Contemplation & Flow
To experience something gladly, paying attention with love.
The Beginning; I often refer to this phrase of measure, as in, since the beginning, from the beginning, etc. I do this as a matter of encouragement, saying to you that what you most need is already present within. My propensity to encourage is an example of something within me endowed since the beginning. Anytime I include such phraseology, I am referring to the powerful simplicity of present grace.
I want to tell you about my brother. To begin, I share a somewhat incomplete poem, composed on a long walk as I thought about him. It is incomplete in my mind as it relates to its inadequacy in speaking to the reality of this man.
A brother I have,
father and mother
a shared bond.
Deeply I trust,
even deeper I respect
this brother in blood.
Trust and respect I give,
but earned both are.
It’s true, I suppose,
that over time
what you say
and what you do
come together in truth.
A powerful thing it is to say
a wonderful thing it is to claim
I trust your truth.
This attempt of putting words to what I know of this man came in the year after his daughter Molly’s death. Molly was the most courageous person I’ve ever known, and her spirit was bright, loving, and compassionate for all others. And right there in courage with her were her mom and her dad.
In spite of medical prediction, Molly made it beyond her 39th year (she was the longest-living liver transplant recipient at the time of her death). Those years were brutal to her body. When I consider such reality as the perpetual sickness of the entire life of a child, I am sadly amazed at the ease with which we humans give our energy to the insignificant; things in life and work made dreadfully significant by our false belief that we can exert control. Such belief is unreal, because it is formed in the space of false expectation: untruth we too freely allow.
In the last months of our mom’s life, my brother and I worked together around key components of securing credible care for her, most of which fell under his watchful eye, which was a loving duty well beyond just his geographical closeness to her. Being personalities of very different preferences and gifts, we worked well together in the processes required for mom’s care. I have been privileged through the years to be inspired by the grace of my brother’s strength.
It is a graceful privilege to know someone for many years. My brother is four years my senior. We therefore didn’t do a lot of things together growing up. I do remember a lot of front yard wiffle ball games; totally played within his situational rulebook to assure his victory! We were both in our thirties when we became close, spending quality time fishing, allowing us both to find respite from some parts and parcels of reality.
My brother and sister-in-law are, as they say, tough as nails. They have had to be, for the sake of all their children. They have both come to forgive reality. If it were not so I would not see the generosity and love that flow through them. Molly’s love and compassion was learned from her parents as well as gifted to her since the beginning. And she too was tough as nails.
Here is what I know: My brother is true. For this he makes no apology. I am not referring to opinions or any other superfluous view. I know his Trueness. I have seen its steadfastness all my life. His wade through both joy and suffering has washed him onto a path where he contemplatively walks. This is what I know, the grace of this man.
To get to what has been present, within you, since the beginning, it is critical to learn the tenacious call to forgive reality, to forgive everything.
Washed into the OpenThe journey of learning,
experientially,
road without end, reality.
To forgive such, necessary
for the sake of flow;
limitless, uninhibited freedom.
Experience is a teacher.
But do we learn?
Rhythm, the acquisition,
the purchase of mastery
with the currency given
since our beginning.
Yet, what do we master?
Surely not others,
probably not ourselves.
The mastery, less about expertise,
more about tireless contemplation;
compassion for oneself,
and all,
as One.
And within contemplative freedom
we learn
to walk
in the cadence
of simplicity and truth,
the reality of our own currency,
our poetry and our love.
Realness, buried under the sediment
of expectation.
Spirit, attentive to the strokes
of Trueness,
sluicing deposits of limitation.
And, stepping
into the stream
of who we really are,
we are washed into the open,
delivered yet again onto
our own path.
–J. Brunson
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