A Touch of Now - An Introduction

“I sit here desperately wanting to create something; to say something on these pages that will convey my thoughts, the beauty of this spot; to share my experience of this moment in time. My chest aches and tightens, as if to squeeze out the salty tears of longing. I look up from my shaded table cracked and weathered like the hull of an ancient ship, my back warmed in the afternoon sun, and thought is inadequate to the task.
Emerald green waves, speckled white with tips of foam, roll toward me from a forest curling like a finger out into the sea. Puffy white clouds emerge from beyond this jagged green horizon and float in lazy patterns against a pale blue sky. Leaves flutter in the warm breeze and dancing shadows dabble all around my wordless perch as seagulls, screeching nature’s plan, dive for unseen morsels and a jittery squirrel buries his face in the still moist grass.
The scene is there for everyone present. My experience lost within me and an inability to truly share the wonder may be my greatest pain.”

When exactly I wrote this is uncertain. Why, is an even greater mystery? What I am certain of however, is the truth embraced by the experience. It describes a moment in which I felt the touch of “now,” and in that touch the truth was unmistakable, simple, clear, and thoroughly unspeakable. I was present to that moment and the moment shared with me all there is to know. This Blog is about my journey, then and now, into the moment and the truth I find there.


August 28, 2010

You Can't Love Something You Need

      At first light this may seem a bit confusing. However after I gave it some serious thought, it really made a lot of sense depending of course, on what you mean by love. Most people want to love, or be loved by another, in order to fulfill some need of their own. Perhaps the need is quite subtle and requires more than a wee bit of introspection.
      After considerable effort to be open to my own needs in past relationships, I was able to see the accuracy of the statement. I came to realize that my experience of love was tinged with more than a little selfishness, and that this is by definition, an attachment to self. I was able to see how it precludes us from allowing our beloved the freedom not only to be who they are today, but to grow and to change over time. To be needed means the beloved is needed in a particular way; they are required to fulfill the needs of their lover. This kind of loving is based on filling needs, wants, expectations, or desires for me rather than being based on my honoring and thereby loving you.
      More often than not this kind of relating requires you to complete me by assuaging my emptiness in order to receive love from me. It really isn’t love at all, but rather a dependency on my part, which will restrict your freedom as a human being based on my needs. In this situation attachment and need are synonymous. Krishnamurti made a similar pronouncement when he cautioned his readers that "One cannot love what one is attached to."
      Stewart Emery expressed a less self-sentered perspective when he wrote, "Love is when I am concerned with your relationship with your own life, rather than with your relationship to mine." Real love might similarly be understood as a state wherein one honors the beloved as a total package: as valuable just as they are. To care for another sans my need for feeling wanted, being taken care of, or in some way lifting me beyond the limits of my own abilities. This is not to desparage the fact that these may be secondary outcomes of any relationship. If so, all the better for it. But true love is not about an attachment to having my needs met in a relationship above the needs of my beloved. Through real love I am able to value my beloved's freedom to change or to grow over time.
      How does one nurture this posture within oneself? I think it all begins with cultivating an awareness of what those needs are for me and being committed to taking responsibility for an open dialogue with myself as well as the one I love regarding my feelings in spite of any fear of vulnerability. Anything less is an evasion of my own tacit attachments, precludes equanimity, and fosters dissatisfaction through the "rebirthing" of previous sufferings.
      And in the words of Walt Whitman, ".......re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… You shall go directly to the creation. Your trust shall master the trust of everything you touch… and shall master all attachment."
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