards and into the depths of our being. Experiencing life from deeper and slower is not dependent on our moving slowly; even when we are rushing or excited, it is possible to experience everything from an inward and downward slowed down encounter. It might not be apparent in the rush of excitement but when we do stop and look deep within, there is being – sweet, unaltered, omnipresent. We are invited to find this out for ourselves – beckoned into the depth of our being . . . called to encounter the real, the truth of our vast, silent, spacious and timeless essence.
We yearn for real connection. Connections without masks (the psychological ones) or pretending. Even as we are caught up in the social requirements of relating on the surface of things and making nice or competing, we long for something more deeply satisfying. We want to see and be seen, in deep ways.
Typically, we humans live with a feeling of isolation. To one degree or another, we are cut off from ourselves, cut off from others, cut off from the world, cut off from nature, leaving us unsatisfied and longing for contentment, joy, unconditional love; even when we cannot name this longing. Often not knowing what we are looking for, we spend our days distracting ourselves, working hard to keep away from the abyss of our yearning.
If and when we really look within, we are likely to find that we humans are made in such a way that we are, crazy as it sounds, attached to our suffering, to our mind’s perspective. We become convinced that our suffering is real, it is necessary, and it gives us a sense of self and purpose. If we are fortunate, we intuit a call to seeing through the mind’s perspective and an even deeper call to its surrender – surrender of what we have counted on to cope, surrender of what we have assumed we would not live without. After all, how could we not see it this way (until we do not) given how we have lived in this mode our whole lives, our society has collectively agreed that our mind’s viewpoint holds sway and we are, most often, terrified of knowing, really knowing we are not in charge of our lives as we thought we were.
The stillness, the spaciousness, the presence we intuitively know, both calls to us and lies hidden underneath the human drive for survival . . . this mechanism we so fervently cling to. This is the rubber hits the road reality, the apparent abyss . . . questioning the messages we get from the ego’s demand and insistence on its realness and it-must-survive-at-all -costs implications.
Encountering the real, beyond our mind is an ego death. This ego death (living beyond the survival machine) is shifting from the point of view of the conditioned mind to the perspective of wholeness. . . oneness. Ego death comes from a deep devotion to the truth . . . from deep surrender and deep listening . . . observing . . .encountering. Listening from silence and stillness is the sacred encountering. We are often not accustomed to really listening; it takes practice and sincerity to listen closely and deeply; what we hear is often quickly interpreted, figured out, analyzed and explained by our minds.
Paradoxically, to enable ego death requires self-understanding. It appears we need to know ourselves, know what is in the way of realizing our essential being, know our defenses and patterns, know egoism up close and personal; in order to open our fists and let it all go.
I remember my closed fists, the sentries at the gates and I remember being guarded making sense to me, given my heart had been broken, time and again. And I remember something deeper calling, over and over – being challenged to drop defenses, intuitively knowing being defended was not the way to go. There is something deeper afoot. How did I really want to spend life – how did I really want to live – dead/unfeeling inside? Numb? Watching from outside my body? As if? Disconnected? Superficially?
Even before tasting it, I knew I wanted to feel alive and accessible. I yearned for my heart to be open. I wanted to be truly alive . . . all the time, every day, every moment. No matter what it took.
Self-understanding appears to be essential to awakening– before, during and after. To be consciously attuned, to be aware of being aware, to expand and to be love appears to call for self-understanding, an ongoing noticing and honest looking at yourself kind of self-understanding . . . not every once-in-a-while understanding, but every day, every moment. Saying it that way can make it sound like very hard work, but really it doesn’t have to be. With kindness and curiosity, with compassion and lack of judgment self-understanding does not have to be burdensome or harsh; instead, it can be open, effortless, and welcomingly revealing.
In a way it is very simple, although the opposite of what we have been taught. See through the mind’s demand to shield you from life. Drop defenses and show up. Drop defenses and be real, let life live freely, allow pain and heartbreak, joy and awe, fear and regrets move through you, like electricity coursing through wires.
It really is simple. True encountering (love/acceptance with no conditions) is the fire needed to face and dissolve all defenses. It is the power to face anything – heartbreak, leave-takings, rejections, isolation, fear and doubt – anything. It is a two-step dance – open to presence, open to the love that you are, and put down your guard. Layer after layer of guard.
Be still and greet life.
The free soul is rare but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
Charles Bukowski