You Have One Message

Last week, I had a dream that I was hanging out with some kind of "angelic" being in a vast, undifferentiated space. I was invited to play, so I made up two short, vertical lines a small distance apart from each other, with a long, crazy, squiggly line linking the two that looked like an erratic heartbeat glyph on a cosmic monitor. The design appeared as I imagined it, immediately, in my field of vision. After a moment's hesitation, I wrote a descriptive word underneath it: "Monster".

My friend seemed to thoughtfully examine this creation, and reproduced it exactly, a little to the right, with a different caption (in my own writing): "Moving Stillness Being Blessed."

Hmm.

All of this activity took place in a simple, childlike way, from an innocent, intuitive heart. My companion didn't criticize the original design, but made an offer to my offering. I realized that one was not better or more true than the other. One was not more beautiful or ugly. I could feel the dreamlike tug of opinion before it dissolved like fog in the sunshine.

I turned to this being, my friend, being so brightly indistinct, and tried to understand all this in a way that I could carry into the multilayered complexity that life enjoys so much. I knew I was dreaming, all of a sudden. And just in the turning toward, I felt something in a very deep way. Talking about it scatters the impact, but it seems to need expressing.

On the surface is the obvious message that opinions and comparisons are meaningless to reality-in-itself, whatever that is, which accepts absolutely any description or design laid upon Her, like a tattoo birthed in the heart to appear, organically, on the flexing skin of all that is. She doesn't care what you call it, what meaning is ascribed or which logical path was designed to support this whole thing. Whatever's clever, She might say.

Underneath this lovely indifference and impersonality (so that we can be personable) lies a song in a language that appears foreign, until the body and mind let go into the hearing. The song isn't about the design or the path; the song is of the singing, itself, the very act of calling an "object", thought, feeling, wish, tree, dance, breath, birth, death, particle/wave into being by noticing it. Noticing is a miracle. Deeply noticing is blessing.

In ancient days, blessing was done with some kind of sacrificial blood, great ceremony, honor and ritual, people impressing the importance of another person, place or thing upon their minds and hearts for a lifetime. In a way, this was daily life brought into the spotlight of community theater, an attempt to remind ourselves of the sacred realms we are steeped in. Get it, people--we are incarnate, we are temporal, we are fragile, and in this cosmic blink lies tremendous beauty that is missed when we forget to see and feel it, when we deem being alive to be so common and painful that it is beneath our notice (until we realize it is slipping away, perhaps). 

Explaining everything to death intellectually may be necessary--I don't know. What I do know is that I, like every other thing, am full of some kind of sacrificial blood in which the world appears and disappears, like a dream. I look at a fencepost, and it comes startlingly into being out of the Vast Soup, with color, texture, dimension and the scent of peeling paint. It does this just for me, with me, right now, in a moment never to be repeated, in absolute uniqueness. Fencepost Maria has arisen. No other human can ever be this experience in just this way. This is true every second of every day. No one will ever "understand" this, because there is nothing (thank god) to be understood. Just one creative miracle after another, for anyone willing to be this.

It is the act, the silent singing of everything into being that is so spectacular and effortless. I don't know where this song comes from or why it is. I just know when I'm fighting it.

Loneliness

As a busy "caregiver" and "artistic type", I'm familiar with the value of aloneness. Sometimes I just need to be away from the demands and distraction of other people in order to think/feel deeply, to get a clearer sense of whatever is emerging from the crazy sea of worldly data and craving my creative attention. I love these spaces in my life. Arguing with that call is almost impossible, anyway; putting it off too long seems to be hazardous to the health of my psyche.

Loneliness, though, has been quite a demon in my story. At first glance, it is entirely different in quality from voluntary solitude, tending to appear as a hollow portrait of lack and emptiness, with nothing voluntary about it. I've been lonely off and on throughout my time in schools, jobs, marriages and therapies--alone in my head, heart, and in the midst of crowds. I used to think it was just depression or some kind of inherited kink in the energetic hose. I could never figure it out, really, and cycled for a long time through stern lectures from my adult-self to the "needy" child within.  I was too bright, too young, too whatever to be so pathetic...I just wanted to knock it off. If it was biology, then to hell with it. Wasn't about to be jerked around by fluctuating hormones...and so forth.

I learned, over time, to distract myself from the pain of loneliness in many different ways. It was another fine coping skill to add to my repertoire. It worked, too, for a while.

