“Jon, please try to be gentle when you feel someone has accidentally overstepped. When I read your blog, my heart was open, and these responses were bruised. Thank You.” – Sandy.

I was fortunate enough to have two critical contemplations today.

I think my visit with Zoe, the genial and affirming physical therapist, opened me up early in the morning. Once again, I was not as sick as I thought I was, and there are clear and sensible things I can do to get back the strength lost in my legs during my foot problems.

No drama, just age, and work.

I’ve had dreams about being in a wheelchair. No, said Zoe, just a few simple exercises. Your legs are fine. I often slip in and out of the natural world, the real world; I think that is what contemplation is about.

I got home and wrote, and then, on impulse, I put on my new earphones and listened to Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl album, a favorite of mine.

These new earphones have opened me up in a spiritual way as if they were the key to another world. Perhaps they are.

I don’t know how it works, but Orbison seems to be my guide into deep and powerful meditations lately. Something about his wise and mournful voice touches my soul and opens doors to my heart.

Then I took off the earphones, skipped lunch, and took Zinnia up to the hill where we walk (every day now, when I’m home). This brought me to another meditation about being gentle that Sandy inspired.

Sandy’s message was posted on my blog this morning,

I’m not sure if she talked about the people who sometimes message me or me. She spoke about me and told me that my responses to people who overstep their bounds and boundaries bruise her open heart.

I had not heard that thought before or seen it expressed as gently.

I thought about gentleness on my walk with Zinnia, one of God’s gentlest creatures.

I responded to Sandy, thanking her for her thoughts and explaining that my goal was honesty, first and always, and gentleness if possible. As Roy wrote, “there are things we can’t change in the real world, and endings come to us in ways we can’t rearrange.”

For me, contemplation and meditation are about facing the truth about myself and knowing for sure that there are many times I could be more patient and gentle.

My anger and fear have plagued me all of my life, but you can’t order up gentleness like some strawberry pancakes, as I told Sandy. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time and wisdom. I’m strong on the first two, still working on the third.

Pleading someone to be gentle because you have an open heart is like asking a congressperson to be compassionate because they have great power.

It doesn’t work that way; I’m sorry to say. Gentleness has to come from within, not from a message on a blog. My therapist has been helping me with it for years now, poor thing. I might go into one realm or another, but the real world is where I live and where I will die.

What I am learning through my Amish and other friendships is that true love and gentleness come without qualification or condition. You accept me, and I accept you. Not on your terms or mine, but at the call of a higher level of life.

I can’t take in everyone else’s pain; it would kill me and do no good for them. The truth is I can only promise to be who I am, not who others might wish me to be. If I promised that, I would be lying.

The good news is that I believe gentleness is good, and I aspire to it. It is within me, just buried under layers of hurt and betrayal.

As I walked with Zinnia on this gorgeous, windswept skill under a great sky, this idea was in my head.

Thomas Merton, my contemplation guru, says contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual lie. It is life itself; he writes, “fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.  It is a spiritual wonder.  It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source.”

Merton has often likened the contemplative experience to poetry, music, and art. But it goes deeper than that, he says, beyond philosophy and theology even.

It transcends all of them, he says.

Contemplation is beyond our knowledge, beyond our light, beyond systems, beyond explanations, beyond discourse, beyond dialogue, beyond our self.

Th enter into the real of contemplation, he explains, I must in a certain sense die, or a conscious part of me must die., or a way of looking at the world.

This death of the self, this letting go of pride and ego and anger, is, in fact, the entrance to a higher life. It is, in so many ways, not a gentle process.

“It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, experience, as joy as being, ” Merton writes. True contemplation is the highest fulfillment.

I am not there, but I edge closer towards the truth and strength to face myself and get closer.

There are things we cannot change in the real world, and endings come to us in ways we can’t rearrange. I love you, and you love me, but sometimes we must let it be in the real world. – Roy Orbison

I accept you, and you except me. That’s where gentleness lives.