the journey to get there (2)

Posted on July 10, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#79: Aberdeen Scotland: Wandering through these streets and lanes looking for my childhood; searching for something that’ll tell me what it was like more than 50 years ago as I walked along the route to school in all kinds of weather. The present time as it was in the past, brought forward into the ‘now’. All the shops have gone, been demolished, rebuilt and everything has become something else. Only civic amenities and urban architecture remain, paving stones, cast iron lampposts, doorways and gates. An iron gate hinge embedded in stone but no gate – is it something I passed on my way to school? Do things like this survive at below-zero temperatures for 50 freezing winters? Not impossible, everything is made of granite here, indestructible. Following my footsteps as a child, along these same streets that were old even then. There’s an unusual shaped crack in a paving stone that looks like a tree, strange familiarity, a passing recognition – the kind of thing a child would notice, head down and leaning against the wind.

Is it the same wind now, after all these years, flowing like a river from its source to the sea estuary and every single part of it moving always in present time everywhere along its length? The scale of it is so immense, a whole lifetime can seem like a day, an hour, a moment – and did I glance down at this tree-like crack in the paving stone when I was a child and react in the same way I’m doing now, thinking… how strange, it looks like a tree! What is it that makes one thing seem to be something else? Is this the recollection of a physical feature, or a memory of the perception of it? Remembrance of things past, former lives… it feels like yesterday, the nearness of it. It feels like now – or somewhere on the journey to get there.

There’s also a feeling of far-awayness, the day before yesterday I was on a flight from Delhi, transit in London to Inverness. Jet lag and bewilderment, scanned by X-ray machines, identified, processed, held in aircraft cabin pressure for 10½ hours and transported 4000 miles to the Northern hemisphere. Then placed on the ground and having to quickly reassemble the parts of who I am in this new context. A visit to the tribal elders, then into Aberdeen to revisit these childhood days. Coastal winds, cloudy skies – and when the sun comes through, the heat is intense. Raincoat on, raincoat off again, I don’t really feel I’m connected with the pattern of things here after so long in the East, sun shines all the time and years go by but it’s just like one very long day. Thought processes are without substance, fade away, and if I don’t reach out for the next thought, there’s nothing there. There’s a memory of how it was when I was a child here in the North of Scotland, I’m holding that in mind but when I let go… it’s gone. The wind blows and a feeling comes back again that triggers a memory, then it’s carried away with the sound of seagulls and the smell of the sea…

‘… a sense of existing right now, a sense of life looking out your eyes, and life feeling through your senses into this experience, this space of the room, this place. It’s like we are a sense apparatus for raw life, raw consciousness, which feels through us as instruments with five or more senses. What is sensed registers in awareness — this knowingness of existence, this knowingness that is existence itself…’ [Mukti, adyashanti.org]

————————-

world without end

Posted on June 19, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#74: Delhi: Ping! An email hits the inbox. It’s from the travel agent, about my flight to UK: Delhi/London, and connecting flight to Inverness Scotland. I see for the first time that the whole journey door-to-door takes place on the same day (allowing for +4½ hours time difference). Didn’t notice that… and another thing is that the date of travel is the 6th July which happens to be my birthday. It’s a time-and-space thing, I’ll have the longest birthday I’ve ever had in my life. Delhi departure time: 10.25 am, London arrival time: 2.50 pm (local time) then Inverness arrival time: 6.00 pm, and the folks there are saying we should go out and celebrate, have dinner somewhere. It’ll be a very long stretched-out, spaghetti-like, spatiotemporal birth-day.

But that’s not all; I remember now, in the Northern region (57.4717° N, 4.2254° W), it never really gets dark in the summertime, being near to the land of the midnight sun. So my birthday will continue in a glimmer of daylight through the night of the 6th July, into the dawn and the brightness of the next day, then all through the night again, into the next day and on and on like that for the rest of the summer. There’s a sense of birthing, and a feeling of forever about it, ‘world without end’. I’m swept away in a great ocean of memories. Everything that ever happened in my childhood flashing before the eyes. The mind racing through everything contained in the system, and clicking all known picture files. Hundreds of windows all opening at the same time; layer upon layer of memories. The thought that there is a place called Home… ‘home is where the heart is’, what does it mean, how does this make sense to me now?

