Category Archives: India

the bird is the messenger

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POSTCARD#279: Delhi: The bird is the messenger, a leaf in its beak and a note tied around its tiny leg. Brings news, we’re moving from here at the end of September. After that, three months in temporary accommodation, then we’re leaving India for good.

There’s it is again, the tiny bird in the bush outside, and I’m inside the room, trying to get a clear photo of it through the window glass. There are three of them there, the other two out of sight right now. They move so fast, quicker than thinking. It’s the Purple Sunbird, olive green as youngsters; full size less than 4inches in length and these are so small, almost not there at all. I blink my eyes and they disappear… the quickening. See one for an instant then it’s gone – takes my breath away.

Even now, it all seems to be coming an end – a cancellation of everything that remains, no time to settle, before we’re gone. The disappearance of the past, a new direction, and return to Bangkok – return to “Go”… time is just slippin’ away.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that we came to this house, characteristics of the shift from house A to house B. At the edge of my vision, household items look at me as I pass… poised in choreography of dance steps, ready for their next move. The great leap… percussive landing, clatter, scrape, bump and hastily take up their positions in new rooms.

In the morning we wake up in somebody else’s house… a familiarity of objects out of context in these new surroundings. I’m in someone else’s life – stepped out of my own life, into theirs. Same world, just a different angle on how it’s seen, felt and understood– same sensory awareness mechanism creates the kaleidoscope of different coloured lights.

Where am I? Maybe I’ll find myself in the Lost and Found Department. Searching among the ghosts there, for a self that’s missing – but if it can’t be found, any one will do. I can bear with the tendency for “self” to think it’s different from all the other “selves” going around thinking they’re different too.

Who am I? The world is how I/you perceive it, he/she, perceives it. We/you and they see and look into each other’s eyes. A window opens into another realm inhabited by him, her and them. The sense of their presence inter-lacing with the presence of others before them and as yet nothing of our own. Generations and generations of karma in an arrangement of cause and conditions and interconnected lives

I remember coming here with the house agent. Walking up the path, open the door… ghosts of previous tenants rush away to their hiding places in a whisper of movement. For me there’s only the dust of empty houses everywhere in the city – looking for somewhere to sit in a room with no furniture. Leaning thus, in a doorframe, and maybe this will do. Maybe here we can invent a life we’ll be happy with. Awareness takes it all in, puts it away in a new folder. A new reference point: ‘this’ is where the heart is, home is where I hang my hat.

“It is not as it were that one, dropping out from this world, is born into another but there is continuity of causes and conditions.” [From Madhyamika, quoted by T. R. V. Murti]

Excerpts from an earlier post: quicker than thinking

‘extrinsic’

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POSTCARD#278: Chiang Mai: I’m in this 3rd floor apartment, lying on the sofa and the balcony door is open. The sound of a plane coming in to land (this building is near the airport and on the flight path), I’ll resist the impulse this time to try to take a photo of it – lean over a low balcony rail… scary. So I lay down flat on the sofa, ready for the immense noise, and the aircraft flies over. The sound is absolutely devastating. The glass of windows, masonry walls, ceiling and floor vibrate at a deafening frequency… and just at that moment I see the upside-down reflection of the plane in the highly polished floor tiles. It’s there for an instant, flying away across the floor, out to the balcony, and leaves my vision at the same time as the huge sound ends.

An upside down passenger jet flying across my room; such an extraordinary event, I think I need to write that down – where’s my pen? Something to write on? Look in my wallet, and a piece of paper falls out. It’s an old, creased, folded, coffee-shop receipt and on the back of it is written the word ‘extrinsic’. Hmm? I made a note of that word for a reason and I can’t remember what it was. Now here it is again: extrinsic: adjective: ‘not essential or inherent; not a basic part or quality; extraneous’ (extrinsic at Dictionary.com).

There’s no context, it doesn’t seem to belong anywhere – an existential anomaly. It’s here, yet it’s not here; the integral substance of something that doesn’t exist. Something external that would perhaps answer the question: What is its ‘whatness’? How is its ‘howness’? Somewhere in the realm of seemingly incidental meanings that arise of their own accord as if they’d been consciously created, contained in words, and language itself is the metaphor – I could think of it as the unstated ‘I-am-ness’ of things, the grounded, certainty of being.

