Category Archives: POST CARDS

non-aversion

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IMG_0106POSTCARD♯11: Delhi: There’s a wasps’ nest in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. I’ve been away for two months, didn’t know it was there and didn’t notice it at first, in the half darkness of 5.30am, walking along to this bathroom we don’t normally use. And wearing glasses because I’ve always worn glasses but since the eye operation it’s all a blur. I forget, put them on and in the darkness, can’t see any difference. Switch on the light in the bathroom, look in the mirror; is this really ‘me’? An awareness of a low humming sound; a multi-frequency buzzzzzz, just on the edge of hearing. Something crawling on the window, what’s that? I have to take my glasses off to see, a strange reverse action I’m not used to, then wait for a moment until vision gets in focus… wow, a wasps’ nest in the bathroom, not good. Back out of there fast, close the door and get as far away as possible from it – closing all doors between me and it. Seeing imagined wasps in faulty vision.

It’s full daylight in an hour and I go back for another look… some kind of large-bodied heavy duty, Indian-wasp-like species; googled it later: ropalidia marginata. The nest is not actually in the bathroom, it’s built on the underside of the top part of the bathroom window, outside… thankful for that, but still kinda scary, even though there’s mosquito mesh on all doors and windows and they can’t get inside the house. I go outside to take a photo but nervous about all the activity so the pic is not clear. The wasps are transparent orange, the nest is grey, a truly colourless grey; remarkable because of its absence of colour. Kind of supernatural, like dust, or ash.

Ropalidia_marginata_2A species so distant from where we are, there’s a reluctance to look at this, yet a fascination with it; more like science fiction than real. The Queen wasp and attendants, baby wasps, larvae, that will emerge from all these small hexagonal openings. Yeh, well… somehow it’s difficult to think of them being cute. Wiki says the females contend with each other for the position of queen. They’ve evolved through aggression and hostility. How to understand this? I don’t know, but keeping a safe distance from it, and mindful of that action – not pushing away. The contemplation of aggressive aversion and the tendency to create a category for things I hate; enemies, difficult people, personality issues at the office – all kinds of other situations worse than that. Social conditioning has made me critical; looking for the fault in people, where to lay blame. Living in circumstances I don’t always feel comfortable with. Seeing what’s wrong, not able to see what’s right. Metta, loving kindness, isn’t a case of: “I love this person, but I don’t love that one.” Metta is non-discriminatory love, all beings have conscious awareness, a shared subjectivity….

Metta is unconditioned love; you don’t have more metta for the nice things and not as much for the bad things, it is evenly distributed: our beloved friends and our detested enemies. The action of metta is unconditioned, it is patience and non-aversion. We accept the pain, disappointment, failure, blame, persecution, abuse and all the experiences we can have in a lifetime. We begin with: ‘May I abide in well-being,’ starting with yourself. It’s an attitude of acceptance and patience with the way it is; accepting the anger, resentment, aversion, or the little petty things.’ [Ajahn Sumedho]

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Lower photo from the Wiki page

intuitive design

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110920131975POSTCARD♯10: Delhi: Going to visit my neighbour who says she can help me with a new sim card for the iPhone5. I got the phone in the UK, and need a Nano SIM for India, the tiny one, rather than the standard size for the Nokia I had before. When I was in London, I had to wait 24 hours for this new NanoSIM(4FF) to be activated – why? I don’t know. Difficult to be without your contacts for that long. But that’s how it is there, no flexibility – in other countries there’s less control. In Bangkok, for example, I needed a Thai NanoSIM for the local network and was thinking it would be the 24 hour waiting thing again but they looked at the screen, clicked a couple of times, went in the back of the shop and came out with the new NanoSIM(4FF). Removed it from the backing card and put it in… working!

Now in Delhi, I need a local SIM and I heard that if you take it to the phone shop and pay Rs.100/- (US$ 1.55) they have a special cutter and it’s done immediately, snip… you’re connected. My neighbour says you can just cut the old SIM with a knife, save the Rs.100/- and it’s better than going downtown in the heat and traffic. I’m hesitating, decide to Google it first. You’re supposed to do a bit of measuring and create a paper template to cut around carefully and then finish off with a piece of sandpaper. Well, my neighbour has a blade, saying, it’s not very sharp but let’s see; I think it’ll do.

