Outside in the Fresheness ~ from Privacy to Communion
Jan 29, 2020
Saying For Today: Something that cannot be quantified is always happening, and this must be honored for us to grow more deeply in Love.
*Brian Wilcox. 'Androscoggin River Series~no. 16'.
Something that cannot be quantified is always happening, and this must be honored for us to grow more deeply in Love.
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Elizabeth Mills, in In the Stillness...
What may appear to be empty Is more than enough For a lifetime
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Relationships provide the environment to discover from which the possibility and happening of relationship arises. This does not resolve the mystery, intensifies it, makes it more real by it being experienced as more a mystery. So, something is present larger, more embracing, than the space of the two sharing, and the sharing is happening in that space, that something. You together can enjoy that something, without needing to know what it is, needing to define it, explain it, or even call attention to it.
We could call this emptiness, for it is empty of our usual understandings and explanations. Also, for sages have wisely informed us that to know this Nothing, we know it best through subtraction. So, we unsay, to express it. Then arises the paradox, this nothing is something, is Something, this emptiness is not empty, is Fullness.
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When two are together heart-with-heart, for there is truly only one heart present, the primary mode of communication is not talk but communion in and from silence, more is said in the not being said than in the saying, even though much be shared by voice. Words are like little boats floating in the spaciousness of this something, the boats merely carriers of an unseen upon the waters of this nothingness that is something, is everything. Words carry grace, but grace does not rely on words.
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The heart, not as physical or emotional, but prior, as subtle, has its own mode of sharing. Here, together, two can realize there need be no purpose in the sharing outside the sharing itself, and there need be no reason to love the other or be loved by the other than the love itself. Those in the something, the sharing, the words, the feelings, all this and more are one action, not divided as in usual ideas of being together.
All this can be so intimate, one may even become aware of how words and emotion are used to defend oneself from the communion, and the freshness and joy felt when giving oneself to such intimacy, a sharing in which one gives oneself to the other, yet the other within the same beingness one can call love, as well as God, silence, grace, and many other words that ineptly apply to this union, a union in which we do not so much enter as find we already are in, already are. We find ourselves glad to be home.
Here, we are not burdened, we are refreshed, for what happens is life-giving and life-affirming, not the prepackaged socializing by merely words and ideas or emotions. The soul seeks these deeper depths. This is organic, all-natural, and thereby our essence is attracted to this communion and is gladly welcoming of it, finding in it a quiet joy that tarries afterward and is recalled long afterward with the same sense of gladness and gratitude, for this communion is untouched by time, as new now as then, indeed present without a then or now or to be. Even if the relationship itself ends, as all relationships do in time, at least in the mode in which they arise in time, gratitude remains for those endless moments shared together. The fragrance of the intimacy remains.
*Video is accessed on original side via upper left artist-title below...
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I started visiting a Mennonite congregation in Gainesville, Florida. After worshiping with the small community for the first time in March 2015, after Worship some of the congregants invited me out with them to enjoy a meal. We went to an organic food store, sat outside, enjoying soup and salad; we talked for about an hour. Upon leaving, I reflected that in all that talking we did not accomplish anything ~ meaning, nothing of what we talked about would be altered by all the sharing. There was no apparent goal to the sharing. Then, I recalled something important happened, something more important than reaching some apparently practical end to the time together. What? We shared with one another. Joyful was that sharing, and such sharing with no practical intent is as important as the practical goals of change or progress that we may easily become over-identified with and, thereby, miss out on the beauty, grace, and tenderness of just being together. This is the Mystery of Love, which may as well manifest as impractical as practical. Or, better, this Love will transform our understanding of Itself, thereby transcending altogether the opposites of practical and impractical into a more encompassing harmony. Indeed, we will find beyond that duality that the most impractical sharing is the most practical, the most practical the most impractical. Our whole understanding and experience of being together is transformed out of the pragmatic vision we have unconsciously adopted from others.
Years later, again recalling the sharing that day with the Mennonite congregates, another insight arose. I had seen then we had shared with each other. A more mature way of seeing this is that sharing with is a step towards sharing oneself. Of course, these moves in understanding reflect the evolving capacities of insight and experience that take place within us. Likewise, these insights arise after the experience itself. That is, what is happening is always prior to our seeing that it has or is or can happen.
So, these are steps outside ourselves, yet without losing ourselves, without parting from ourselves. We are not speaking of giving ourselves away or losing ourselves for others, or some egoless state of supposed self-transcendence. We are not diminished in this sharing and sharing ourselves, we find ourselves more enhanced, becoming more fulfilled in ourselves and as ourselves.
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Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche speaks, in Smiling at Fear, of moving from privacy to real privacy. We could speak of false privacy to true privacy, or isolation to communion. False privacy is shutting ourselves in on ourselves, closing our heart to others, to the world. We do this partly for we are not comfortable with ourselves, may even have a sense of shame that we are, that we exist, that we are fundamentally bad, damaged goods, not worthy to open up cheerfully, bravely to the world. Whatever the reason, we experience isolation, we are a butterfly hiding in the cocoon. And no amount of encouragement can open us up. We have to face ourselves, our hiding honestly, that we are not alone, we are hiding. Then, we can experience the real privacy Trungpa speaks of, an aloneness wherein we are not in hiding, we are simply enjoying the communion of life apart from others. Then, with others, we can remain alone, for there is no opposition between being with others and being apart from others in aloneness: as I have said before, solitude meets solitude.
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One gift we give others in our relationships is to mirror back acceptance, to receive the other in tenderness, kindness, and open-heartedness. We mirror back the basic goodness of the other, and he or she does that for us. We can do this, however, only if we are offering this to ourselves. If I can come outside my isolation, I can invite another out of his or her hiding place, out into the open, and he or she can feel, ironically, more deeply the joy of his or her aloneness, aloneness that meets my aloneness.
So, this does not have to be practical, like what is the end-result of our being together, it can simply be the enjoyment of being out in the open together, breathing the fresh air of a vista of spaciousness and freshness, like a boat on the ocean having no direction to come from or to go to, being moved by the tides and the wind. Then, we could ask, “What have we accomplished?,” and the question is found not to need an answer, we do not want an answer, we have simply, for a time, enjoyed being together. We are edified by receiving the other into ourselves, and by his or her receiving us into himself or herself.
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So, why daily engage a form of silence, or meditation practice? Either with others or apart, the act of silence for a time is a time to grow in intimacy with ourselves, including the environment in which we are silent. We need to feel thoroughly, clearly ourselves, including the body in which the essence finds its carrier through this life. We, thereby, grow in capacity to live in this world intimately and be with others intimately, even when they cannot reciprocate or cannot maintain the intimacy as mutually-shared experience.
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Now, yes, this matter of heart-with-heart shifts as the nature of our relationships shift. Practical intents and goals arise within this aimless togetherness. Yet, this openness of heart, this communion, remains the environment of the relationship. A person may work at a job, for example, or be in a relationship of lover-and-lover, and this provides content and direction to the sharing; yet, again, what remains primary is trusting the communion happening. Something that cannot be quantified is always happening, and this must be honored for us to grow more deeply in Love.
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This act of communion, or heart-with-heart, of any relationship, we cannot manage this, only give ourselves to it. In going beyond the fear of not giving ourselves to it, we enter joy, for we are not merely loving someone, we are truly in Love together. Love will manifest itself as Love manifests itself, and we can relax from feeling we must decide how that happens or does not happen. This is not difficult, as is the difficulty of managing the relationship, this is natural, not a struggle at all once we consent to the ubiquitous movements of the heart.
*Video is accessed on original side via upper left artist-title below...
