Month: July 2023

It feels good to sleep between the right sheets, especially when the weather is hot. Apparently there is some science behind this. While the specifics get complicated based on material type, the concept is fairly straightforward: a balance between thread count and weave creates for a cooler sleeping experience. The more sheets breathe, the better humans rest.

I can’t help but pause to consider the language used to describe a sheet’s ability to let the human skin respire during repose. As we breathe, so do our sheets. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise; sheets are, after all, just reusable skins we manufacture to help our biologic ones maintain homeostasis when we enter nightly states of semi-hibernatory suspension. Natural selection has adjusted for many things, over millions of years. And the largest human organ – the skin – is an amazing feat of evolutionary manifestation. But humans still need supplemental shells during our daily routines. We don’t just cloak ourselves because of modesty. We can’t survive in most climates, awake or not, without doing so.

Plenty of species don’t have this problem. They use hair, burrows, nests, even other bodies to maintain body warmth by night. They spread wings, flap ears, roll in mud, and use various other techniques by day to keep cool, to regulate. Sure, some four-legged friends tolerate knitted sweaters or blankets, depending on situation or odd human whim. For the most part, however, the natural world has not sacrificed organic solutions for manufactured ones. Humans seem to be the only species unable to survive without fabricated assistance.

This is not an idle critique; I’m pleased to wear clothing and sleep between percale, sateen, or cotton. There is nothing wrong with our requirement for attire. It demonstrates innovation, practicality, and plenty of flair and personality. What other species has figured out how to create enveloping spheres of protection around itself, changeable based on season, replaceable following repeated use? We are animals of verticality, our orientating centers of operation positioned at the very top of our physique. We conduct the business of daily life, for the most part, upright and awake. What we know matters most, what we can do with that knowledge, where it can take us and the planet we inhabit, how we are able to continuously respond to changing needs, predict futures, survive, and grow.

Hold on a second. There may indeed be other species that have figured out a thing or two about protection. Upon further reflection, my mind is now flooded with images of floral and faunal adaptability to weather and environment that make our clothing and bedding discoveries seem less impressive. I should be careful to differentiate between ingenuity and necessity. After all, humans never intentionally decided that we didn’t need body hair or woolen skin. We didn’t consciously, as a species, choose fire over fur. It just happened, as did the drive to knit, weave, cut, and sew natural and synthetic fibers into a myriad of physical shapes and sizes. We had to sort all that out – in order to survive.

But even that’s not quite right. Humans didn’t have to spread themselves out across the entire planet. We could have remained within a band or two of longitude and latitude that didn’t require complex adaptation. We might have been satisfied to keep our species scope and locale somewhat more circumspect.

That is clearly not our style. “Have consciousness will travel!” seems our motto. The infusion of thought and language has fueled an almost insatiable desire for movement. Unable to sit still, the human species has become obsessed with exploration, typically in and of the external world. A place that has not been trod by our footwear, on earth or outside our atmosphere, is a destination, somewhere we should go. It’s actually not a bad axiom, this restless drive to brave terra incognito. Discoveries abound because of it. So does our knowledge of the universe and its cosmos. Bipeds now fly, hover, and voyage to geographies unimaginable to previous species, generations, and millennia. We just need new types of shells, more innovative traveling shells and transportation skins, to take us to these places, and hopefully return us home.

“Home.” The word lands deep within. I feel it in my gut, despite the sensation from the soft chair on which I sit while I think about apparel, travel, and notions of returning. My skin, with its trillions of cells and sensors, appreciates the chair’s cushion, the shirt and shorts on my body, the fan blowing cooling air above my head. My sense of being, however, seeks something else. It recognizes home as something far different than walls, roof, and floor enclosing my rather feeble physical form. Nestled within that sensation of release I have in response to the idea of returning home lies a longing to belong to something well beyond my dermatologic border, a desire, nay, an awareness, that I already am part of something bigger, something more intricate, something more interwoven than the seamless layer of cells covering my unique constellation of sinew, organ, and physical structure. I am awareness, or at least that awareness, the knowing that my gut has which my brain does not. I am not simply a machine motored by physique, manufactured by genes, commanded by brain. There is not some little version of me, the proverbial homunculus, seated in a control tower within an encased hard shell balanced precariously atop my human verticality who is running the show. There is something more. My gut knows this. What type of envelope holds such awareness? What sort of skin, spiritual or ethereal, lets such awareness find inspiration? How thin is the skein of interconnection between my awareness, yours, and that of every living organism and creature respiring in one way or another in the world today?

I am beginning to realize that more threads in a life do not necessarily result in a better braid of being. At least when it comes to a sense of home, a more balanced weave between go and be may bring less bounded space for me to breathe.

Streams flow, emptying into earth, sky, and the continuous current of change.

“I’m tired of not speaking my mind.”

Someone said this to me recently, in defense of a rather blunt and somewhat hurtful comment they had made to someone else. The situational context mattered less, it seemed, than the individual’s need to “tell it like it is”, to be honest.

Truth is a tricky thing. It can sway under the weather and wonder of moments. Like blades of wheat reaching vertically in time’s fields, we move laterally in response to the winds of our days, bumping into each other, becoming entangled, forgetting to keep our attention on both the source of our yearning and the anchoring of our being. The sun shines generously, impartially, on us all. And yet we jostle and position for perspective as if somehow our roots can be transplanted in richer soil, longing for a loam that is free from our common ancestry, our collective existence.

I made a face while eating dinner the other day. My wife and I were sharing a meal inside a recently screened pergola we bought and built in our tiny yet fertile backyard. July has been growing hotter. Sitting outside after sunset in the peak of an Arizona summer seems a bit like a meal resting in a pan freshly removed from a stove’s heat. Volume sags. Presence pulses. The future is poignantly certain yet the moment oddly bursts with unworried relief, acceptance.

That’s when I took a bite of dinner, briefly chewed, and felt the muscles of my face alternately contract, relax, and turn slightly askew as I swallowed. The sequence was unrelated to any conversation; we were eating in silence. I was blissfully empty of thought. And then I swallowed and, as if spontaneously sprouting from a place of majestic nonchalance, a memory arose: how my father sometimes swallowed. This was no image, not some visual remembrance of Dad at a particular place and time. I was simply he. He was me. I was swallowing not as I remembered him doing but as he and I were, had, should be doing together, a gesture of concurrence manifest outside the landscape of time and separate identity. I felt and saw myself looking, acting, and feeling like him.

This hasn’t been the first of such fleeting fancies of blurred beingness. I’ve had a few similar experiences in recent months, a sensation akin to catching water droplets on outstretched hands beneath a cloudless overhead sky. Everything coalesces. Thought ceases. There is only the ineffable recognition of shared now.

I don’t know what is true. And I am increasingly cautious of speaking my mind. Because the reality of what, who, and how we are seems so much more complicated than what the narrative of our personal timeline suggests, the stories you and I construct inside the walls of our isolating identities about ourselves and each other. What does it mean to be honest? Is it helpful to release without filter the often unflattering and turbulent commentary generated by an ego’s memory field onto the outstretched vulnerability of another? It sure seems like the right thing to do when someone else releases part of their own troubled tumult. “Oh yeah?” a voice hollers inside. “You want to know the truth?” Writing those words here, I hear that voice inside my own head. It is a four or five-old’s, maybe my own four or five year-old’s, confronting some emotionally-charged challenge or perceived threat. It is joined by other young, frightened, or indignant expressions of defiant self-defense. They sound like taunts from the sidewalks and street corners of my youth. Sitting with them, however, I hear them merge, into a single plea for recognition, and then softly recede into the soundless posture of humanity sitting on the curb of summer dusk and just wanting to be understood, nay, to be held. We don’t want to fight. We have no desire to be arbiters of truth. We just want to know that truth exists, that it somehow is able to hold our hand, whisper in our heart, touch our spirits with its buoyant beauty.

Aaaahhhh. Release and relief just rippled across me. I can feel myself stretching once more, upwards, toward the dimensionless future, downwards, toward the interwoven past, and outwards, toward you.

What is your greatest fear? There is no shortage of reasons to be afraid, as life offers many challenges. Concern can accumulate in a lifetime like rings in a tree. Unlike arboreal additions, however, the anxieties which often encircle our awareness are quite different to the new growth girdling a maturing tree. One constricts. The other strengthens.

“We really need to try to be more open.”

As usual, my wife was direct and on point. We had just ridden a gondola up the side of a mountain, marveling at the summer majesty of the Colorado Rockies in response to the recent winter’s abundant snowfall. Our gondola ride had not be a quiet one; shortly before the doors closed in the boarding station, another couple had joined us, a much younger pair. When one of the two interlopers had apologized for disrupting what we thought was to be a trip of soft solitude, I had said something semi-welcoming. But our body language had undoubtedly communicated something very different: disappointment.

What a mistake! The couple was delightful. During the ten minute ride to an altitude of close to two miles above sea level, we learned a bit about their background, how they were spending a summer working remotely from the local mountain town, what they enjoyed about both this region and where they would be returning at summer’s end. The conversation enhanced our ride, our day, reminding us that nature’s glory is not always meant to be experienced in solitude. Better still, the interaction offered humbling counsel on the importance, even the vital place, of continuous engagement, receptivity.

It is so easy to close, to recoil, to seek internal cover in the face of each day’s fresh potential for frightening rebirth. It takes courage to turn and unfold, like a flower greeting the sun and elements, when we know not what harm may befall such vulnerable baring. Far easier is a posture of caution, defense. The array of potential provocation loitering beyond transparency’s threshold can be paralyzing.

That’s where faith enters. What I fear, while understandably relevant, should be secondary to what I believe. Because cradled within my beliefs lie the aspirations of my being, the hopes of my existence, the reasons I find during my most private moments to live, to become someone better today than the person I was yesterday. How I act should be guided by what I believe.

Is this about religion? Wisdom traditions based on values promoting positive action beyond selfish place pour steadying foundations beneath frequently unstable human footing. But belief can also include spirituality and sensibility that defies categorization while resonating with purpose and intent. We are not alive for ourselves. We could not live without others, whether of human or other biological form. It makes no sense to build layers of defense when our very being depends on connection.

And yet we do it, or at least I do, far too often. A voice inside me may call for caution. My imagination may fill my spirit with prospects of misfortune, for myself or for those I love. It is easy to lose oneself in a narrative of separateness, of independence. In response to what I might fear, I can construct borders that divide, that compress, that deliver my best self to the clenched grip of my sometimes worst instincts.

Faith – a belief in something greater – liberates. Based on trust instead of proof, it offers no guarantees, only the awareness that the gift of being is shared. Everything is interrelated, interconnected, even interdependent. I can chose to believe that, or I can live within a circumscribed shell of suspicion, of deliberate discretion. The path to peace and growth is illuminated by that daily decision.

I am learning how to turn from identification of my fears towards a more affirming realization of my faith. The experience, however fleeting, feels freeing.