I watch as she starts to cut the sim; doing it by eye, no measuring, she has to hack at it a bit with the blunt cutter and finishes off with the kitchen scissors – cut off the little corner bit. Yes! Looks like the real thing. So try that… but it doesn’t fit into the slot in the phone! Why? Because she was thinking it was the MicroSIM(3FF) for the iPhone4 – that’s what she has and thought it’s what I had. But the NanoSIM(4FF) for the iPhone5 is smaller than that… oh-no, what to do now? Worry-worry. But no problem just cut off a bit more to get it to fit. It’s like you offer someone a piece of cake and they say, oh that’s a bit too much for me, can you make it a bit smaller please? No science required. I’m amazed that it’s possible to do this. How come I didn’t know about it? There’s a feeling that I’ve been making life unnecessarily difficult when, in fact, things are quite simple.

Walking back to my place, and nobody pays any attention to me, except the gardeners and ordinary folk who stop and look at me as I pass; an anomaly in their world. It’s a direct gaze, gentle, curious: there goes one of these foreigners, look!… children laugh and run away. White adult male, a colourless being, transparent eyes – comes from a different planet. So far away from the actuality of the human experience, dependent on the employment contract that enables all the support mechanisms. Not much of an idea how to do anything except the job and outside of that, wash the car on Sunday, cut the grass, watch TV. I’m dependent on others who have the basic skills I don’t seem to have. Meanwhile, somewhere inside, there’s this feeling that all it needs is the intuitive leap… and I don’t know how it happens or why it’s like that, the solution just comes to me – like seeing the whole picture all of a sudden, and knowing what it is.

‘Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.’ [Robert Graves]

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Photo: the finished home-made NanoSim(4FF)

the look of eyes (2)

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flightPOSTCARD♯08: Bangkok/Delhi flight: Large men standing in the aisles of the passenger area look along the length of the plane in one direction, turn the head around and look in the other direction. Hold that for a moment, then look to the left, to the right, and back to the central position: ok, so here we are on this plane… Sensory receptors positioned around the face and the cranium spins around, up/down on its axis, moving in response to received vision, sound, smell. The mind coordinates, thinks about things… ‘60,000 thoughts per day by each and every human being on the planet.’ [Deepak Chopra]. No wonder it’s such a novelty to discover a space where there’s no thought, no stories unfolding in the mind.

Maybe it’s something cultural; the male authority figure standing there like a tall pillar and everyone else is seated. I’m reminded of Meerkats, these cute creatures who stand up on their hind legs and look at everything in a kind of philosophical way. See and be seen. I catch the look, and glance away… a brief encounter, not held; no dialogue: hi how are you today? No, no need for that; no language required to interpret events and engage the mind. Just the look of eyes, and our shared space up here in thin air; a passenger jet travelling at 600 miles per hour, 10 kilometres above the curvature of the Earth.

Bundles of conditioned reflexes squeezed into the volume of a body, the experience of being a human ‘being’ – only this. Seeing the events without the story, like screenshots in a sequence; a few gestures, the meaning is not quite there. It creates a pause, taking a moment to receive that data before mind gains control and ‘self’ gets a hold; before ‘I’ perceive what it is, or what it could be; pleasant, unpleasant, neutral – how should I feel about that? Maybe no feeling at all… It’s as if there’s a small seed of wisdom buried deep in the layers of unknowing; lying there, dormant, waiting for things to evolve and the right conditions to be there, in order to wake up. But it hasn’t happened yet… contemplating the noble truth of waking up in some future lifetime.

I can’t read text, cross-eyed vision after an operation on the left eye. It’ll be okay after the operation on the right eye. Mildly deafened by the white noise of air pressure systems and the velocity of the plane displacing the air. And there’s a stewardess announcement: the plane is now making its descent, this concludes our inflight service, thank you…. [Link to: the look of eyes (1)]

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“And what is the origination of the world? Dependent on the eye & forms there arises eye-consciousness. The meeting of the three is contact. From contact as a requisite condition comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. From craving as a requisite condition comes clinging/sustenance. From clinging/sustenance as a requisite condition comes becoming. From becoming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth as a requisite condition, then aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair come into play. This is the origination of the world. [Loka Sutta: The World” (SN 12.44), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 17 June 2010]

lonesome highway

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IMG_0063POSTCARD♯07: Bangkok: Travelling along the highway to the airport in a taxi that has past its best – seen better days. It’s veering off to the left, trembles for a moment then corrects itself. There’s another problem, the driver has it revved-up because the engine stalls when we slow down, so the sound is a bit alarming. We stop at the tollway to pay the fee, engine stalls, driver gets out to push. Fortunately there’s a little slope at the tollbooth and the car moves forward easily. Driver jumps in, ignition on, and the engine comes to life. Big sigh of relief, driver apologizes to me: koh tod khrap, polite. A nice guy, just trying to earn a living with a rented vehicle that’s barely roadworthy. The Thai compassion for this kind of predicament means it’s tolerated more than it would be in other Asian countries.

