we fall in love with people when we allow ourselves to be our selves in their company.
just like we love the ocean because the ocean allows us to be at peace.
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once i read a story that was roughly: a kid thought his friend’s bicycle was awesome! there was something special about it. the friend took care of it and he seemed very happy about it. so the kid was given the exact same bicycle. but his friend’s bike still seemed to be more special. the friend was just so excited and he seemed to be having a good time even when he was just cleaning the bike. the lesson was: what makes something special is the quality of attention we give to it.
there’s a difference between glancing at something with disdain, with indifference, and with longing. all of these reactions are pre-set, the emotion is muddled with the viewer’s judgment, attachment and repulsion. how we view something colors our perception of it.
i’m learning an important lesson in life: don’t overfeed fish and don’t overwater plants. yet don’t neglect them to starvation either.
i’m learning that we can re-late, look with love and nurturing, recognize the natural aliveness of everything around us. that everything around us can tell us about themselves without us needing pre-set strategies. that i can relate and communicate with myself and all outside of me, without necessarily viewing it as separate.
what changes when we become enamored and when we become bored with the same thing or person? it seems like the quality of attention we give to things, the interest, the focus, the curiosity to find out more, to allow this entity to be itself and tell us about it- i want to say that is what love is.
i like the analogy of the sun giving energy to all life as an aspiration of what love may look like.
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sometimes there is a dropping away of the boundaries, the moment when the room that houses me is not there anymore and i’m left with just (me). this me doesn’t remember it’s me-ness. it is like becoming aware of my breath, the breathing cycle continues on its own all the time but as soon as i become aware of it, it becomes more labored, less spontaneous, it becomes self-conscious. self-consciousness flirts with the boundary between being aware and being separate. it is when i pull out a figure from the ground and focus on it, that i lose the ground. it is in this edge of perception that non-duality and duality collide. the rubin’s vase illustration demonstrates that.
i remember being fasc
inated as a child by optical illusions. i wonder if that was a fascination with being on that edge, of getting a taste of the perceptual edge we live in. as far as i can tell, the vase and the faces both exist, co-exist, yet my perception sways. perhaps connection is realized when the duality diminishes.
on one hand. letting my boundaries dissolve is overwhelming. and i fight to keep my existence intact, the filters of our perception allow reality to be more manageable in our limitations. but as the boundaries of our limitations evolve, the perception of reality wavers between being too intense and too un-stimulating.
macro photography highlights how much richness can be experienced in each micro-segment, if we bother to zoom in.
the rubin’s vase image was obtained from Wikipedia
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the paradox of being 