What is it about middle-agelessness that so quickly peels off the illusions? Why is it that the thick buffalo-head, so effective in scaring away the really difficult states of being for so many years, just falls off? Does it get too heavy, too ridiculous, too painful? I don't know. What I do know is that there comes a point when there is no one left to blame--not even oneself--in the vast, empty space of one's own being, in which purposes and distractions rise and fall like the grass, through seasons which pass more and more quickly.

Here I am in the whirling year (oh my god, it's June, already?!), and I wake up in the middle of the night as I turn over into the cold side of the bed. Before the first thought manages to surface, I feel myself, somewhere, to be in pain. I pull a pillow into my stomach and try to go back to the sweet peace of unconsciousness. But the silence is heavy, my heart is heavier, and I'm too tired to think my way out of it.

Now, this is an ideal situation, and deep down, I know it. I recognize this demon as one I've never befriended, that will sit on me until I die if I don't get into where it lives, if I don't accept this invitation.

Oh...the surrender is almost instantaneous. Oh, the pain is intense! It's like a room that dwarfs me, as if I've fallen into a forbidden void...I just breathe, and wait. I find that I want to see what comes, and so, it does...grief, sadness, and fear...not of a final thing, like death, but of more monuments to grief and sadness. There is an ocean of them, built by me, and then built by all of humankind. The pain is too vast to be personal. Everything, as a matter of fact, is too vast to be personal!

I look into this feeling in my heart, in my body, circulating through the local and the universal, and find it rising and falling in a familiar fashion, like notes in a song. The grief and fear are brief and lovely, perfectly formed, only to dissolve in that slippery way that all forms have. It doesn't matter, I realize, how many of these memories and monuments I build. They are already gone, and I can't hang on to them to save my life. Something has unclenched. I find myself in state of gratitude for the impermanence of life, the fullness of it. Not a discreet, objective state of gratitude, but an active explosion of gratitude, an awestruck participant in this throwing up and tearing down of feeling-forms.

Loneliness has naturally transformed into a spontaneous beauty that sadness can't mar in any way. It isn't that some quality has been added to ease the pain--it's that nothing can be added or lost (even the belief in gaining or losing). What sort of being is this that can think, feel, believe, disbelieve, learn, unlearn, so permanent in its flux? An inalienable human, being deeply.

I don't sleep the rest of the night, as the demon has become a sort of muse, whose depths are fascinating. There is no regret over the length of time this complex relationship with "alone" has taken to develop. I realize, also, that voluntary solitude is a rough, uncommitted sketch, a thin layer between here and nowhere, the familiar tip of a giant iceberg barely showing above the waves. Further exploration is always called for. I love it, and I love you.

Freedom Cells

 At the dentist's office the other day with my son, I learned that he needs a complicated and expensive procedure to rebuild and crown one of his precious teeth (he was born with only a few adult tooth buds). His insurance refused to cover the job. (My desert-like bank account can't cover it, either.)

While the dentist was finishing the exam, I sat in the waiting room and did a bunch of futile math in my head. I ran through several grim scenarios, lots of inner tantrums, and ended in intense weariness. The last couple of years have been very stormy, and it's easy to generalize, to see a mentally turbulent ride everywhere I look. I sighed, and decided to walk across the street for a cup of coffee.

The office is on the edge of a quiet residential neighborhood, so traffic at midmorning is very light. Somewhere in the middle of my diagonal negotiation of the road, my stressed thinking simply ceased, and I dropped into a spread-out awareness. All at once, there were dusky-edged clouds in the blue sky, a magenta Japanese maple to my right, and a whistling gas station attendant to my left. I felt my feet in their trusty gray running shoes, flexing through each step. I caught my own heartbeat, and simple contentment and renewed curiosity flooded across the world.

Literally seconds before, I was locked in the eddies of my head--searching, searching for a solution to a problem, swamped in the kind of melancholy that happens with the admission that, yes, this is a big wall to be backed up against, because my autistic son still depends on me, and always will, in some fashion. A form of grace, I suppose, pulled awareness out of the symbolic existential realm, and into the pure "nowness" of the body. Actually, I have no idea how. But the shift and the immediate comparison of one state to the other was startlingly clear.