In a moment we’re accelerating down the road again with this huge noise and there’s still about 20 km to go. I’m thinking that if the engine fails, we’ll have to stop at the edge of this long and lonesome elevated highway with nothing around except sky up above… this really is the middle of nowhere. I drop into a state of alertness; being mindful is exhilarating, the inclination to be awake, watchful. All senses switched on, an awareness that sees also, at the edge of this, some anxiety – the Buddhist term: samvega/pasada describes it – a sense of urgency. There’s clarity too, even though things are not looking good at all.

It’s like a death, just stopping at some place on the road, anywhere’ll do and that’s it, engine conks out. Nothing extraordinary about death; we die and come to life again from one moment to the next. Physical death comes along and instead of coming to life in another moment, we find ourselves in another lifetime. This is how it is, according to what I’ve read, and it could be time’s up for our taxi, it’ll die anytime now. Worst case scenario is waiting in the heat of the tarmac with no air-con running because there’s no engine and hoping another taxi will come along – unlikely… empty taxis don’t normally go out to the airport. What to do? Ah well, miss the flight, I suppose, go tomorrow – yes, but I’m getting ahead of myself here, it hasn’t happened yet.

In the end, the taxi holds on to life and we arrive at the airport okay. Get the bags out of the car with engine still racing and the last I see is the driver heading off in the direction of Arrivals; hoping he’ll pick up another passenger and make it back to the city again. I wheel my luggage into the cool airport and go look for the check-in row. Doorstep to the world. Goodbye Thailand, next stop Delhi…

BKKairport‘The universe I’s (using the word ‘I’ as a verb) in the same way that a tree ‘apples’ or a star shines, and the center of the ‘appling’ is the tree and the center of the shining is the star, and so the basic center of self of the I’ing is the eternal universe or eternal thing that has existed for ten thousand million years and will probably go on for at least that much more.’ [The Essence of Alan Watts, Vol. 4: “Death”]

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Upper photo: approaching BKK tollway. Lower photo: BKK airport departure gate area

constructed reality

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sun image2POSTCARD♯06: Bangkok: Standing outside the house in the shade of a large tree, waiting for the taxi to the airport. The brightness of the sun is tremendous, colours are vivid, the world is a high resolution Photoshop enhancement. After the eye surgery I feel like a nocturnal creature, squinting in the daylight, a quiet presence behind sunglasses. I have an attachment to darkness, I’d like it to be dark, dull and rainy today but instead it feels like I’m in a television studio. The light penetrates everything. There are no real seasons in Thailand, no markers in the calendar to say where we are in the annual cycle. The weather is the same every day. Night comes at 6pm, instant darkness, then at 6am, instant daylight and each day is pretty much like the one before. The days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. The whole thing is just one very long, continuous day, and night is the blink of an eye.

Time disappears, people are startled to discover they have aged… wake up one day to discover they’re old – life has gone. Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and woke up with a very long beard. The story is based on an Orkney folktale about an inebriated fiddler, late one night on his way home, hears some wonderful music and discovers a group of magical beings dancing in a circle. He plays his fiddle with them for a while and continues on his way home. When he arrives he discovers fifty years have passed; people have died, his daughter is middle-aged, her children are grown up. We don’t see the true nature of the world. Reality is thought to be what is out ‘there’, perceptions based on received sensory data input: what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell – and what we ‘think’ it is. What we recognize as a particular colour, is seen by an insect as ultra-violet, by a snake as infra-red. Who are we to say our view of the world is exactly what it is? The ground appears to be solid, terra firma even though the planet is spinning around, hurtling through outer space at thousands of miles an hour. Things are not what they seem to be.

A bright pink and white taxi approaches the house, enters the driveway and fills my vision. Bags inside, door slam, reverse out and we’re gone.