I’m feeling more at ease since the passing of the big headache and, without the meds, ordinary life is creeping back. I’m much more in contact with the mind/body quality of ‘I-am-ness’ than I used to be. Not necessarily the identity, this is me (((self))), I can choose to be separate from thinking it’s like this … the sense of there being a thought process that ‘somebody’ is separate from. The extrinsic sense of ‘I-am-ness’ is an aspect of conscious experience. It comes and goes, changes, disappears and returns.

The word ‘extrinsic’ appears to be outside of the moment I’m in, and as soon as I think that, everything shifts to include it. It’s as if ‘extrinsic’ is a location in the ‘world’, the object is seen from the outside looking in. And ‘intrinsic’ is another location; the subjective sense of the object in the ‘all-aroundness’ and the ‘all-it-isness’ totality of the ‘world’.

All this is interesting, maybe because I’m now outside the aircraft and usually I’m inside the aircraft, going between India and Thailand… but what’s this? The sound of another passenger jet approaching. Drop everything and lie back on the sofa to get the full impact of the sound. Incredible! Upside down plane reflection flies across the floor.

“All life is a single event: one moment flowing into the next, naturally. Nothing causing everything. Everything causing everything.” [Wu Hsin]

this is a re-blogged and re-written earlier post named ‘no-thingness’

prasada (karmic intrusion)

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POSTCARD#277: Delhi: The story so far: I went to see a well-known anaesthesiologist lady doctor, professor in a government university hospital, down-town Bangkok, about the 24/7 headache I’ve had since September 2015. To cut a long story short, she performed the PRF microsurgery on the nerve, 25 July 2017 and when I woke up the next morning, the headache was significantly gone.

Unbelievable… only a tingling sensation in the place where the pain used to be. No time to ponder on that, I had a flight to Delhi in the afternoon. So I sent an email to the Doc saying, the pain has gone, treatment successful. Thank you so much. Bye, packed my bags, taxi to the airport, checked my phone and the Doc had replied; possibly three pain-free months like this, no headache, and after that, when it returns (because this is not a cure), the pain will be noticeably less than it was before. Feels like a gift, I’m amazed, monks and other holy people have induced karmic intrusion, prasada.

On the plane over to Delhi there was this special consciousness of having been blessed, I felt like dancing in the aisle. “These are the days of miracle and wonder. This is the long distance call. The way the camera follows us in slo-mo. The way we look to us all, oh yeah”.

Sit back in my seat and review the experience of it through notes made just after: Here I am, back in the white room with the doc, my fairy godmother, dressed in white. Residents and other persons in white too… getting kinda crowded in this small room. More of her assistants squeeze in… there’s not enough space for me, the patient… claustrophobic, and a moment of panic. It passes. I stay calm. They get me to sit on a chair, lean over, face-down with head on the edge of a pillow placed on a gurney. It takes a bit of organizing, small hands in green cotton cuffs gently shifting the pillow until it’s comfortable, and I’m looking down at the floor, darkness, people’s feet in black, overshoe, rubber boots.

I’m in the operating room, OMG I’m not anaesthetized, hey! somebody! you forgot to give me a shot! After a while, as if they’d forgotten then been reminded, a surgical assistant, miniature lady in green cloth gown squats down close into my space . A chair is pushed in where she puts her stainless steel tray. Wearing rubber gloves, shower cap and face mask, she heaves my arm, like the branch of a tree, around and on to the chair, ties tourniquet, smack, smack, smack on the back of my hand, finds a vein and sticks a needle in. I’m taped up with a hard plastic valve set in place, ready to go. She plugs me into a relaxing woozy cotton-woolly sedative, and nothing matters anymore.