Question: where is home? Sit quietly and clear the mind for a bit, consciously aware of the sensation of the breath gently touching the inner surfaces of nasal passages. This feeling is the same for everyone. Look out through the eyes and see the sky, the same blue sky everyone else is seeing – and not just the sky, the physiological process of seeing the sky is the same for everyone. The consciousness that recognizes this sense of subjectivity is the same for me as it is for you and everyone, everywhere, as it has been all the way through history. I can know how they felt and understood the world in ancient times; the sky they looked at and sounds they heard, fragrances they smelt, food tasted, surfaces touched and their mind responses. All of that is the same for me here and now as it was for the ancient people in their time. The ‘me’ and ‘mine’ I experience is not different from the ‘me’ and ‘mine’ anyone else experienced in the past, or at this moment, or any time in the future. The body/mind organism that receives the experience of this ever-present sensory data through the Five Khandas, is the same for me as it is for everyone on the planet. Outer and inner are both parts of the One, the Same, Inseparable – This is ‘Home’.

‘…the Buddha practised deep embodiment – really inhabiting his body, not sticking on the surface at sense-contact, but going inwards through breathing to where the subtle energy-channels of the body open, find their still centre and suffuse the practitioner with happiness and ease. In contact with that, the mind drops its wayward thinking, its sluggishness, agitation and passion and gathers at one point. ‘Jhāna’ he called it, ‘touching the Deathless with one’s body,’ the meditative entry to nibbāna. Note: not ‘witnessing’ or ‘watching’, but touching.’ [Ajahn Sucitto, Surface, Depth and Beyond]

————————-

Image: the midnight sun in Altafjord in Norway. Source: Wikipedia

Note: excerpts from an earlier post: now as it was then, are included here

wake up

Posted on February 17, 2013 by tiramit

There’s a book by Jack Kerouac titled ‘Wake Up’, the story of the Buddha in the style of the ‘beat’ way. I used to have it on my bookshelf in the house in East Anglia and one day the electrician came to the house to fix some circuits and his young assistant picked up the book; a young guy, long hair sticking out, wearing shorts and running shoes, tattooed legs, said he’d heard of the Buddha and also Kerouac and that was pretty cool. So we had a little discussion about this. Later on I noticed the tattoo on his leg, there was something familiar about the flowing calligraphic style and then I remembered: Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ in Tibetan script. I asked him about it and he was pleased that I’d noticed it; said he got it recently, didn’t know much about what it was, really, just looked good. And I told him, it was nice, and we looked at it for a while; him spinning his leg around so I could read it all, leg hairs and the indigo coloured inks. I said that I’d read somewhere this six syllable statement contains the essence of the entire teaching of the Buddha, according to Tibetan tradition. ‘Cool,’ he says. There it was, the innate consciousness in nature, activated by mysterious Sanskrit sound frequencies in harmonic resonance, tattooed on the leg of an electrician’s assistant in East Anglia.

Kerouac begins with the statement: ‘Buddha means the awakened one.’ Buddhism is the wake-up call; it’s built-in – comes with the software. There’s the quality of being aware; receptive to the whole thing. The sensation of sunlight on my skin, of how the body senses the outer world, and everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think. The mental faculty senses the larger consciousness, looking to see what that might be. It’s not the thoughts, the thinking process, or the identity of ‘me’ engaging with this. It’s anatta, what’s outside of all of that; an awareness that includes everything. And I can find it coming out through all the layers created by the mind. Just trying to understand what it takes to see what that sort of thing could be.

This holds my attention in a particular kind of way. It’s a kind of alertness, an ongoing investigation into the present moment and everything about the sensory function and the cognition of it is there too. It’s triggered by a simple curiosity: what is this? And the attitude of careful listening, I am the awareness inside of the object outside, awareness is both and everywhere is here, everything is this; as far as the eye can see.