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‘… there are no colors in the real world… there are no textures in the real world. There are no fragrances in the real world. There is no beauty; there is no ugliness… Out there is a chaos of energy soup and energy fields. Literally. We take that and somewhere inside ourselves we create a world. Somewhere inside ourselves it all happens.’ [Sir John Eckles, Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine 1963]

recognition

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HarnhamLakePOSTCARD ♯05: Harnham Monastery, Northumberland: The monastery is situated on top of a small hill; guest accommodation is down the road a bit. I walk up to the main building for the one meal of the day; sunshine, a cloudless sky, and I meet one of the monks at the door. How long has it been, more than two years? He looks different. Faded brown/tangerine robe, shaved head, exposed face, features looking at me. The whole presence of a person, eyes in the centre of a field of vision – it seems like an immense identity just living here quietly… my perception of how things are, looking back at me. Recognition is a selective thing, matching moments of experience with what’s in the files inside the folder marked: THE MEMORY OF OTHER THINGS SIMILAR TO THIS – select/match, the mind-body organism default. It’s not what it is, it’s only what it appears to be.

Chanting, food, wash dishes and walk back down to the guest accommodation again. Huge daisies on the edge of path, everything is swelling up in blossom on top of this solitary hill and the panorama of Northumberland landscape all around. Unknowingly, I’m manipulating my perception of things to see the world as I want to see it without any real understanding of why I’m attracted – a huge habit of indulgence that I think is simply normal. I don’t understand desire, I just respond to the experience of it. Now on top of this hill, looking at a lifetime of seeking after what I want and rejecting what I don’t want without really knowing why. There’s this experience of dissatisfaction at the base of it all… normally I’m pretending it’s not there. It’s a hunger – a hunger for what? Caused by what? Is there a way of ending this hunger? There’s a name for it. It can be identified. Dukkha, (suffering), the First Noble Truth. Knowledge enters and ignorance is pushed out. I couldn’t see it before; too much thinking about how much I dislike the idea of suffering, an obstacle is created by my aversion to it; the desire for it to not be there. Strategies of avoidance, and lost in experience, agreeable/disagreeable. Caught in the momentum of seeking gratification or holding on to unhappy states of mind believing that this is my reality. The deluded self, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. This is the obstacle – the only reason it’s there is that I linger with the idea of it….

KHouse daisiesReturning again and again to the same starting point means these unhappy states of mind are reinforced more and more. Recognition is not informed by ‘clear knowing’, it’s seen through the clouded prism of unawareness, avidyā not-knowing (ignorance). What’s required is mindfulness, applied recognition, Right View, and the undoing of all the little knots tied in memory, habitual reactions over many lifetimes. Bit by bit, letting it all go…

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‘If we have faith in the Buddha’s teaching and are inspired by the great teachers, we can direct our interest into not just avoiding suffering, something we have spent a long time doing, but finding a skilful way of directing our attention towards recognising it, here and now. What is this ‘self’? How is this ‘me’ and ‘mine’ manifesting itself here and now?’ [Ajahn Munindo, Entering the Monastery, 22 July 2013]

– G  R  A  T  I  T  U  D  E –

suspended disbelief

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StACaPOSTCARD #04: St Andrews, Scotland: It’s a sharp bright light, different from the sunshine of South East Asia, comes at a lower angle; the sunbeam seems to shine straight into my eyes. Quite blinding in the early morning, I’m dazzled and have to shade my eyes to look up at the ruins of the nave of St. Andrews Cathedral, against the Northern sky. A great emptiness, 12th century mediaeval folk saw it as the ‘Glory of God’, projecting a ‘self’ onto empty space and if there was an intuitive sense – a normal inquiring mind – that something about this is not quite right; the sense of lack, unconvinced, doubting – could it really be God? If it was like this, they were living in fear of their own natural thinking processes and reasoned that it must be because ‘we are all sinners’ and the Church is there to ‘save’ us. Religion was/is power; the Church of Rome, then the Scottish Reformation claimed all the wealth of the Cathedral of St Andrews. Not much in history about the spiritual life of those who lived in that place, studied, prayed, meditated; their compassion, or loving kindness…

I see the door arches and passageways, people walked through here and lived their lives, breathed this air. How was it then; the existential reality of these 12th Century Britains? Conscious experience was the same in mediaeval times as it is today: outer object triggers inner recognition/desire. Example found in the Old Testament: Adam sees the apple: I want that… Dependent origination (paticcisammupadda) in an Old Testament format: there’s an apple out there and I want it but there’s conflict in the mind, associating a fictional self with a normal response; sorry this apple belongs to someone else and you can’t have it. How to resolve this? The response to the apple is normal, the process of human consciousness must be universal – there was never any time when people didn’t react/respond like this. Today we can apply understanding; how does the process work? In those days, no other way to understand it, you have desire for the apple, you are a born sinner, believe in God, and have your sins forgiven… and that was it – no other instruction. Thank goodness I discovered Buddhism.

