of this faring on

Posted on March 21, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #196: DELHI: Skating along with our trolleys on the smooth floors of airport halls and passageways, all these people coming and going. That feeling of familiarity, that déjà vu… I become you, he, she or it, we, you, they. We’ve been away and on our way back, or we’ve gone away and gone is gone… surrender your documents to the immigration officer, passport examined for as long as it takes the facial recognition system to get a hit. Passport stamped thump and through to the other side. Take out computer, remove your watch, phone, belt, and shoes and stand up on the box for a full body search. Wow! By the time we’re done and getting dressed again I feel like I’m a member of the family.

The relief from officialdom, we’re through at last, and welcome to the duty-free shopping mall extravaganza. Gold, diamonds and good-looking people; Hollywood celebrities posing as themselves wearing a watch or a necklace that costs a small fortune. There’s that familiarity, I look closely, but can’t remember the name, Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio? Trying to remember who is who, like this, and thus the idea is beginning to rise to the surface that I could get that watch and be like them, posing as myself. The three-quarter turn, they smile at me, comfortable with themselves, don’t seem to suffer from that great yawning chasm of emptiness situated in the center of everything – they become all I want to see, in my seeing of them: confident, secure happy and yes, this is how it should be….

With just the right amount of energy required to wrench myself free, the polished steel of the purchasing trap snaps shut on itself, and the ricocheted impact propels the escapee forwards in the direction we all seem to be heading anyway. You can’t miss it, the massive head sculpture in the departures hall – dramatic indeed (see photo above). I’ve walked around it a few times looking for an information plate explaining what it’s a sculpture of – the Buddha or a monument to the exaltation of self? It looks feminine, maybe somebody reading this can tell me. No time, no time. Into the queue, on to the aircraft, fasten your seatbelts, and we’re catapulted up in the air for a 3-hour flight. The hydraulics of retracting landing gear is such a reassuring sound, and audible click as it locks into place. We’re part of the sky and clouds, just this is enough.

Incalculable is the beginning of this faring on. The earliest point is not revealed of the running on, faring on, of beings cloaked in ignorance, tied to craving [Saɱyutta-Nikāya, Nidāna-vaggo]

somewhere else

Posted on March 16, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #195: NEW DELHI: These easy days of gentle sunshine on the roof terrace coming to an end. The long shadow of departure is approaching again and I’m caught in the momentum of its passing, swept through airport halls, the layers and passageways of the travel network. Checked-in, identified, one self-contained unit flowing along in the great river of humanity 24/7 passing through these air-conditioned corridors within corridors connected end-to-end, telescoped into smaller passageways, and down into the low ceilinged capacity, enclosed space of an aircraft seat made to measure, reduced, restrained, tightness in the knees squeezed in. There’s a small video screen about 18 inches from my face, showing hundreds of movies. Fold-down tables upon which, small trays of food are placed, fit exactly, and inside they’re divided into even smaller dishes. Small cup, small spoon, absolutely tiny packets of salt and pepper and a toothpick…

In no time at all, the food trays are cleared away, watch videos for four hours flying time, sleep for a while, go to the bathroom, then we’re there – just beginning to feel comfortable and it’s time to go. Passengers squeeze and squidge along the aisles like one body of thick fluid bristling with hand-held luggage and jamming up the doorway. The space we’re in opens out and extends, becomes a passageway then a larger space, all of us holding a destination in mind. Eyes hardly ever meet, preoccupied with mobile devices or searching for signs. Turn left, then right, stand in the immigration queue, passport stamped thump. Out of there and I’m in a different country.