‘Thus Tathagata, He-Who-Has-Attained-to-Suchness-of-Mind and sees no more definite conceptions of self, other selves, many divided selves, or one undivided universal self, to whom the world is no longer noticeable, except as a pitiful apparition, yet without arbitrary conception either of its existence or non-existence, as one thinks not to measure the substantiality of a dream but only to wake from it; thus Tathagata, piously composed and silent, radiant with glory, shedding light around, rose from under his Tree of Enlightenment, and with unmatched dignity advanced alone over the dreamlike earth as if surrounded by a crowd of followers, thinking, ‘To fulfill my ancient oath, to rescue all not yet delivered, I will follow out my ancient vow. Let those that have ears to hear master the noble path of salvation.’[Jack Kerouac, ‘Wake Up,’ 1955]

————————-

Image (upper): detail from a photo by Louk Vreeswijk (lower): Om Mani Padme Hum, in Tibetan script

the doorway

Posted on October 12, 2012 by tiramit

London-Bangkok flight: What a strange way to spend the afternoon… brilliant clear light enters the window as if we were in a room high up in an apartment building. Purple carpet with yellow stars, walls are grey, the fittings are of brushed steel, but I’m somewhere in the air, and thousands of miles away from where I was 8 hours ago. The little old house in East Anglia is empty now, I packed up and left it behind.

Last thing was to bless the room; a blessing and a ‘thank you’ for providing shelter, and doing this also helps me to be alert, mindful and ready for the next thing. Hands held in anjali, and walking through all the rooms in that small dwelling saying in my mind: ‘May all beings live in safety, be happy, be healthy, live with ease. May all persons who come here after me find the same feeling of security and stability I found in this place.’ Then step outside, close the door, double lock it and into the taxi. It helps give a sense of closure, or something, at the end of an event. I recommend it. Recently I came across something very similar about blessings that I liked [Link]

After that, walking through the airport halls and passageways and all these people just moving along with their bags; as you pass them there’s a hint of something familiar – it’s that transitory ‘thing’. Airports and stations are an extraordinary example of it, in fact it’s always there – there at the corner of one’s vision. We’re all having the same kind of experience; we’re all going ‘away’; we’re all in transit; this is the time after we left and before we arrive. This is aniccan the ‘in-between’; the moment of transforming.

Change is there all the time – might seem like a contradiction. There’s a Nagarjuna quote: ‘All things are impermanent, which means there is neither permanence nor impermanence…’ could be a koan; the constant sweeping along of aniccan and waves of change. But immediately it says to me, first I need to lighten up and there’s always something new, gently nudging at the elbow and that’s what makes it possible to ease away from attachment.

If I’m free from ‘holding’, I can easily pass through the layers and corridors of the travel experience, part of the great river of human beings, all of us on the way to ‘somewhere’, surrounded by advertising images of well-off, good-looking people smiling all the time; Julia Roberts doing a Gucci advert? Celebrities I know but can’t remember their names, just posing as ‘themselves’ wearing a watch the cost of a small car. I look closely, trying to remember who it is, and fall into the dream.

They look secure, confident, happy and everything is going allright for them. They don’t seem to suffer from that great chasm of nothingness situated in the centre of everything; the ‘me’ I live with. What is it they have that I don’t? If I could have whatever it is they have, I could be happy, like them…? I’m drawn towards ‘the purchase’ by scenarios and strategies created by commercial psychologist witchdoctors who can manipulate my conscious experience.

Mindfulness means I stay free of the hunger and the urge. Here on this plane I can see a small piece of sky out there. It’s sufficient to remind me that if I get pulled into consumerist samsara too much, there’s a doorway in the mind which leads to freedom from suffering… the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving. Just knowing this is enough.

