I want to feel my way into this a little…I want to try to communicate something about intimacy. Let me share with you now, that when I try to put this into words, above all else I am sharing something completely personal to me. I have absolutely no certainty that this will make a jot of sense. It almost feels unnatural to share it, but I’ll be a daredevil for now and perhaps I’ll trust that the more personal and uncensored I am, the greater the likelihood of saying something universal. See if you can see where I’m trying to point to….but if you can’t, it’s just because I’m not getting my hands on the right words. I’ll start with an old memory.
When I was a young child, I used to play this game, sometimes alone, sometimes with other children. I’d pretend I was swimming under water, lying on our kitchen floor, pushing myself along with my arms, through the imaginary shipwreck of our kitchen table and chair legs. And then, in the midst of the laughter and effort of this, I would look up into an inside corner of a piece of furniture or some dark spot……and a feeling would come over me that what I was looking at was utterly private, anonymous…..as if I was disturbing a little piece of life that was never usually revealed by awareness. And then an urge would come to just stay there and look, followed by a feeling that this unexpected little moment of unintended experience was absolutely equal with every other normal experience in everyday life.
There was just this feeling that every experience in life simply had to be “equal” with any other experience, no matter the difference in how widely lived any experience was. This is the best I can do, I’m afraid.
I bring this up, because this feeling of “equal-ness” that I would get as a child when playing around (the same feeling would come over me when putting a mirror on the floor and making a new upsidedown world to explore) is very close to what I would call “private experience”….the two things go hand in hand really. By “private experience”, I am trying to point to that moment when triangulation stops….when we stop knowing what we are looking at. In truth, we only “know” our experience by bringing a third party of thought, of another’s authority into the equation. If I’m honest, when it is just me and what is before me, there is only intimate, unknown experience. It is seen but it isn’t known. And so, in that moment, there is a feeling of equal-ness….a feeling that if this moment lasted for ever, even looking up into that mysterious underside of a cushion, there would be not a single secret in life left to discover………and with all this, the utterly obvious fact that there is no such thing as a “wrong” moment.
Constant Voice 
I get it. That was so well put. Thank-you Jamie.
Hi Ken,…thanks so much for connecting…..this is such a lovely thing to try to share with each other….no reason to share it at all really, but on the other hand, there is something so natural about it……it’s what we all always wanted to say before we had anything to say. Thank you.
Thank you Jamie, this is beautiful. reminds me of experiences I had as a child. I am very happy to have found your blog (thanks to Jeff Foster’s FB page), and I will continue to check in and read more of what you write.
Aloha from Maui.
Aloha Summer….lovely to get your message………yes, it was just us and Life back then, wasn’t it….so direct, so vast and defenseless……..that mysteriousness right at our fingertips….who needs a guide to life when all we have ever loved is life itself!
It has always just been life, but somehow we turned away, believing there was something more impotent then this moment. In truth, it is impossible to turn away from life, for we are life itself. Actually, it’s more like we started a game of make believe and then forgot we were pretending. How silly of us 🙂 Thanks to my Mom and the way she raised us, I never took the game to seriously.
I have a great passion fro exploring the place where truth and parenting meet. I am always trying to find ways to explain what was different about my childhood, about how my mom was, and what it felt like just being allowed to be. What if children were allowed to stay as the vastness, the mystery? What would that look like?
I don’t find many spiritual teachers talking about this, and it is always what I want to talk about.
Hi Summer, this is really beautifully put and I absolutely share your question about this vastness and parenting. As a parent myself I don’t even begin to know how I might play a part in this…but my instinct is just to be led by my own child, allowing moments to deepen and linger, allowing curiosity to lead us into the fabric of each moment together, whatever that means. Children are right there in that “place”, totally available to play…..free from any sense of obligation or responsibility towards their experience……and in that “unpulled-ness” that sense of vastness feels welcomed in and becomes a regular guest. Thanks again….for me, really, this is so full of interest.
beautifully put. we are all just pretending to be grown up aren’t we ?
Thank you Prudence…..yes, it does feel like that doesn’t it. And that pretending begins very innocently as a child when we trust what we are told so completely…trust that there really is something called “growing up”…as if that is even a possibility? And deep down, “growing up” never really made any sense because we always new that there was never any way of leaving where we always are. Thanks so much for writing.