It’s daylight until very late at night here, a long twilight going through to dawn the next day – really no darkness at all. The morning gathers momentum and we’re flooded with sunshine, day after day, everybody stumbling around in a state of astonishment, suspended disbelief. The sense of being on an island doesn’t seem to be here in Scotland, we are not held, contained, more like we are dispersed, all the way to the Northern region; Orkney, Shetland, Faroe Islands, the Arctic Circle and beyond…

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Ignorant of their ignorance, yet wise in their own esteem, these deluded men, proud of their vain learning, go round and round like the blind led by the blind [Mundaka Upanishad 18]

a small island

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050POSTCARD #03: London: Writing this on the new iPhone I bought in Apple Store, Covent Garden. Takes some getting used to. The keyboard is tiny; index finger placed on the letter key blocks out the whole letter – fingers too thick. The letters ‘O’ and ‘P’ are difficult, and when I type ‘M’, I hit the backspace instead. Jiab can do it okay, she has fingers as thin as flower stalks. Maybe I’ll give it to her…? A friend fixed me up with a blue-tooth keyboard and small projector (Optima). I’m using the image on the wall like a screen. Uploading the post to WordPress is possible with wordpress mobile but only with a good Wi-Fi connection. Interesting to work in miniature like this – there’s something about the smallness of it that suits things here in UK.

We’re in a tiny hotel room, just enough space for everything. The streets outside accommodate pedestrians on the pavement, and a narrow road allows the big black taxicabs to rush by. Could be a claustrophobic feeling if you think about it too much, compressed, economy of space provision. Don’t think about it. Japan is the same, squeezed into a little country. It is a small island, travel across from East to West and you come to the sea again – I am marooned. Geographical aloneness. The world is out ‘there’. I remember the separateness; the belief in a ‘self’ but seeing only the lack of it, and nearly a lifetime is taken up with looking for the answer to this conundrum – seeking. Now coming back from Thailand where I’m living in somebody else’s country, an outsider, and finding that it’s been so long since I was in the UK, where I was born, I’ve become an outsider here too. Can’t relate to this culture; holding on to a UK identity and there’s really not anything to support it, just my attachment. Most people I knew then are gone, I’m a homeless person, staying in hotels, staying with people I met in Buddhist groups, friends, and at Buddhist monasteries on the way.

Pretty nearly everyone here is an outsider, a visitor. So many different languages: Italian, Japanese, French, South American and others – where are the English people? It’s the holiday season, maybe they’re in someone else’s country too, being outsiders there? All the staff in hotels, restaurants and shops are East Europeans. Visitors come here and what they see is a system run by other visitors to England. A picture of England; a picture of reality – when was it not like this? Buildings and statues of eminent Victorians, a solitary man standing alone, high up there on a plinth, pigeons sit on his head. Splendid isolation, tourists take pictures of each other standing next to the man’s name carved in the stone of the base of the statue’s plinth and up above he’s there, looking out at other statues. I feel I should know who he is, I’m British, I should know… but you’d have to have studied history to know that. I can’t remember, it couldn’t have been important to me. All I see here is a monument to ‘self’, the grandeur of it escapes me. But it was important to the people of that time; statues, ornate buildings, the opulence and wealth of the Empire recorded in history. Such a great achievement, such a small country. This was. Can’t help reflecting on the fact that it’s all a fiction created by the storytellers of the day about a reality somewhere else, far away – samsara, stories from a small island.

‘There is a path to walk on, walking is being done but there is no traveller. There are deeds but there is no doer. There is no self. The thought of a self is an error and all existences are as empty as whirling water bubbles, as hollow as the plantain tree. There’s a blowing of the air but no wind that does the blowing. There is no self, there is no transmigration of a self; there are deeds and the continued effect of deeds…’ [Ramesh S. Balsekar, ‘Advaita, the Buddha and the Unbroken Whole’]

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Optoma projector on gorilla tripod keyboard and iPhone

nothing extraordinary

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photo-1POSTCARD #02: London: There’s a crowd standing around the entrance to the Underground Station. It looks like an emergency, police cars pulled up on the pavement, and an area is cordoned off with white tape stretched across entry points to the station entrance. All traffic is redirected and pedestrians can’t get through either. A policeman gives me directions to the Underground station entrance on the other side; so reassuringly calm, I’m made to feel convinced there’s nothing unusual about this situation of flashing lights, bulletproof vests and loud crackling voices on the police audio system. Pay no attention if there’s a slight urgency in the air and the world seems like it’s falling apart, it’s all being taken care of…