‘Within that cycle [the wheel of birth and death (samsara)], there is one doorway through which we can step out, namely, between feeling[Vedana] and craving[Upadana]. All the other steps of dependent arising are automatic causes and effects. Unless we learn to live with unpleasant and pleasant feelings without wanting to get rid of the one or keeping and renewing the other, we don’t have access to that doorway.’ [Aaya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies, Transcendental Dependent Arising p55]

non-becoming

Posted on October 6, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: Dreamy half-formed images swim before the eye without identity, no recognizable or known parts of the image. I’m trying to see it this way: no identity, otherwise ‘self’ intervenes and it ‘becomes’ something [bhava]. I’m falling asleep again; still early morning, comfortably dark and sitting on the cushion on a futon on the floor in the upstairs room. One advantage of sleeping on the futon is that you can roll over and up into the sitting position on the cushion quite easily – a smooth transition from sleep to wakefulness. The disadvantage is that it’s difficult to stay awake.

The process of waking up in the morning means the mind is in the process of getting shaped into a form, a ‘self’, and it all gets locked down then; ‘becoming’. So what I’m trying to do here is not let that happen. Without the habitual inclination towards ‘self’, conscious attention gently searches out another way, one that is identity-free, no ID card. The problem is, of course, ‘self’ tries to take over, as usual and if the identity-free state is present, ‘self’ understands it to be sleep. So I start to drift off to sleep again. I see it happening and think: Hey! Why should the ‘self’ impose itself like this? But the ‘self’ goes around imposing ‘itself’ and making assumptions about everything all the time and if I were to just let it go on doing that, I’d not see that things are actually quite different from how they appear to be.

Continue the meditation by following the breath, and a curious feeling that I’m sitting at an angle, or the weight of the body is over on the right side and on the left side there’s something like an empty space… what’s happening? Next thing is, I’m thrust into another dreamlike scenario and some sort of memory sequence. Here we go, I’m falling asleep again and losing it all in the dreamy half-formed images of the sleep I just emerged from. Mindfulness cuts in when I remember to let it all go. Hold on and let go… I need to hold on to the intention to let go. Everywhere I look there’s a ‘self’ searching for an opportunity to create an identity, (sakkayaditthi) ‘personality view’. It’s what holds beings in the cycle of rebirth. Breaking out of the cycle is arrived at by non-becoming – allowing it to ‘become’ without becoming.

————————-

It does not appear or disappear.
It is not born and does not die.
It is neither constructed nor raised up,
Neither made nor produced.
It is neither sitting nor lying,
Neither walking nor standing still,
Neither moving nor turning over,
Neither at rest nor idle.
It does not advance or retreat,
Knows not safety or danger,
Neither right nor wrong.
It is neither virtuous nor improper.
It is neither this nor that,
Neither going nor coming.
[Lotus Sutra]

Photo: Louk Vreeswijk

something else

Posted on October 4, 2012 by tiramit

London: I’m in a narrow rush-hour train, standing in an integrated mass of human bodies all supporting each other. I’ve got something to hold on to above my head which is fortunate because the train is shaking about on uneven tracks, noisy and exhilarating. This really is the whole experience of train travel…. Then it settles down to a smoother pace and I’m focused on the closeness with other people; fragrance of wet raincoats and a forest of arms reaching up to hold on to roof bars, blocking the view. Somewhere nearby, a voice suddenly shouts out: ‘I’M ON THE TRAIN’ – a man speaking on his phone…

‘I think, therefore I am’ [cogito ergo sum] The Buddha noted the inherent problems in this kind of thinking: “I am the thinker’ lies at the root of all the categories and labels of conceptual proliferation, the type of thinking that can turn and attack the person employing it… “Do I exist?” – It depends on what you mean by “exist.” “Do I have a self?” – It depends on what you mean by “self.” Thinking driven by definitions like these often falls prey to the hidden motives or agendas behind the definitions, which means that it’s unreliable.’[Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

The man on the phone continues with his loud conversation, surrounded by people with grim faces who don’t speak. He disregards us completely, asserting himself in this space that everybody is squeezed together in, caught in the dis-ease of ‘deadly tedium’. We are struggling over this intrusion of the man and his phone but holding our composure with patient endurance. Folded newspaper in front of the face to avoid eye contact, we are managing to ignore each other completely. Turn the page of the newspaper, fold it back skillfully without untoward touching and have a casual glance all around, as I’m doing it, just in case there’s anything that needs to be noticed, looked at or ‘seen’. No, everything is as it should be; newspaper held like demure fan that masks the face, and doing the crossword: 7 across: Four letters, ‘It may follow something _ _ S_. Meanwhile the man talking on his phone is saying the line is breaking up because we are going through a tunnel.