By the time I reached the parking lot of the minute-market a few moments later, sweetness was rising up my throat and through my eyes. I felt every detail of my body in motion--my breath deepening, my shoulders relaxing, the child-animal unfurling. Yes, I am lapsing into poetry, because it's the only way to articulate what happens when attention diffuses like a cascade through the entirety of the physical being, and every nerve ending takes on the intimate "soft gaze" of clarity. This, my friends, is why a body!

The sweetness lasted through a good part of the rest of the day. It never fails to astonish, and I have learned the futility of trying to "keep" the sensation (as if it was something apart from me). The more relaxed I am, the longer it stays, and the longer it stays, the more relaxed I am. Migrating into problem-solving tends to push it into the background, so that it plays very softly. Should I get caught up in the noise of worry, I catch myself acting as if "now" isn't here.

Thought, and attention therein, is a deeply ingrained habit for me; it serves me well, some of the time. Over the years, I've learned that intellectual insight can be blindingly wonderful--blinding, in the sense that it brings a feeling of power, of mastery, and a temporary sense of security. I've noticed that all deep thinkers have the potential to take this "intellectual path", in the same way that one can take a meditative path, a path of service, or a devotional path. One can think to the end of the chain, until everything is investigated right back into itself, like a maze. But intellectual insight is akin to running into a dead end and believing that this, finally, is the way out. The dead ends prove nothing, except to point out that, hey, you are a-mazing! Of course, this may be a close-to-the-end point--the maze is something "you" construct and get lost in...why?

The question "why" is only productive if it leads into the emotional realm, the deeply denied and feared place. Intellectually provided answers, such as "my parents were abusive", or "I didn't know any better" are pseudo-answers with limited value in maze-solving. The real answers lie like mysterious organisms in a thick layer of mud, breathing in an alien-seeming way, buried as they are. They are alive and waiting for their time in the sun, when they will be another creature entirely, with burial an intimate and necessary part of the life-cycle. The real answers are wordless, made of emotional tissue. One only knows them by feel. The only place to feel them, is--not through a thinking process--but in the tender, sensitive, rough-and-tumble body.

Alas, many of us are numb to (if not downright divorced from) our physicality. Herein lies vulnerability, after all, the place where, under our clothing, we are always naked. How can we trust a being through which desire burns like heat lightning, shame weighs like solidifying lava, and grief opens like a bottomless pit? We fear all this, some of us to the point of incessant anxiety. These states, these inner territories, exist--not to be ignored, pacified, avoided, or even acted upon--but explored and experienced in the fullness of what they are, as they occur. That's all. There's nothing to be done about them while they rattle, charge and echo off your walls. They are brief, beautiful and perfectly valid. What they show you is exactly what you need to know.

Being "in" oneself is as simple as paying attention to breathing, physical sensation, sensual messages to and from the entire body. It isn't easy for those who have been traumatized into habitual numbness, or who were given the message that feelings are shameful and not to be trusted--but, it is literally vital to learn the energy of your own territory, the place wherefrom life springs, the gate of consciousness. Staying "safe" and comfy in the library of the mind nets a lot of dusty facts, and keeps one far away from blissful immersion in your own dancing river. Even asceticism, the path of denying the body, leads one inevitably back into it.

No escape.

Please, fall in, fall down, fall in love with the source of love itself. Risk it. Trust it.

Did You Hear?

It happens, sometimes, that a space opens in which I can indulge myself in some kind of sensual delight. Yesterday, it was a deep music-listening session, which is every bit as refreshing and insightful as sitting in a soundproof room. I am paying attention more and more, these days, because I feel that venturing far (even only once in a while) is relevant to a full life, and telling the story sparks an awareness and memory in other minds.

Really listening to music (or a voice, or the world) is like opening a gate to a previously unknown land. I can stand near this opening and admire the skill of the musician, the placing of tones and silence like elements of a land(sound)scape, the mood and rhythm and poetry. This is a relatively "safe" position, in which my active inner voice can critique the art, imagining itself objective. 

I can venture in a bit more, and begin to encounter the energy of the piece--the local weather, the strength of current. There is some rawness and uncertainty there, where preconceptions begin to fall apart and my own edges biodegrade. There is a pull to "go native" and walk deeper into my own not-knowing. Answering that call is agreeing to encounter the strange and powerful Eden of emotion...energy in motion, directly experienced...the ride, in all its highs, lows, curves and pits, pulling memories along like cars I can step into and examine in a different light. This is the danger and excitement that keeps most people away, back behind a fence. It's also the place of true opening and resolution, of break-it/make-it. 