I’m going to Carolina in my mind, or is it just a continuation of the last journey? Home is an expanded concept, ‘many mansions’, memory of former lives. It has the feeling of an in-transit time; where we were after we left and before we arrived. It’s the ‘in-between’ time (when is it never the in-between’ time?) on the way to or coming back from somewhere else. There’s a Nagarjuna quote: ‘All things are impermanent, which means there is neither permanence nor impermanence…’ Change sometimes takes a very long time to happen. Usually though there’s enough time to rest, open up everything and lay out my things, then pack with fresh clothing and something new arrives; I’m swept away in the velocity of thought. These easy days of gentle sunshine on the roof terrace coming to an end…

“Just as it is known
That an image of one’s face is seen
Depending on a mirror
But does not really exist as a face,
So the conception of “I” exists
Dependent on mind and body,
But like the image of a face
The “I” does not at all exist as its own reality.”
[Nāgārjuna, c. 150 – 250 CE]

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found objects

Posted on March 8, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #194: NEW DELHI: Even though everything we had in the old house was numbered, labelled and the whole thing carefully folded in on itself and squeezed into a removals truck with a set of instructions on how to reassemble, when we got to the new house it came out backwards, and the assembly instructions must have gotten lost as it was going in. Thus everything had to be emptied out on the floor in the search for the instructions, and that’s how it began to look like a vast three dimensional jigsaw of an instant house-kit, abstracted. So that when the assembly instructions were found, we weren’t interested in them anymore because we’d already found the proper screwdivers and L-shaped keys that fit into these holes in furniture assembly and started to put bits of it together by eye and what looked right. More things were discovered, ‘objets trouvés’, a collage, arising from found objects carrying that strange familiarity… traces of a former life.

And that was when I remembered something from long ago and far away; I used to be an easel painter, had exhibitions, sold paintings, thought about being a rising star in the World of Art. Then something happened – I don’t know what, an insight into how things arise and pass away. Everything just turned to dust, vapourized, reduced, distilled into the elements, thoughts created by Mind and the words required to describe it started to run out. Anything still standing after the event was taken to pieces, carefully numbered, labelled and the whole thing folded in on itself, then squeezed into a large box that I’ve carried around with me ever since and never opened… until now.

I cut through the old nylon ropes and slit around the edges of the box, sealed with parcel tape and old labels saying FRAGILE and sticky stuff from years of airline stickers for check-in luggage. The lid opens with a creak and a great volume of pandora’s creative playfulness is released in a soundless explosion. Well, that’s done it… no going back now. Brushes, pallete knives, tubes of acrylic paint, acrylic medium, glue gone hard, unusable adhesive tape, bits of measuring devices. and pieces of artwork. Boxes of charcoal, ink and yellowed pencil drawings for a painting I remember I never started – wouldn’t it be fun to go back, after all these years, and pick up where I left off?

I don’t know how many years have gone by, lost in the dream. Woke up one day, look in the mirror, hair gone white; the Rip Van Winkle effect – all of the elders are dead now and I’m grateful for everything I have that belonged to them (strangely addressed in the past tense). I’ve forgotten the ‘me’ that used to hold these brushes, squeezing these tubes of vermillion, cadmium yellow, it’s been such a long time, so many journeys extended out over thousands of air-miles, hours and days maybe weeks of looking out the windows of an airplane somewhere in the clouds and the world coming in through these eyes but seeing it like it’s not ‘me’ personally that it’s happening to, more like it’s an extension of what’s out there.

A sense of the air and spaces inside things I never even thought of until now. It’s possible that this is the right time to return to it. Less words more imagery, it’ll change the direction of the blog. Let’s see, I’m going to take a look into that pandora’s box, maybe find out what it was that caused things to shift as they did and what can be retrieved from the wreckage… got to go now. Sayonara bloggers, more later….

UPDATE: CHECK OUT THE NEW PAGE OF MY ARTWORKS, GO TO HOME AND LOOK FOR THE PAGE TITLED ‘ART’ UNDER THE HEADER IMAGE

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all that remains

Posted on February 9, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #188: DELHI: Early morning in an airport coffee shop space while Jiab is checking-in for her flight to Mumbai. Looking around and up above at this steel glass and tiled environment. Sometimes all I can do is find a quiet place and just sit. Look inwards… it’s an unreal world. There’s this pain in my head, but I have a magic medicine pill that sends the pain away. It’s gone… and a part of my mental functioning gone with it. Where’d it go? I think it went into another room in my head where there’s a party going on all the time day and night. I can hear the music beat throbbing constantly, but can’t recognize the music being played, no worries, the main thing is I can’t feel the pain; besides, it’s more like stress than pain. Sometimes I have no stress at all; sitting alert and mindful like the Buddha. Other times I feel the energy of that stress so strongly it brings attention to the thin membrane separating me from the pain – it could rupture any moment now. Wait and see if it’ll be this time?