I am committed to a world of consumption of goods and services. I want to have more of what I like and less of what I don’t like. I’m not interested in things that are neutral, they are meaningless (it’s a pity really, because the neutrality of feeling is the Way To Go). I am therefore in a chronic state of dissatisfaction because I never get what I really want. Okay, but as long as we’re mindful, it can be manageable? Well, it’s allright for some, you might say, for those of us who have recently returned from somewhere colourful and bright, light and cheerful, sun shines all the time; smiling Thai faces and their polite behaviour. But isn’t it just that they have a more cheerful kind of dukkha over there?

There’s a passenger announcement: ‘…delays at Croydon and Blackfriars due to congestion’. Then entering Liverpool Street: ‘… this train will not stop at Liverpool Street because of “flooding” at the Eastbound station (flooding?) and will continue on to Aldgate where passengers can take the train back and enter from the Westbound station which is unaffected and we apologize for any inconvenience.’ I have to ask other passengers what the announcement was about and surprised to discover everyone is friendly; the shared burden of these times of hardship and emergency – something conditioned by World War II?

I get there finally, near the end of a long list of Anglo-Saxon place names, and walking along with the South coast tourists in the pleasant harbour area of a town near the sea at Eastbourne. I’m looking for the office of an agent I have to visit and the phone in my pocket is ringing, who can this be… Hello? Jiab, she’s in Peru; hard to believe. She wants to know, can I get some of these wipes that are good for doing polished wood, and get a few packs, please? I have to take them with me when I come to Thailand. I hold up the phone high in the air so she can hear the Eastbourne seagulls all the way over there in Peru; a great swirl and echo of Northern seabirds singing in the wind, like cats mewing in the air.

————————-

‘It’s because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond transmigration, beyond the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destination.’ [DN 15 PTS: D ii 55 Maha-nidana Sutta: The Great Causes Discourse]

the end of TV

Posted on October 2, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: There used to be a TV here but I gave it away. A big old fashioned dinosaur TV, too large for this little old cottage. No room for it; limited floor space, low ceiling height, clutter and junk (jutter and clunk). I manhandled the TV upstairs but it was no good there; then downstairs again and hurt my back in the process. It was always in the way; just too big. I had it under the table for a while but it looked silly there… and I started to see that it had to go.

But I was dependent on TV watching; every other activity took second place to that, and attempting to disengage from TV was a struggle. What to do? I’d try switching it off suddenly, right in the middle of something, a chat show, whatever, just to see what the room felt and looked like without all the noise, bright lights and rewarding, congratulatory applause. But every time I did that, the absolute silence of a world without TV was devastating! The lack of colour and severity of greyness in the house was just… sad! I had to switch it on immediately. TV was like a friend, I couldn’t say goodbye to it. I kept on doing that, though, switching it off and on again, in the middle of programmes, to surprise myself. Eventually I started to get interested in the idea of the silence that remained without TV, typical of the location I was in – a house surrounded by quiet fields and nature.

But TV-cold-turkey was no fun and I was in denial for a very long time. Then one day I was watching the BBC news and noticed the newsreader pronounced his words with a weird sort of ‘smirk’… kinda disgusting, and then the whole ugly ‘self’ aspect of it was revealed. Shocking, but I was glad it happened because it was obvious then that I didn’t feel comfortable with TV in the house – it had to go. I carried it out the back door and left it in the garden; went back inside and discovered this huge space in the room where it used to be. Interesting to see the directions in the room created by a focus on TV; chairs arranged so that viewing could take place comfortably. So I rearranged the furniture, changed it all around, and that was really quite liberating.