Stepping into such sonic complexity reveals something very simple--the actual space and nature of myself.

I notice that notes, sounds and voids are rising, bursting, washing through me...that they come from me, for me, each a personality full and complete and unafraid to be itself in the silence and chorus of other perfect voices. I no longer have edges. I no longer protect myself, though the heights are still dizzying and the depths just as inky. Somehow I survive all this bursting and dying. I realize that the colors and forms of these melodies are endless, and that in this deep space, they weave themselves into amazing constructs for my enjoyment. I watch as swelling sounds explode skyward as the petals of a flower, born from a spiral of joy...pure, pure joy. They are color, they are light, texture and taste divine! This is the land of predistinction, the place of crossed languages, where no analogy is necessary and genuine generosity is bathed in. "Oh my god" can't touch this free-flowing awe.

And...this is what I am.

How simple, how simple is that?

I am nothing but the capacity, the overflowing potential for song, and would still be if "I" chose to step out in front of an oncoming train. This is THE experience. Fear doesn't get any scarier, excitement any more exciting than this. So "I" rest. I understand that I can do nothing but let go down here, and that any attempt to fight it is a source of confusion, if the very struggle itself is not seen as the beautiful and temporary condition that it actually is. To really let go is to see. To see is to really let go. Things deepen.

All of this from intent listening...and the same (but flavored differently) through any other sensual gateway...which all have one thing in common: the nameless, tasteless, utterly transparent this.

Active Beauty

Eventually, I'm going to write a book on what it is to be a "Sensual Contemplative". I adopted the description immediately upon reading the following passage from my friend James Corrigan's book, An Introduction To Awareness, while in the bathtub one morning:

It is interesting to note that so-called Transcendentalists--poets, essayists, and philosophers--have historically been the most minutely detailed and intimately connected observers of, and celebrants of, life; rather than the most geekish analyzers of its 'transcendental' structure. One thinks of a Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, or Dickenson, not as engineers hard-pressed to reverse-engineer existence, but rather deeply contemplative and sensual individuals who wanted nothing more than to savor and celebrate the intricate flavors of, and their curiosity toward, existence. Their goal was not to "get to the bottom" of it, but to fully engage it, in contradistinction to those around them who saw themselves as separate and apart from "Nature".

I remember getting an "aha" chill from my head to my toes, in spite of the hot water. Never mind all the distinguished company--I knew I had found the taste of my own calling in James' adjectives. Full engagement does seem to be the point of living, here.

Writing about it is sometimes incredibly difficult. A million repeated attempts still can't capture the essence of This in its entirety--all I do is split myself a million times--and a certain astonishing loveliness lies in the fact that I can do just that, and remain whole.

I'll save the most juicy stuff for that book. But beauty has been much on my mind, so let me do a quick, loose sketch...

Sensuality is "bodying" in awareness, of and with all available senses. Sensuality is commonly associated with "sexuality" (the advertised variety), and although everything sexual is indeed included in what I am trying to describe, there is a deeper, wider field of experience in which genitalia are but minor conduits of erogenous energy. The world, in fact, is full of an intimacy both erotic and altruistic, desiring and giving at once, born when one is willing to be a union of total fullness and utter individuation.

There is heightened physical sensation, as well as deep sensitivity to shifting thought/feeling arising in and through cells and organs. I think of this motion as a sort of energetic language, in which all elements of oneself are in flowing communication--local physical organism, environment, and beyond--as far "out" or "in" as one is willing to extend. Boundaries between the sense-pathways loosen, and a kind of synesthesia (joining of senses) can happen.

Contemplation is far more than thinking or mentally processing data. It is intricately entwined with sensuality in that it is actively listening, tasting and opening within the field, the entire presence of self-in-moment. It dilates and contracts like the pupil of an eye, effortlessly, unplanned. Logical thought happens, a pale shadow of the larger intuition and cross-languaging going on. Ideas appear, but always shimmering with the countless threads connecting them to everything else. Contemplating is being completely present to what is. What is, in spite of all the varying elements, is one, incredibly obvious non-thing.