Cloths and plastic sheeting placed over my back and neck, and I can’t see anything but floor tiles. Darkness and the sounds of quiet voices chatting, somebody makes a joke, they laugh, another joke, more laughing. I’m thinking, hey what’s so funny? Sounds of shifting chairs scrape clunk! And I can see sideways they’re carefully wheeling in a large machine on a trolley with rubber wheels. A small hand comes down, seeks out the electric socket, plugs it in, switch on the switch… is it going? Yes. This must be the unit that generates the radio frequency pulse to stun the nerve.

More people coming in and out, I feel them brush against me… someone says ‘sorree.’ Trying to picture what’s happening out there and above my head. Thais are small in stature and used to this kind of closeness with each other. I’m the big foreigner one step removed, but with head leaning over and surgical cloths spread over my upper back, it’s as if I’ve disappeared.

It was over in 45 minutes, the central event was, after the deep probing needle to find the nerve, the PRF itself. Doc says, now I’m going to send the pulse, okay, are you ready? And it started; an awareness of the huge intrusive spike. An electric shock obviously, sustained, intense, deep hard pressure. As if it were penetrating the bone itself. More like a deafening sound than an agonized experience almost unbearable, it felt like I was being permanently bonded to the metal and concrete of the floor.

Then it stopped and that was it. I’m allowed to sit up, look around, people everywhere. Surprised to see the doc wearing a green gown and shower cap to cover her hair. Facemask removed from smiling face; how are you feeling? And I was just fine.

Prasada: a gracious gift that is first offered to a deity, saint, or an avatar, and then distributed in His or Her name to their followers

incredible lightness of being

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POSTCARD#274: New Delhi: about the permanent headache, the anaesthesiologist lady in the white room says there’s another kind of treatment available: Pulsed RadioFrequency (PRF), so I could consider this rather than coping with the pain by self-medication. The new procedure stuns the nerve that’s causing the pain. Agreed, let’s fix it for 25th July, and all of a sudden with some degree of excitement I’m looking forward to a major change in my life.

That was then, this is now. I got the flight back to New Delhi from Bangkok, all the usual rumble tumble and really, what’s all the fuss about, I don’t feel the pain as much now as I did at the beginning, nearly two years ago. The meds give me a space where there is almost no pain at all. The lingering ‘mind’ aspect of the pain (that re-minds me about other things to do with the pain) is pushed out of the way due to a particular attitude/ focus of mind that doesn’t find it interesting to be with these associated shadows of mind.

Forgetting, of course, the deep stabs of pain, which penetrate, like long steel blades, and there are no meds to make that go away, ringing the urgency bell in the dark morning of an environment that seems bleak, unforgiving, and just BAD. Anxiety and despondency, the evolving stages of pain and confusion in between, and retracing my steps that seem to have once brought me to a place of peace, like entering a room within a room, and there’s a door leading to another room and so on, until I’d forgotten which room was which, with no plan or diagram showing how it came back to the present time. Why? I think that somewhere along the line I must have said to myself, enough is enough, this’ll do! And a large chunk of it (The ‘rooms inside rooms’) was erased from memory completely. So now there’s no finding my way back to there and then, how it was before all this happened.

The meds seemed to be as much a problem as the headaches; the nightmarish Alice in Wonderland bottle with the label saying: DRINK ME appears and long after that experience I’d wake up in the morning, roll over on the pillow and it felt like I drank too much wine the night before, but I don’t drink any alcohol at all (unrelated: that’s another story) whatever, like a light that shines in the darkness, I’m a meditator; early Buddhism/ the lineage of Ajahn Chah.

The headaches have ricocheted through these quiet spaces so much I’ve had to expand the boundaries to include mind states that are more like contemplation than focused meditation. Every time I gratefully fall into the meditative state of mind, it feels like I’ve been away from here for such a long time… returning to the knower, the fundamental mind, addressing the objects of the mind, thoughts, and phenomena arising in the mind. Staying there with this incredible lightness of being, and happy enough to not reach out much more than that.