Allow all things to pass, continue to sit like the Buddha upright in a chair, quiet and alert to everything that’s going on. A few tables down from me in the coffee shop there’s a teen-aged girl with head and body hunched over her iPhone device all I see is the reflected color glow from the screen on her face. The colour of her eyes sparkle with light that’s continually changing; flashes of blue, pink, and everything goes orange. She is speaking with her friend, loudspeaker on, so she has her hands free to work on the keyboard and smoke her cigarette secretly, and here’s the thing, she’s writing messages on her phone and speaking with her friend and smoking a cigarette, all at the same time. Multi-tasking on social networking FB, twitter, SMS, very noisy texting noise: poo, paw, poo, paw, pee, pay, pay, poo ; digital tones I feel are as sharp as auditory stabs on this frequency that all digital sounds, phone-ring-tones and alerts seem to inhabit.

The voice of her friend at the other end is really LOUD. Must be she’s calling from another party environment similar to the one going on in my head, all kinds of party noises – in fact I can’t tell the difference… what’s happening to me? Is she calling from inside my head? Disregard that thought. She has to shout to be heard: Yeh, I know her, ahna got natheen to say to her, that back-stabbin sawn offa beech. The girl here says something really loud in agreement and they seem to acknowledge this observation as being cool. Maybe I can seek what peace there is in the space surrounding this noise, up to the ceiling structure, the bigger picture, the larger space within which all this is contained, and already the sound of the girl’s phone feels like a tiny diamond or sparkling jewel.

The intrusive lunge of the girlfriend’s voice into my space again brings me back to the way things are; it’s a razor sharp Samurai sword. Language syllables shrill and piercing sound waves suddenly slice my head and upper body into pieces scattered around. The sense of bien-être quivers and gasps in a kind of death. These are the battles fought in the mind.

Jiab comes with her cabin luggage on wheels behind; small oriental, everything compact and a unit of information, we say goodbye at the security line and I make my way back. Out through the crowds and into the car, squeezing through traffic against the flow and wondering why then realizing we are making a sudden U- turn.

The whole landscape is just gone, pieces and parts of objects recognizable from faraway events in history when huge towers tumbled to the ground in seconds, as if all the concrete and steel had turned to dust instantly. The population just can’t figure it out, the psychological effect… it’s too huge. Time to move on from here. Only clouds of dust now, the effect it has on everyone is the same as the metaphor; devastation is all that remains.

If one is a true learner of the Way, one does not search for the faults of the world, but rather speedily applies oneself to attain genuine insight. If one only can see with perfect clarity, then all is completed. [Rinzai]

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Photo (source) showing one of a number of Buddha ‘laps’ at the Ayuttaya site Thailand. Many thanks also to WordPress blogger: ‘of rhyme and reason‘ for the photo
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

nothing

Posted on February 2, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: DELHI: Sitting quietly on the meditation cushion, together with this headache that’s moved in recently, and I’m wondering if it’ll quieten down too – sometimes it does. At first it’s like there’s this energy of time and space moving through me from the past into future in continuously transforming evolving forms – but it’s more than that; internal processes happening by themselves – there’s no ‘me’ involved here, because I’m engaged with this swirling mass of headache and also just on the edge of understanding it’s like that when the whole thing becomes transparent – there is no beginning/no end… and it all slips into what you’d call the bigger picture.

So the meditation becomes more of a: let’s see now where are we at? (the headache and me). The outside world is not outside it’s inside too, every time I look/watch/see an object, it’s internalized. The brain creates a customized picture of it for me – and we all agree – who says the sky is blue, it could be a fantastic different color?

The pressure points on the cushion and floor where my legs are folded, and right knee supported, also parts of the body that are in contact with the surfaces of mat, form sensory data which reach the mind and give me balance, and I slip into this physical position like a hand fits the glove.

