vulnarability invites you to enter a state of intimacy.

In us moderns, intimacy is usually associated with vulnerability, because most of us are too coarse-grained to work with intimacy skillfully. Vulnerability-- the felt sense of risking something -- is a distortion of intimacy. Intimacy is best when associated with non-reciprocal care. Like in your garden. You have a flower you worked really hard to bring back to life, and one day, something happens, it sings its lifeforce to you. You might collapse into worrying that it will die soon. That brings up the vulnerability. Why should I fall in love with this -- enter into a state of intimacy-- when I only will be hurt. So these two aspects need to be decoupled, so we can successfully enter states of intimacy. Now the rock. At first I see it as a thing. Then I see that this "thing" is the prior potential of everything and everyone I love. It becomes sacred to me, as the intimacy of recognizing it for the first time, deepens. I am glad it is there, resting as it does, where it does, among the lichen and fern. As the intimacy grows, I see it is like a miniature garden, with a pattern that is complex. Intimacy allows us to see things "perfectly" What then is it like to be intimate with another person? You see we are children of the same mother, we are part of the same story, we are both coming and going. There is a loss of self-other boundary, because I am situating our relationship in a deeper (comsic, evolutionary) context. Sometimes, with people, you can feel that you are living this life and that life too. Because you look at the world through both yours and the others eyes. Not in a conceptual way, but because it is as if you step into their body, and feel what it feels like from their body. Ah.... yes. That's who you are. With the rock, we are not always sure if the rock feels something too. But with people, as with animals, we can see that they are participating in the deepening also! – bonnitta-roy from https://bonnittaroy.substack.com/p/why-we-need-a-school-like-this/comment/10954602