Right View and Suffering, okay once I’d gotten rid of the adversity attachment (note to self: this will change too). Now there’s an opportunity to know the pain is likely to ease with this new ‘procedure’, I’m into this new stage of what’s happening with this headache and the degrees of focus, (no-one seems to know) leading to the confusion again, the kind that had to go away, away and get out of here – not thinking at all that the desire to get-rid-of-it is the same as the desire to-have-it. Polarizations, there’s no difference between ‘out’ and ‘in’, good or bad’, and so much more. So I have to let it in through the barrier I built. Let it go and let it in, try that and see… close the door that wasn’t open to it.

PIcture at top: A wall painting in Bangkok’s Suwannabume airport

ends and beginnings

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POSTCARD#272: Delhi – Bangkok journey: TV drama going on as I’m packing, I see it, stop and watch: intense dialogue, close up on faces, directors’ exercise in portraiture. Carry on with my packing, gathering things from here and there – then the TV catches my eye again, sit to watch, and the credits come up… is that the end already? But it’s not the end it’s the beginning. An extremely long intro to an old series of The Walking Dead… oh no, morbid curiosity, and too much for me. The scenes of zombies being stabbed in the head are too similar to the stabbing pain of the PHN headache I live with.

But anyway, it’s okay today, taken my meds, and time I wasn’t here. Dress up in the clothes of who I think I am. Passports, ticket, fiddle with the key, open, close the door. I am the person who lives here – note to mind. Bye-bye to house, into the taxi and away.

Wheeled luggage through airport hallways and corridors… check-in desk for Bangkok, and check it all through to Chiang Mai; transit time in Bangkok is one hour – note to mind, beware of misleading signage in Bangkok, arrows don’t seem to point in the right direction to the Transfer Desk.

For a moment, future time invades the present, and I feel I’m already gone, but it’s just that mild urgency of airports, and ‘the journey’ which is forever ‘here’ and never ‘there’.

Flight number, gate number, passport number, visa details, watched by hidden cameras, facial recognition software, security procedures: ‘Passengers are reminded not to leave baggage unattended at anytime.’

I am part of a network of beginnings, middles and endings, always leading on to the next journey. Jettison clutter of the mind, travel lightweight, be minimalist – ‘it’s better to journey than to arrive’. It’s always about the journey to get there. Arriving is the departure point for the next journey, and another opens up after that.

Watching the signs above and mindful of body movements, there’s only the walking. Watching the duality of steps below me, left, right, left, right… flooring surface beneath spins underfoot. The way, directionality, as if held in one long continuous moment leading to the imaginary place of arrival, like the vanishing point in a perspective drawing doesn’t actually exist.

And there’s something about the flow of faces I see, pulling their luggage, holding their children. I can see the unique identity of each person as I pass, as they must recognize the same individuality when they look at me. But somehow we’ve all become blank, there’s nobody here

We are all in transit; on the way to (or coming back from) somewhere else… a glimpse of the nothingness situated at the centre of everything the Bardo of the in-between. The ‘me’ I live with is not a substantial thing – sometimes not there at all. Present time is more connected with the past, where we arrived from, than with the future where we are going to, a place of speculative conjecture and hypothetical likelihoods, stumbled-upon in following the here-and-now.

Photo: Barges travelling from Holland to England, taken from the window of the aircraft from Aberdeen to Amsterdam.
Note: This post written as the news arrived that we are leaving India in September 2017 after 6 years working here, and returning to Thailand. It’ll be sad to leave, that’s life…

monsoon

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POSTCARD#271: Delhi: It’s a warm rain to me, of course, coming from the far northern part of the world. Here in Delhi (28.6139° N, 77.2090° E), it’s not a cold rain, it’s cool – a huge respite from the fierce dry summer that’s been hammering down on us. Almost volcanic, self-combusting temperature these last few months. Now it’s like a champagne party for the team that won the race and everyone joins in. Disregarding danger, street kids up to their knees in deep puddles, completely wet, clothing stuck to their skinny bodies, and dashing around in traffic. One of them jumps daringly close to my window as we drive through at speed and send up a shower of shlooshing and splooshing, laughter in the great waves splashing over their heads.