I’d return to the kitchen window from time to time and look at the TV out there in the garden – holding my attention, still… thinking, that object should be ‘inside’, not ‘outside’. Completely out of context in the garden, but I just left it there; no longer connected to it. Later that day, it started to rain and drops were falling on the dusty black surface – the urge to take it back in… that was difficult. The neighbour dropped by and he said it’s not a good thing to leave a TV out in the rain. I told him I didn’t want it anymore, maybe he’d like to have it for his spare room? Okay thank you very much… and, you’re welcome. So I gave him the channel changer and that was it. Off he went and I watched him carry it into his house, happily bewildered by my generosity and failing to understand my joy at having escaped the inertia of TV.

That was then; and this is now. I’m sitting on the cushion in an absolutely compelling silence. It’s before dawn, still dark, and I have the window wide open. Not cold but it’s raining, I’m upstairs and can hear a few rain drops hit the window sill, most of the rain drops are still on the way down. I want to experience this rain so I go downstairs open the back door, get my meditation cushion positioned so that I’m not bothered by drops or wetness coming into the house. Sitting on the surface of the planet listening to the rain striking the hard concrete outside and the grass beyond that. The open door to the garden, no wind here, dry and the sound of raindrops merged together in one whole mass of tiny collisions. An endless wave of pitter-patter-pitter-patter, like thousands of tiny finger snapping sounds. The generosity of rain.

[Link to: Rain]

————————

‘Like a thief entering an empty house, bad thoughts cannot in any way harm an empty mind.’ [Padmasanbhava]

Photo Image Source

Low Headroom

Posted on September 24, 2012 by tiramit

East Anglia: Here in the cottage and wide awake at half past three. There was a full moon shining in the window of my little room like a headlight in the clear sky and it woke me up. Came downstairs and got a fire blazing in hearth. The last of last years logs in the shed covered in cobwebs. Nothing has happened here for a year except the neighbour coming in to clear the junk mail once a week. Cold, quiet and that alone feeling; fields all around. I must be the only one awake in a radius of some miles, except for party-people and the night shift down at the Quay. I’m in this wide-awake condition, alert and ready to get on with the day, ears buzzing with the absolute silence of the English countryside.

In this 200 year-old building, the main door is very low, 5ft 6 inches; duck your head to enter and exit. Sometimes the rising up occurs too early and the head collides with the door frame.

I know it well, it’s happened a number of times and thus I have this bruised head and resulting consciousness of the head situated at the top of the body that reminds me of Douglas Harding’s idea of Headlessness. I met him once at his house near Ipswich, not very far from here. He was my neighbour but I never knew him, met him only that one day when Jiab and I went to visit with two bhikkhus. We stayed for the meal and after we’d eaten, did the thing with the paper cylinder that Douglas used to demonstrate the headless reality. What I remember was seeing his cheerful pink-cheeked face at the end of the cylinder he and I were holding and the distinct fragrance of lunch. Sad to think he’s gone now. Douglas Harding passed away in 2007 at the age of 98. The photo above was taken in 2005.

After that I ordered his book: ‘On Having No Head’ on amazon and delivered here by Parcelforce, a company that sounds REALLY assertive. Looking at this now and the description of his visit to the Himalayas and that moment when he discovered he had no head: ‘…what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! … this hole where a head should have been was … a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills. I had lost a head and gained a world.’

The ‘headless’ condition he describes at length is something I’ve considered many times. Now seated here at the desk upstairs on revolving office chair, yellow vinyl floor surface, facing the small window, no curtains, dark black outside, the window glass reflects the interior of the room and back of desktop computer. I find the Douglas Harding Quotes page.

