December | 2018 | dhamma footsteps

POSTCARD#337: Chiang Mai: 05.00 hours. Dreamscape of spinning fans in a warm dark night, gives way to another sound, a motorbike intrudes, coming nearer and nearer, voices talking loudly – the driver and his companion sitting behind, shouting to be heard over the sound of the engine. Driver lowers the throttle to listen to what’s being said. The sound fills my room up here on the third floor, as it passes below, engine noise and a few disconnected words, then it’s quiet again.

I hear them, faintly now, fading into the distance, enclosed in the small environment of their moving world. Curious acoustics in this narrow street, the sound of the shouted conversation sliced into pieces only where there are facing buildings – and other people, I assume, are wakened for a moment, as I was, then fall asleep again. Consciousness creating continuity between otherwise unrelated but similar things. Thus long strings of events linked together form a lifetime, included in one seamless reality.

Just as a monkey moving through the forest or the woods holds on to a branch, lets it go and holds on to another; in the same way what we call viññāṇa (consciousness) arises as one thing and ceases as another, by day and by night.’ [SN.II.95]

reflections on an earlier post

POSTCARD#336: Chiang Mai: Learning how to do this, simply to walk mindfully, step by step; dhamma footsteps? It’s the name of my site – how could I have known that 5 years further on there’d be a very good reason to be taking these mindful footsteps?

I had another fall (backstory: right foot sticks out too far, gets stuck on things) and broke a rib also did something to the sternum. Sternum is the vertical bone in the centre of the chest. This part took the impact of the fall – I tripped and fell on the step of 7-Eleven. I fell diagonally on this step, hands held out to break the fall, but as the floor comes rushing up to meet me, it’s the step BANG! that takes the weight. A bit like being in the ring with a heavyweight boxer, who punches me in the chest, and that’s it, game over.

I got up ok and made it back to the apartment. After that, I was getting around allright but the pain in the centre of the chest got worse and worse. Decided to go see the doc, “tremendous pain in the chest and feeling very weak”, and he said ok let’s do an X-ray and also let’s do a few blood tests.

Now here are the results, X-ray shows you broke a rib, the pain in the chest is just the muscle healing, and blood test shows the sodium level in the blood is very low. Ok so we start the process of building up the sodium level and it takes a week or two. This low-sodium level is a side effect of the medication I’ve been taking for three years. Now I’ve come off that and getting used to another kind of medication.

It amazes me how all these meds work, and I need to find out how to understand that, but my ‘find out’ function has gone missing, lots of other things I depend on gone missing too. Losing my balance, over-compensating, and doing a dance along the pavement while attempting to find out how to walk properly. Also pieces of the jigsaw that belong in the cognitive mind, let’s say, vanish then reappear.

So, all kinds of things happened for about a month, and I got back to WordPress in the end… really, it’s all a bit bewildering but anyway I’m here. It’s so good to be aware of your quiet energy, old friends out there in the blogosphere; I can feel your presence here in my heart. All this gives me the boost I need to lift me off of that floor and that long story I can leave behind. Thanks for being here.