For a moment I’m in awe, it’s like being in the car wash. The all-surround-sound of rain rattling down on the thin vehicle hood, trunk, windows front to back, to the left, then to the right, and a few inches above my head the deafening roar of water like a fireman’s pressure hose. The dynamic environment becomes something I don’t recognize; images in the mind of death by drowning, instant recall of an apocalyptic fear, the Genesis flood narrative, and looking for shelter, anywhere will do… but I’m safe here in present time, the car is a watertight bubble, a Noah’s Ark, carried along, and self-propelled in the deluge,

Streets suddenly engulfed in volumes of water I’m not used to, and we’re giving way to waves, not driving in cars any more, we’re in small power boats, jostling for space in the midst of the great sweeping along of flotsam and jetsam. Everyone, everywhere, giving way to the force of it, running for shelter, motorbike riders huddled under a bridge fiddling with mobile phones… images on Facebook, Twitter go out to everywhere in the world.

Then we’re home, out of the car, under umbrellas that don’t open correctly, hopping and sloshing through deep puddles and jumping over small rivers in the driveway. Shoes off in the hall and into the house. The strange darkness of rooms and the deafness of sound of rain on the roof. There’s nothing to be done, the deluge takes priority, get in and lay low for a while. See how the trees and everything in the garden; all growing things, leaf, stem and root, are connected totally with the downpour. Fused into one and the same thing. Like an electrical charge, a large voltage, long and deep stab of energy thrust into the earth, activates everything below ground, more than enough, generosity, Biblical abundance.

Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. [Lila (Hinduism) – Wikipedia]

Upper photo: from the car. Lower photo: WSJ/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images/Children on a waterlogged street during rain in New Delhi, July 12.

 

more than words…

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POSTCARD#270: Delhi: Sitting in the garden these cool days, and the world as it’s seen, suddenly falls into an enhanced version of what it is. Alice in Wonderland… things are not what they appear to be. The presence of my cup and book, my phone and a pen, just lying there on the garden table, extensions and extrapolations of the environment I’m in – who I am. Everything I see becomes unfamiliar, yet known – uncanny recognition of every-day things, strangely out of context here, but also fit quite well in these surroundings of birds, sunlight shining through the trees and a pattern of moving shadows through layers of leaves.

A momentary easing… the ‘beholder’ sees beauty through the glass of eyes to the world out there and the self, as ‘me’ in here, disappears completely – a flow of words just tumbling out and I’ve got to get it all written down… if not, it will vanish. It’s the writing of it that gives it life (of course), the quickening. Words snatch at a direction, fractals of the original instance. Too huge, I cannot see the whole pattern, only what is here and now.

We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news. Everything falls into a vortex of shattered ends and beginnings as the focus shifts to the headache mode – It’s part of me these days… take meds, wait for it to pass, allow healing, nurturing. And now it is later. Fragments of imagery of the story appear in the mind so fast I can’t keep up with it. Scribbling it down on scraps of paper, and rewritten on the back of till receipts found in wallet, pockets. The back of my boarding pass… reduce the size of handwriting to get it all in the space, then take a photo of it and zoom in to see. A flow of utterance, stumbling incoherent urgency, activates extensions, developments, and completions… and I arrive at an ending. It changes the beginning (I thought it might), and there, it’s done. Refined, defined, in the form it takes, chunks of language jigsaw together, trim the edges and placed.

Extreme minimalism… the story contained is edited out. The Absolute is in all things, omnipresent means it’s everywhere and there’s nothing that it’s not a part of. Ponder that for a moment. Where is it not? There’s no ‘nothing’ and no ‘thing’. Gone is… even the word ‘gone’ is gone.

light through glass (20170613) by crow

for a single moment
perhaps that pause
between heartbeats
the sun shone through
the wings of a butterfly
and i understood
the reason for cathedrals

(reblogged from: Words and Feathers)

unblinking gaze

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POSTCARD#269: Delhi: There’s always this curious silence when the end of the journey comes, I find the place-marker and disembark into life as it was before the great hop-skip-and-jump to the other side of the world and back again in 12 days. It’s a slight re-entry burnout landing somewhere along the karmic sequence route, cause leads to effect, then someone comes along and asks: “So how was it?” (eyes glaze over in the asking of the question) “Fine, yes, good, thank you.” The past is a remembered ‘now’, open eyes wide and see. Find rather than seek. Listen rather than hear. See rather than look – the verb: to see, is intransitive, doesn’t require an object, I just ‘see’ in an unblinking gaze… creak of the open/close shutter mechanism of eyelids as it widens into the corners.