A "sensual contemplative" could simply be a human with a superhighway between the left and right hemispheres of the brain...or a mystic shaken out of the slumber of illusion...or a madwoman. All of these descriptions seem apt at one time or another. None of them can touch the act, the fact, the sacrifice and celebration of being, here. The point of all this deep feeling is the sheer beauty of it. Beauty is always the "trigger", the attraction, the embrace.

Again, I'm speaking of a different order of beauty than smoothness, symmetry, or waist-to-hip ratio. I'm talking about the sensation and awareness of beauty that precedes and outlives a judgment call. I'm talking about the gorgeousness that is literally in the eye of the beholder, a touch so deep that one is what one sees, hears, feels, smells--"I" and "That" express the same beauty...which is, after all, what we are. It is an active, dynamic principle, rather than a static wish or image "over there".

Full engagement--with suffering, joy, humanity, spirit--happens when I am subsumed in this beautiful ongoing stream, where the past is gone but always here, transforming, and the future never but always here, transforming. The motion is so eternal that it's still. The space behind is so vast that it allows for a perfectly earthy, intimately felt sense of location that I tend to call "me". How can this be? I don't know. 

Give It Back

Most of us are running a virus in our mental/emotional background--a piece of malware, really, working its way into almost every waking moment. Fully implanted by the time we are teens, the directive is: Get something out of life.

"Life" is our interaction with various facets of self--people, places and things. As we move through the world and it moves through us, we habitually try to add objects and concepts to "me" which represent security, sensation and power. Once we are able to find food, shelter, clothing and some basic form of affection, we want more safety, more experience, more respect. We want wisdom, too, if it promises greater comfort and better feelings. Because--god forbid--we might miss out, not fully actualize, be alone forever, have bad teeth, etc., etc. We will cease to exist, and then all will be lost! Seize the day, kill that time, and leave a legacy--or else.

Generally speaking, we don't get the kind of attention and reassurance we prefer from trees, rocks or the wind, so we try to get it from our fellow humans. If security, sensation and power were physical commodities like water or clothing, we would fiercely compete for them. They exist only within us. Still, we try very hard to "get" these feelings from other people, as if security was a fence someone could build, or power a cloak of self-confidence someone could wrap around our shoulders (there, there!).

Crazy--almost everyone is seeking like this. We're trying to grab something from each other that doesn't exist. No one has this stuff--not one! Security, sensation and power are spontaneous, natural, holistic expressions which, like love and trust, can't be bought, stolen or forged. The belief, however, that the world (an "other") is something to be used, to prop us up, make us cooler, hotter or more immune to mortality is deeply embedded. We think of relationships as investments, as something we do in hopes of a big return for our time and trouble. Meanwhile, our partner in this crime is hoping for an equal return. I ask you--how can you give what you don't believe you have? How can you get a "state" of being that is only sourced in you, and which, furthermore, you have zero control over?

When we are fourteen, or sixteen or twenty (and beyond), there is a terrible hollowness inside that holds the cusp of adulthood, the myths of our parents and culture and all the intensity of Being combined. Steeped deeply in the viral division solution, we are too young, perhaps, to directly face all that fear and longing, and so throw it outward, hoping to somehow catch a miracle of beauty, of raw strength and approval from that oceanic condition we live in, but feel so separate from. Cast. Cast. Cast. We may land just enough to keep us fishing, to fortify the belief that something will come along to really care for us, grant us what we never had, bring us healing and balm for our loneliness. We hope, before we die, to get that elusive Something out of life.

This hopeful, desperate youth within us never goes away. Ever. We learn, in time, to be well-adjusted, to manage it, dumb it down, numb it out. Most of us divorce this wild creature, on some level, as it is simply too problematic, emotional, and occasionally self-destructive. We think we are adults, until in the depths of some argument with reality--usually someone we love--out comes the most rebellious, immature drama we could ever hate! (Ah. Thought I was rid of the brat.)

Not ever. But with proper care, the brat can grow up, becoming a mysterious ally. Eternal Spring is the heart of this creature...a well of passion, a sparkling morning to get you through a very dark night. Proper care? All your love, immense patience, that wisdom you thought would get you somewhere. This is the place to plant it.

Take your wild child for a walk and feel what it is to let sensation be given. It is nothing she needs to wring out of the woods, the rain, the air. There is nothing, anywhere, better or other than this. Sit with him and feel the power of this kind of vulnerability, the fact that direct and thorough love is inescapable. Let her understand that security lies in the freedom of being a shifting point in a whole field of them--all equal, all relevant, all valid, all illusory. Remind him that here he is, even in all emptiness.

