March 5, 2009

• Outgrown
  

  There's something strange going on here. By here I mean in my Being Presence, for lack of a better descriptor. We have many ways to describe a color or shape but so few to describe the things that really matter. It may be because we spend so much of our lifetime running after the things that don't really matter. Oh, it's not that we know they don't matter. We think they are the things that really matter, are of the utmost importance. The things we know we'll die if we don't get. The very young behave that way about toys and then boys and girls, then cars and bigger toys. It expands to careers and houses, partners and love, prestige and reputation, etc. Toward the end of our stay here, when the hormones begin to wane giving us the ability to see what was there all along, behind the façade, our world begins to shrink. We accumulate so many of the things we worked so hard to get. Even if we didn't work hard to get them we used a great deal of time and energy to acquire. To outgrow something, in the world of the five senses, is to grow too big for something. This is different. This is like shrinking. You can see it with the elderly if you know any. The older they get the less visable they are until finally, poof! They're gone. They seem to shrink in about every way. Now that I am elderly my world is smaller than once it was. The leash is shorter and like someone trapped inside a paraplegic's body a new world begins to open on the inside where the able bodied have no time to explore. Imagine the world in which Stephen Hawking lives. Oh, I'm not saying I'm smart like that or that I ask big questions. Quite the opposite. I'm getting smaller and smaller every day.

  Rather than race around on a motorcycle looking fast, young and sporty I pass many hours a day in meditation sometimes so deep it's an effort to rejoin the animals with whom I share the house. Rather than thinking big thoughts I often feel as if I'm standing behind the thoughts, the mind, the emotions and him, It, James. From that vantage point the meaning of everything is altered. Perhaps altered isn't the right word. It's not that the meaning is altered as much as the meaning takes on a new dimension. It becomes fuller and deeper with an entirely different center of gravity. It's like a painting. Sometimes an artist will frame a part or section of a larger painting because the composition works better. The rest is discarded. It's not that it ceases to exist but that it has less meaning than once it did. Another example could be an iceberg in the quickly diminishing, once frozen north. When we see the part that's above the waterline it has a certain mass and center of gravity, a certain meaning. If we can then view what is beneath the waterline, the meaning of the chunk of ice takes on a new dimension with a vastly different center of gravity and mass.

  At some point one may be able to see that all of life is a preparation for death. Some pass the portal better prepared than others but everyone passes. What seems important at the end of the ride is, more often than not, very different from what appeared important at the beginning or in the middle of the ride. A few weeks ago I was conversing with a young woman I've never met. She is a Woo Woo. A Woo Woo is what I call a person who wants to give peace a chance, teaches Yoga, meditates, eats more consciously and in general tries to live a conscious life. She said something that stuck to some part of me. It's taken me weeks to assimilate it because it wasn't just verbal. She said, I married a redneck. It wasn't a complaint. It was a happy fact. Happy because she accepted him as he is, for what he is and had no desire to change him in any way. They couldn't have much in common in an outer way. She's a Woo Woo and he's a Redneck. Polar opposites. She loves him. I could feel it, hear it and taste it. It struck me because I married a redneck too. For a long time I wasn't happy about it. I kept thinking I'd made a mistake. That somehow she had changed and reverted back to her redneck ways. Sometimes she would say things that were so NOT what I thought it looked like we were in two different worlds. Then, I realized that we are in two different worlds. What I also realized is that my world, the reality of which I have consciously become an integral part, dictates that I love everyone in every world without conditions or requirements, expectations or demands. I can do that and be happy or revert to what once was and figure it all out so I have a good reason for not loving the rednecks.
  

  • 12:27 pm
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