But the huge experience of the journey doesn’t mean much to my listeners, I couldn’t expect it to be much more than a pleasantry lost in the uncanny quietness where nobody can think of anything to say, and deep thrusts into trouser pockets, rummaging around in other pockets, and in handbags – out come the phones, androids, iPads, ear buds stuffed in. Long hair like curtains almost hide the face lowered into hand-held devices, coloured displays reflected on skin of nose and cheek… and conversation shrivels up; occasional sing-alongs, sudden remarks about YouTube videos, and a patchwork of quotes from Wikipedia and Google.

Everywhere I went on the journey, it was the same, crawling through caves of populations in London, blind, deaf and dumb, glued to their soundtracks in the dark public transport corridors carved into the earth and immense push and shove, clatter of metal wheels on rails, spurts and sparks of electric energy and no-words-at-all in the haste of getting there.

Wake up next day, Jiab has an early flight to Chandigarh; I’m up at 4.30 to make her small breakfast. Car comes and she’s away in a tunnel of headlights in darkness, just before dawn, birdsong and wakefulness. A Rollin’ and Tumblin’ headache, and I go through to the bedroom to lie down for an hour or so. Conscious of the ceiling fan above me suspended from a dusty whitewashed ceiling. A constant spinning cycle that seems to say something about the weight of the rotary blades. It looks like how it sounds – I turn my head and the whole room turns through 90° and it now looks like a spinning propeller of an old-fashioned aircraft… traces of British history are everywhere.

Consciousness of that image in my mind. Consciousness of the soft bedding I’m lying in. Consciousness of the smell of coffee left in a cup, and burnt crust of toast in the kitchen, the taste of it. Consciousness of thought and consciousness of no-thought. Consciousness of what’s going on by means of eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue, cognitive functioning – and the mind always wants to make it into something more than it is.

Consciousness of something, anything or everything, or just consciousness itself, shining through soft translucent skin, held nicely like curtain folds at the corners, beneath which these old eyes look out. Consciousness without an object, unsupported consciousness – the unconditioned, the still mind. ‘I think, therefore I am’. Oh yeah, a strongly assertive statement, because the sense of ‘I’ has arisen simply through thinking it’s there. And when I stop thinking about it, it’s not there.

Disjointed memories of the flight, that don’t matter, everyone seated, and facing the same way, as if it were a movie theatre, the audience in darkness and there’s no screen, no movie. Phone goes ping! It’s Jiab at the airport; shuffling along in the security queues… practising very slow walking meditation.

Image: Open Hand Monument in Chandigarh

the space where it hasn’t happened yet

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POSTCARD#268: Amsterdam – Delhi flight: KLM passenger jet, Boeing 777-200, rapidly moving into the darkness of an evening already turned to night. No view from the cabin window, it’s a nocturnal blackness from here on. I try to picture it, high above the clouds, a sliver of waxing crescent moon reflected in the silver streak of thinning atmosphere – too fast for the human eye to follow. The tarot pack Fool contemplating the sum total of everything as nothingness or ‘somethingness’. Up here there’s nothing to compare with the speed of the aircraft, only what is inside our bubble of contained ‘here-and-now’ – not ‘there-and-then’, in a past or future time, awareness of how it is, simply that.

Laptop fits exactly on the small fold down table. Wi-Fi on board and I’m busy with the relative speeds of this aircraft travelling West to East at a speed of approx: 500mph in the same direction of the Earth’s rotation which is approx: 700 mph, West to East. The aircraft can never catch up with the speed of rotation of the earth but their speeds are close enough, and if we could see the land below, there would be the sense of it all being almost stationary, a phenomenon I have noticed in relative speeds of aircraft and their surroundings.