Strange circumstances, we all think, realising what we are expected to do is adjust to it, stay within the familiarity of ‘self’ mode, conventional reality. Mesmerised by strategies to keep the population from mass hysteria. No, really, everything is perfectly allright sir… and I feel a hesitation; it wouldn’t be polite to ask the policeman what’s actually going on here, to take up any more of his time with awkward questions – no, and thank you, you’ve been so nice about this, thank you very much – very English. You hear the word ‘thank you’ constantly; THANKYOUs are everywhere, staying with how it appears to be; nothing extraordinary here, no, no… but I sense something catastrophic; a great yawning chasm opening up beneath my feet. Things are clearly not allright and there’s this sudden desire to be absent, distance myself from this location ASAP.

tube pic1Depending on a self that’s seemingly in ‘here’ creates the objective state – I am inside looking out through the eyes; seeing what’s going on out ‘there’ – a world separate from where ‘I am’. Duality. It’s an illusion, and part of this illusion is that the mind is maintaining the illusion. The policeman is maintaining the illusion, media, culture, everybody I meet reinforces the illusion because we’re all doing it. Even when I can see there’s no self to speak of – nobody at home – the mind is always telling itself there is a ‘self’ in here. And this is the situation; seeing past the ordinary self where there’s a ‘me’, a GPS locator: YOU ARE HERE. This is how it is that I arrive at the Underground entrance by way of the small backstreets, following the crowd. Then down two long escalators, deep under the ground, down and down to the depth of what feels like a ten storey building. At the very bottom of this is the tunnel and the track. Heavy old metal train careering in with a great whoosh of tunnel air, I get into the carriage and we’re off clattering through the blackness of the underground network, rattle-bang-clink, rattle-bang-clink, rattle-bang-clink….

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‘… the distinction between an ever-changing experiential response to the environment, and the concept of a reified continuous self living in an objective world,’ [Gay Watson, ‘I, Mine and Views of the Self’]

Upper photo: Newcastle Rail Station, lower photo: London Underground train

a kind of alertness

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100720131952POSTCARD #01: Chiang Mai: A slight breeze disturbs the wind chimes, tinga-tingaling… ting. An unfinished sequence of musical notes. It diverts my attention from these rememberings, one by one, rushing towards me like a single wave quickly covers the smooth beach sand for a moment then recedes. The wind chimes again: tingaling-ting… ting, a sense of something suspended, isolated, uneasy – butterflies in the tummy – why should it be like this? The fact that I don’t know why it’s like this, causes the uneasy feeling to be there, ‘a riddle, wrapped in an enigma.’ Uncertainty, impermanence, the Ajahn Chah teaching, ‘Not Sure’ [mai nae]; poised on the edge of something – a kind of alertness. I’m going to UK, it’s to do with that; leaving Chiang Mai tonight, only a few hours left. Flight to Bangkok, change planes and I’ll be in London on Sunday morning – 5½ hours in the past. Thinking about Inkland (England, as M calls it), a great flood of memories and the revisiting of these times. I’m not feeling sure about it; Inkland is such a ’proper’ place (compared with Thailand), not sure about being not sure and remembering other times when I was not sure.

Only two weeks in the UK and too many things to do; a sequence of events planned; connecting with trains often delayed, sometimes cancelled, and meeting people in places I don’t know. So many things dependent on so many other things. And so much of it is unresolved until it unfolds, piece by piece and fits together in the right order. A handful of printouts of train tickets and hotel reservations, it’s hard to keep it all in my head. I feel cramped, it’s time to finish off planning for this event – the event is already here, it’s happening now! Time to get ready to go to the airport. Tidy up this placet; the Zen of housekeeping, inner peace, do the ironing…

Hot iron on freshly laundered fabrics, comforting, homely, perfumed smells. It has a soothing effect. Ironing out all these little wrinkles, the silvery nose of the hot iron smoothens them all away, warm to the touch. Place the folded packets of clothing in the suitcase. Peace and flatness. Being mindful of the ‘not sure’ thing, it’s caused by my being not sure about it. As long as the uncertainty is out there somewhere, neither in nor out, it’s uncertain. So I know I have to embrace it, give it a hug, be open to it and allow the uncertainty to enter – there’s nowhere else for it to go. The willingness to let it in, leads to an immediate sense of release, inside and outside. Wind chimes go: tingaling again, joyful sound. Passport, ticket, wallet, I’m on my way. Goodbye house, anjali…

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