‘The lost Gospel according to Thomas, discovered “by accident” in an Egyptian cave in 1945, couldn’t have appeared at a more opportune moment in history, or with a message that speaks more directly to our condition and needs.’ [Link to: Douglas Harding Quotes]

Birdsong… sun is coming up and I see a flat landscape; low lying sunbeam illuminates a few remaining cornstalks in the harvested field, they are a golden colour. Blue sky, it’s a new day, clear away all the shadows of night and I’m pondering the evidence that all and everything is in the space where the head used to be. Is this what Jesus was really teaching? [Link to: Nag  Hammadi Manuscripts]

————————-

‘… your humanity is like a disguise, an incarnation you have taken on to be here in this world. Inwardly you are God, outwardly you are a person – a unique person with a special contribution to make. Instead of thinking you are just that person, that appearance, you are awake to the Power behind you, the Safety within you, the Source of inspiration and guidance at the heart of your human life. This enables you to be yourself even more so.’ [Douglas Harding Quotes (link above)]

Main Photo, left to right: the Author, Catherine Harding, Douglas Harding, Ajahn Dhammiko and Ajahn Visuddhi

A Little Country

Posted on September 22, 2012 by tiramit

Genève-London Flight: Darkness and the cold mountain air of a Swiss morning just before the 06.00hrs news broadcast; they are playing a short extract of birdsong – the first broadcast of the day. It arises from silence on the car’s speakers, increasing in volume and gradually becomes noticeable; very much like the real thing. Birdsong and high frequency sounds reduce stress, I feel relaxed. Day begins, the news in French as we sail through the silent Genève streets to the airport. Taxi like a limo; everything is reassuringly taken-care-of. No problem, no suffering; the heaven realms.

Airport check in, and through to Departures, impossibly expensive luxury goods in Duty Free. At the Easyjet desk, staff wear fluorescent orange Hi-Vis vests; cheap and cheerful. We are processed, boarded, I have time to find an aisle seat, stow away my bag. Up and away and the next thing is, I’m looking from the plane down on the surface of the planet.

Clouds cover the landscape with openings here and there where I can see the ground below. Very soon we are at the French coast and the clouds disperse as we fly over the English Channel. I can see a few isolated ships with lights on; it’s still early morning. In a very short time the coast of England appears up front and if I look behind me I can still see the coast of France – hadn’t realised how close these countries are to each other.

England is a patchwork quilt of very small fenced enclosures. Everything is the same as it was when I left a year ago; it could have been yesterday. I think I recognize the little houses down there, same flight path as before. No change. Buildings last for hundreds of years, built from iron, brick and stone. It was all here before I was born and will be here after I’m dead. So different from the bamboo and thatched roof dwellings of South East Asia; they fall apart and new ones are built in their place. That kind of fragility and tenuous existence is frightening for people who live in a stormy climate like this, surrounded by the sea.

Concrete bulwarks along the English coast keep the sea out. The threat of the sea engulfing the land is psychological; an island mentality. The perceived fear that it’s impossible to open up to fully accommodate this energy of life. We have to hold it back. There is no space in this little country; cross from East to West by road and it’s done in a few hours. The recognition comes back to me – I know this feeling; a deep familiarity. The claustrophobia of ‘self’; I am an island surrounded by water. There is this anxiety that comes from always wanting to know things are under control; the sea will not breach the flood barriers.

Descend at Gatwick, off the plane and processed through formalities. Large posters saying you cannot bring potatoes into the United Kingdom… okay so this is my last chance to declare hidden contraband of illegal potatoes. Welcome to England. ‘Passengers are reminded not to leave baggage unattended.’ It’s only 07:55 hrs, thanks to 1 hr time difference; a sense that you’ve arrived before you left? The day is yet to begin; dull grey, cold and damp. The Rail Network, rock’n roll, rough and ready; an empty beer can rolling around on the floor of the train carriage. Seats are small, very close to each other but passengers are all looking the other way. How good it would be if we could all just be friends…. My niece would say: can you give me a hug please?

————————-

Let there be a little country without many people.  Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,  and never use them.  Let them be mindful of death  and disinclined to long journeys.  They’d have ships and carriages,  but no place to go.  They’d have armor and weapons,  but no parades.  Instead of writing,  they might go back to using knotted cords.  They’d enjoy eating,  take pleasure in clothes,  be happy with their houses,  devoted to their customs.

The next little country might be so close,  the people could hear the cocks crowing  and dogs barking there,  but they’d get old and die  without ever having been there.

[Tao Te Ching, Chapter 80, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin ]