Barefoot Friendships

There's nothing like being barefoot in a friendship. While barefooted, or fully present in the moment you're with a friend, your spirit can connect to the depths of the channels you both have experienced in a rush of storytelling and understanding. It can be like experiencing two lives simultaneously while the empathy of your experience brings you closer together.

Friendship, to me, is a story of life forming from its rawest elements: emotion, humor, questions, hopes, wonders, fears, loves. It changes our outlook on life and enriches it with an understanding that nothing is perfect in an idyllic way. It has to be perfect in our own way, that is to say it has the potential to be perfect in the path of understanding a coming together after communicating the centers of our lives, no matter what place they are in.

As in a spirit of camaraderie, therein lies the knowing of not knowing. Life has a way of surprising us, moving us into scary places where our hearts are tense with feeling and rent with disappointment. Together in friendship, our lives form where emptiness tries to pull us apart. Solitude brings us new perspective. Maybe there will be a way through this misunderstanding that allowed me to accept the complex truth of mutual realities. Maybe I can laugh and know the intimate places of my soul because a friend brought me there and loved me there.

To trust is to nurture the freedom of communicated experience with each other. Then we can be barefoot, present, and alive. Alive to really uncover what we knew we could be had we only released the moment we thought we knew how it would all work out.

A Path For the Heart

The road less traveled is often quoted when one is proud of the unique path they have chosen. To blaze a trail or follow the way with less footprints often gives us a journey with a more complex landscape. If life were a musical composition, we could either follow the melody line or expand on what is simple and elaborate on the tones and tempos as the music notes rise and fall. This is more than taking a short cut to make something easier, this is taking a path from what opens our lives to creativity, connection, and challenge that helps us live a little bit more and understand that sometimes it is the path to hearing our hearts and our  history.

We often have to take a detour from the path we were taking because life is always under construction. The detour can also be our choice as Robert Frost's poem explains. When we take off our shoes and creep forward towards the frontiers of our comfort levels, we become pioneers discovering how surprisingly beautiful a life can be lived when it isn't always planned out. To some this might be wanderlust, others improvisation, and without both we cannot chart new waters in our lives.

Improvisation. As a part of art or comedy or music, I think part of it comes from an inner restlessness that comes from being tired of the same old routines or in other words, boredom. Another part probably comes from the reaches of the human spirit - exhaustion, terror, rage, inspiration, speechless experiences that can only be evoked through the stirrings of the soul that come out in art. It seems to be the way of creativity, the way of reaching into the rhythm of one's body or one's community and moving forward in response to these pulls that guide us down our own road less traveled.

Sometimes interruptions create these forks in the road that give us the choice of how fast our lives are going. Life always looks like it's going fast when looking through the photo album and through the rear view mirror, but that's because we're seeing all that has happened all at once rather than over the time it took for us to experience these things. I'm not saying we have to blow all over the place like a balloon in the wind, but I'm thinking that if we release some of our routine to our senses, our surroundings and feel our soul take hold, we can begin to find the beating drum of our heartbeat. With that we can possibly realize the human possibility where peace and harmony based on each of our souls, pieces of the diverse puzzle of humanity can be real as the riffs we play from our lives.

balloon in the wind

fun with photography

your own path by water

or land

A New Day, A New Tomorrow

This morning while working my shift as a caregiver at hospice, I stood near the bedside of one of our residents while she passed away. To me, death is a very mysterious thing that connects us to all that is living on this planet while bringing us in more of an awareness of our humanity. The peacefulness of this passing combined with the hopeful and mournful expressions of grief and transition in the life of our resident's family gave me a deeper look at the experiences we feel from the overwhelming emotions of life's permanent changes.  Rains can fall for a long time, but when they clear leaving a misty cloud or rainbow so that the sun can open the heavens to the clear skies above, they show the hope that life can continue to grow and emerge after the water has nourished and strengthened our souls.

Our lives are never just one experience after another. One forms while another one is still continuing to shape our life. It's almost as if the ambiguity that allows us to feel hope at the same time we feel fear is the antidote to creativity that may be stunted by boredom. It creates a greater sense of humanity as the complex assortment of our sensory experiences is our entryway to being our truest self.  It changes everything as the light of day becomes the sunset that bridges the gap between day and night in our temporary moments.

As time comes and goes, moments are found to be measured in what we feel, what we live through, and what we remember.  It's as though the present becomes our forge for memories and our perspective, what we choose to do with what we have and how we learn from our past. As Calvin once told Hobbes as written out by Bill Watterson, "the problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present." Perhaps, though, this conundrum is not a problem, but a chance to take hold and live for the present where everything becomes clear for what has been and what will be in how we experience our lives in our interconnected world.

The rain clears slowly while the sun becomes a source of hope as the love we can feel brightens our fear.

A Time To Plant

As the rain fell today, I thought of the trees I helped plant in Hamlin Beach State Park on Saturday during a statewide event held for New York State Parks called I Love My Park Day. As an initiative to improve the air quality of our planet, the park leadership has worked to plan trees in an area of the park that would become a small forest if the young saplings don't become food for the deer first.

Trees are the lungs of our planet as they regulate the gas exchange in the atmosphere surrounding Earth and provide us much of the oxygen that we need to live vibrant lives. In planting some fifteen to twenty young trees, I began to feel connected. I often feel connected to life when I give of myself to others, but when giving of myself to the planet I felt myself look up to the sky and down to the ground beneath my feet. I was becoming part of more than humanity, I was becoming alive amongst everything that lives.  This was different than paying attention to cows when helping them go through a routine milking. This was giving life to something new that had the potential to change the lives of many animals and people.

In a rural setting along Lake Ontario, trees are homes to animals and closer to the water they protect the land. In planting trees,  I had moments of connection with the land. It had been wet and muddy from recent rains making the planting a messy, yet enriching process. The clean soil surrounding roots that would take in this water showed me the base of life for these young plants much the way we can form connections with those who we have lived and grown with as they form our base and help us know or core or heart.

Planting ourselves in life is a hard process in a world moving frequently with little space for rest. Sometimes to survive we have to plant things in our hearts and our souls if we want to be deeply rooted in life while accepting the flux of movement of the human race. The trees of love, hope, peace, charity, and empowerment can be nurtured by our actions as people are lifted to hold each other as one family. I will write more about experiences that can only be felt by the heart and by the soul of life as the things cannot be felt by the mind once they begin growing in our lives in future posts. It is my hope we can nurture the soil of our lives through our work with what we can bring to life.

Trees growing in the rain. (Note: This is not Hamlin Beach State Park)

A Story Told Is A Life Shaped

One of the first gifts we are given is our voice. It is with our voice that our individual place in the history of humanity is understood by others and hopefully, by our selves. With the voice we're given, we forge an identity that becomes our very sense of what we're going to bring to life over the years we walk across this planet. As children, we are often exposed to the ways others live, the environments of our world, and the people who are our family and our neighbors. It is in a story we find others, we find life, and maybe most important, we find what we connect to.

Growing up, I heard stories that were illustrated by people acting out the actions that tell something about life and as I fell asleep while they were being read by the tender baritone that my dad was given to share with others. During this time, I connected to music that had lyrics formed into stories told as they were sung to a guitar strumming and a banjo twanging. It was the music that had its roots in the soil of gardens, its range across the heart of humanity's experience as the sun rose and set, and that found me connecting to others that are part of life with me.

In a story, we can grow with characters, hear the rhythm that pulses daily in our hearts, recognize our dilemmas and struggles, and continue to ask questions that lead to discovery. We tell stories to children so they can expand the images they have of life in their minds. Imaginations are formed through what we tell them through expressive, vivid, imagery that broaden a perspective and permit a new understanding to form and later be shared to the collective experience that is humanity.

Once a story ends, our place that we put in it, doesn't have to. A part of the story can light a flame or plant a bulb that we can kindle or nurture until it becomes a deep inspiration. We can sometimes only see other parts of life through story. In words spoken we can hear a story in harmony with illustration or in the rhythm that connects our lives to others.  The stories in our hearts from families, friends, other cultures, give meaning and color to the very purpose of life. Their essence touch our soul, reach our minds, and give depth to what we reach for when we sing together to unite as one people in a shared, similar experience, or awareness of what we can do to share life and a light through for each other.

In the story, we see the journey becoming the pages we illustrate. How we use our voice allows us to tell our story as we travel together. We need not tell the whole story of our lives. We can tell the parts that make us who we are, where we are, as we become alive as we relate and understand in new ways in new light whether it's firelight, flashlight, fluorescent light, sunlight, moonlight, or candle light. This is the light of a story, no matter how dark, that we begin to speak out of as our voice becomes part of our stories.

A story can be our bridge to the meaning of our lives built from imagination,
connection to reality, and new understanding.

Connecting Through Walking

All over the world people walk to get from place to place. If they can't walk, they can get from place to place with people who are walking along with them. Walking isn't something that can last a moment because it is something that gets us from place to place over a period of time, but it is something that brings us to experience places, people, and history in ways that are often transcendent.

People have walked on the moon, to represent their opposition to injustice, to bring attention to something that afflicts humanity, to grow deeper in a sense of spirituality or faith, to bond with a friend, family member, or partner, and often to be connected to something or someone important to them. Though many of us cannot walk, we can still experience its liberating power through the movement we make through life. The fluid motion of movement draws one into life and can transform someone's experience of their day or life. Walking along with someone in crisis or sharing in their company can be a way to tune into part of someone else's life, in their movements or even in their feelings when expressed in strides or other means. It brings people closer, more in touch with themselves, and often with each other, and becomes a common bond that has been forged because of what has been shared.

To me, walking is an experience that is close to the heart as it connects me to my soul by feeling the parts of life all around me. When walking with another person, I can hear them better, because I am doing something with them and this sometimes helps me connect to my own humanity. When walking alone, in sadness or in grief, I can feel the larger world reconnecting with me, and showing me more of the universe. In the same vein, I can often feel the parts of life expressed by what lies around me, through the hope expressed in a colorful mural that I pass, trees growing along a neighborhood street, the sadness of a neglected area that is just passed through, and joys of laughter I hear in people playing, dancing, and living near me. It is just a soulful expression of life to move and feel my senses feel and reach to this place of life.

In walking, I can challenge myself to know myself more, to grow through exertion, or to belong to a community or a friendship. It is the greater feeling of joining others in movement, hopefully forward, that allows for me to experience who it is that I am, and where it is that I want to be, amongst the many sights, sounds, and complexities of life.

People walking from place to place in 30th Street Station in Philadelphia

Water Reaching The Depths

Water flows along brooks and rests in tarns in mountains that reach into the sky. Its captivating power has a way of connecting with us, perhaps because so much of our bodies contain this mysterious substance. As I listen to water flowing or pattering on the fly of a tent, it amazes me how the natural sound reaches me where I need to be soothed, and allows me to reflect on the movement of life and the wideness of this planet. 

In many ways, folk melodies strummed from a guitar, mandolin, banjo, or plucked from a fiddle have a remarkably similar effect on me. As the melodies join the harmonies of a vocalist singing from the raw, evocative roots that touch the heart, and reverberate within the soul with memory and melancholy. Such music can move me to tears either from sadness or from recollection, and even profound joy linking the waters of life to the mellow richness of a folk guitarist singing to the cultures and to the bowels of the earth. 

These melodies and waters form a well for our spirit to be reached, and maybe shared. In this well, the depths of our dreams, our histories, our relationships can be drawn and bring us together or more in touch with ourselves. Why are we drawn to waterfalls, rapids, and crashing waves? The fast movement of water is like the fast movement of life and cannot be slowed, but can be savored and experienced with it's full force and blast of emotion and heart that makes us feel alive. As the melodies reach us, and inspire us, we can form them to mean what they will for our lives. From splashing in puddles and laughing as we dive deeper into the salty waters of the ocean discovering the soul of the earth to rising again as we grow more aware of what this life brings by wading in and embracing what is there. 

Niagara Falls - Summer 2010 

Light From the Soul

Life's precious moments cannot be held onto, because like water, they are cherished and felt, before slipping away. The memories may linger, but whatever was happening gives way to whatever will happen, or is happening. Our lives can be touched and forever changed by the momentous or the quiet murmur that strikes us where we are able to receive and know it before it passes away.

The human soul can be evoked, and evoke as music or art. Music as a force can drive into our souls and rouse us into action like nothing else. The soaring of melody and the undercurrent of harmony may mount our hearts and leave us in tears for music is one of the few expressions where we can feel solidarity with our sister, understanding with our brother, angry with our condition, or jubilant with the connections we forge with our ancestors and the celebrations we have with each other. As music is created from the conditions that we feel in our soul, it is shared by those that sing or play with the composer, and maybe even embellished as the community and kinship is formed. 

Holiday music can also create connections to ourselves and to others. This afternoon as I sat in the Hochstein Performance Hall in  downtown Rochester, New York and heard Madrigalia, a Chamber Chorus from the city, sing for "A Cup of Good Cheer." The festive music really illuminated the overcast day with a brightness that infected the children listening to this program of Live From Hochstein. As the soaring voices reached the balcony where I was sitting, I saw the children sitting nearby with their heads resting in their arms looking out over the balustrade. One began bouncing energetically during the jazzy rendition of Jingle Bells as the warmth of the seasonal tunes burst forth to resonate with those celebrating the season's joy and hopefulness. Without words, we can express our simple joyfulness and excitement or thoughtfulness that brings us together to connect with the music and tradition of the time. 

During the moments of song over the course of the hourlong concert, the expressions of Christmas were found filling the performance space with wonder and reverence creating and evoking images of the nativity and decorations that adorn edifices this month. Without these expressions at this time for these people the soul could not have been illumined in that way as the collective voices sang out to share the warmth and gladness of a moment of memory that formed before giving way to whatever came next. 

A serene peaceful scene of snow and pine.