Words appear in the mind and tumble out onto the page in structures which only need a little rearranging – the mechanism of transferring thought into syntactical forms which one can normally trust just happens by itself. But in the time that it takes to write it down, everything has moved on. Not possible to describe it… language doesn’t stretch that far – it seems as if the world is an illusion. It’s not what it appears to be, no, nothing is what I think it is…if it’s not that, then, what is it? Make a list of what it’s not, and everything on the other side of that must be what it is. A feeling that’s wordless and indefinable, or one could quite easily say God is the sum total of everything that exists.

Thought as stories of past and future created in the mind. Knowing this brings it all to a standstill for a moment… awareness of how it is, simply that. Then something triggers thought again and the narrative requires me to ‘believe’ in it before it begins. I’m teetering on the brink of what it could be, still contained inside that little space that’s neither here nor there… do I want to get swept away by this story, when I’m quite comfortable being here? It’s telling me I have to engage with it, become it… yes, but I’m also able to stay here in the space where it hasn’t happened yet.

Mindfulness of non-becoming. See how that feels, here with the hummm of the engines, and air pressure white-noise, shooshing sound and everything is always in present time. Passengers are lost in movies, transfixed by headphones and screen, sound & color, or asleep, seatbelts fastened in the shadowy gloom as we fall through the latitudes and on towards Delhi and home – thinking about things in the here-and-now, located in the there-and-then, which refer to events taking place somewhere out there in the thin air.

 

bent into shape

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POSTCARD #265: Chiang Mai: I’d decided to use this image for the header thinking the way I cope with my headache is an improvised thing, much like the way this traffic sign has been bent back into shape after something has crashed into it – then as I write this I’m distracted by wind chimes from the balcony of the next-door house, which suddenly play a perfect chord in the air. I slip into wakefulness from the dream of that which I’m held by, and become an extension of the wind-chime’s notes. Horizontal on the bed as if shipwrecked on a sandy beach. Waves rushing in to the shore crash-crash, and the whole thing receding back. Comes rushing in again, crash-crash-crash, becoming a form that shapes into the body of the sea rolling over on its side like a great animal trying to sleep in an enormous bed. Then I realize I’m awake and have to give my whole attention to the headache that lives with me… just looking at it, seeing it as it is.

Wind chimes strike groupings of notes like the random sound of birds in the trees. I’ve been reading about knowledge which is so completely at one with the thing it knows, there is complete understanding, complete absorption into that knowledge. I can understand how that could be – it is of course a description of events, rather than the thing itself. Seems amazing to me, being as far away as I am, living in the world of attachment, the automatic bonding, even with things I dislike; seeing that and learning, by necessity, the strategy of no-avoidance….

I’ve had this headache for long enough to know that how it is right now, is the kind of suffering I can accept and live with for the time being. I can open up to the presence of it, as a form of recognition, accepting it as it is. Just the ‘me,’ being like this, still slightly on-edge, alert for the spikes which appear sometimes – but no, not this time. It becomes an energy accumulating with the in-breath, disintegrating with the long out-breath like the waves at sea breaking on the shore. I can open up to and experience the fact that it’s here, then it’s collapsing again as the out-breath distances it, like a long golf course, or a road winding into a landscape.

Curious, interested, and seeing the headache I experience as the First Noble Truth… just this openness to it. The contemplation is about calm, steadiness and everything else is swept away in a storm of liking, disliking, wanting, not wanting. Remain firmly in that same place as the wave returns and there it is again but I don’t need to hold on to it by hating it, or seeing it as something somehow construed and thought to be ‘bad’. See all of that happening, see it disassembling, falling to pieces; form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness… and the ‘I’ can vanish into the totality of it.

Time to get the headache into the shower and get on with things. Then I’m at my desk, and at some point in the mid-morning, see how it feels, take the meds, then I’m falling back into a world of no pain, stumbling at the wonder of it. The day gets through in a dull fogginess. Sleep, and next morning I wake up with the opportunity to be back in this place of mindfulness again…

“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.” [Eckhart Tolle]

The sign says: turn left, caution, traffic coming from the right