It's futile to spout platitudes, because wild creatures need the holism of synesthetic language. They want to understand in their bones, in their loins, in the very reason they are present. So in order to demonstrate the important fact that the "Love (Life) you take is equal to the Love (Life) you make", ask your coltish one about its gifts...the things she resonates with, the things he must do to express all that pent-up passion. Does she want to paint? Does he want to drum? Write, swim, act, sing, dance, say, do, what? Listen. 

Honor this courage by doing just that thing...safely, respectfully, with intensity. In other words, make Life--not for attention, not to prove anything, not to get anywhere. Just put the notes, the cells, the colors and steps out there, in the void, like a painting made of sand...for no reason, other than the listening to the longing of your buried heart. Afterward, take the time to notice that here you are, even in all fullness.

Do it again.

Eventually, there will be no distance between the giving and receiving, Spring and Autumn--no imaginary hollow to fill with stuff, no justification for the beauty you do and see, no avoiding the inevitable pain or joy. There is a purity and efficiency here, not conducive to viral invasions of the psyche. Spacious fullness, with a well. :)

Is This Trip Really Necessary?

Yes, yes it is. I know because it has happened, is happening, will happen. I know only from the place where nothing is actually happening. From here, no. Not necessary.

Thought is the trip...my god, the prisons, the palaces, the amusement parks! Questions, answers, constructs, deconstructing. Seeking. Growing. Dying. Exhilarating, exhausting.

(Just now, the music in the background of my typing: Mind can't comprehend the magnitude of the moment...)

...So it builds, and destroys, and through the replaying of these stories, creates a journey I can call "my life". Never mind that when I turn the spotlight of thought upon itself, I can't find it. Not a trace. People say, "This book/house/life is a product of my thinking, my imagination." Languaging and imaging, plus some kind of physical manipulating, makes stuff, and more thinking...or so the story goes.

Well, all the thinking in the world can't explain itself. Standard thought eternally avoids the holy-jumping-off-place, where the journey takes a sudden dive into the void. Usually, it's some kind of sales pitch that resists the pull to the edge, armors and defends its position. Sometimes, a line of thought hardens into a philosophy or religion. Even if the bars of such a cage were once relatively easy to escape, maniacally devoted followers will have fortified it beyond all recognition. It hangs like a desperate, temporal monument to eternity on the edge of The Edge, until it goes the way of all such dead ends.

When thinking matures, it tends to simplify, for efficiency's sake. It may begin to consider itself, to entertain its own paradoxical nature, notice its creation of and dependency upon duality. This is a slippery place. Thinking begins to doubt itself as the font of all wisdom, the healer, or the pioneer. It isn't as special as it once believed, and, in fact, seems to be born to create problems with one hand, which it must solve with the other. The place where thinking is most useful is in the realm of practical being--how to get from point A to B on a map, how to add up the phantom digits of currency in exchange for a meal, how to make a comfortable bed for a tired body. Thinking, it turns out, is a great innkeeper, but a lousy psychotherapist, shaman, or relationship advisor.

Intellect is, however, a Way. Thinking can invent and lead itself to the gate, and take the final step through it...into dissolution. The gate is beyond any moral or spiritual position, and is indeed a kind of "positionless position". Standing in that invisible entrance, no position can really describe love, dreaming, trees or war. It can't locate a beginning or end, because it can never get outside itself. It can only ceaselessly divide. As great a muscle as thought may be, it is only, and always, thinking.

Then what? What a thought!

A leap to a death. The church falls off the edge. The angel opens her eyes, and becomes a holistic emptiness in the middle of a drinking-in, pouring-out dream. The broken pieces of thinking lying around are like interesting fossils--beautiful, judgmental structures, fear-based, love-based. They have nothing to do with discovering where she has always been. 

Fresh thoughts appear, generous and innocent. What is this sight that is the start and finish of a nautilus? Is it thinking, dreaming or both/neither? Suddenly, thinking is poetry, pilgrimages to its own vulnerability, forays in which the rest of itself--body, heart, world--are not only invited, but reveled in. There's no packing armor anymore, no unsafe territory, no looking out for an enemy, no competition among different forms of mind. Thinking and feeling are choiceless as weather.