But then later as I’m walking through the rooms, the thought that I am as much inside as outside is a bit unexpected. The music I listen to becomes me, it is who I am, the alto saxophone sounds of Paul Desmond enter the hearing mechanism and I’m immediately on a 4D wave of melody floating out the window, I just take it for granted.

Then I smell lunch, go through, and eat the outside world. It enters my body. It goes to create flesh, blood and bones. Fingernails and hair grow. It’s quite an experience. The headache is a long swirling blue veil unravelled all around and caught in gentle aircurrents, of the saxaphone music – you could say it’s not getting the attention it deserves. Then all this becomes momentary, the headache disappears again and there’s the curious awareness of nothing. An experience of ‘open moments’, nothing in itself – but how did that happen? Where did the subject go? Suddenly there’s nothing in ‘here’ where the ‘me’ ought to be.

Virtue and the mind itself shows the way to go; the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. Everything else in this great mass of no-thingness is an intuitive part of the whole, while functioning as form which is what we are on one level, everything else is too, and here we can study and learn so much from each other, while all of the world is comprised of particles that become increasingly smaller until their structure is formless space.

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. [Meister Eckhart]

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Source for Header Image
Note “open moments” comes from a post in the blog:A Buddhist Year titled, ‘Time”
Music I was listening to: ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ by Paul Desmond:

becoming

Posted on January 30, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: DELHI: I have this headache that lives with me now; wake up in the morning and it’s there… dreamy half-formed images like wings of birds fluttering around in front of the headache then I see it’s becoming something and try to correct it so there’s no ‘becoming’. As soon as I do that, there’s no headache – wonderful except, I fall asleep again; the mind assumes, since there’s no becoming, no subject is focused upon, no actual thing (nothing) happening, this must mean sleep; okay, goodnight. Zzzzz….

Wake up again, and stumble out of bed, the whirr and buzz of the mechanism of headache that still hasn’t managed to become anything yet is taken into the hot shower. Then dressed in scarf and warm clothing because it’s cold here in North India this time of year. Downstairs from the third floor holding on to the hand-rail in an almost spiral staircase makes you dizzy to look at it and balancing the head as best as possible in a stable position because now the headache has become a snooker ball rolling around and crashing into the walls inside a sphere at the top of the vertebral column.

Stone steps with shiny-soled slippers that slip. Spinning around, everywhere in the mind thoughts arise; there’s always a subject searching for an opportunity to ‘become’ something. Is this what holds beings in the cycles of rebirth? Curious idea; a possibility… so it must be to do with non-becoming – allowing it all to ‘become’ without anyone ‘becoming’ it. Let’s see, how does that work? Stop here for a moment and think about this.

Am I down yet? Which floor am I on now? Having to be careful about not slipping, how many landings are there? I’m losing my sense of direction. But this idea gets my attention: active thought arises from somewhere in the midst of a great cloud of inactive thought. I can decide to not-become a thought just allow it to ‘become’ by itself.

So it’s possible to be focused on two parts of a thought at the same time… there’s a kind of transparency about it, a ‘becoming’ but no one who ‘becomes’. There’s no become-ee; a headache but no ‘headache-ee’ – it doesn’t belong to ‘me’. There’s awareness of the headache, but no awareness of to whom it is happening, there must be a larger awareness that includes this – an awareness of one thought that includes awareness of another. There’s something that allows me to consider this; I’m seeing it from somewhere else.

Yes this must be it, I’m at the ground floor now, and these stairs are difficult I get lost in them every time – don’t know if I’m going up or down. The mind searches for this awareness in some place completely unknown. Where is it? The space that’s unattached: the space-in-between. This takes me to another awareness that’s quite distant from the headache. It’s like it’s happening somewhere far away.

The mind is the canvas on which our thoughts are projected and is part of consciousness. Our body is a holographic projection of our consciousness. [B. M. Hegde, cardiologist and former Vice-Chancellor Manipal University]
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Source for header picture. Note: this was developed from an earlier past titled ‘non-becoming‘. the structure of it is almost exactly the same, only difference is I had no headache in those days. So I was inspired to apply the same strategy in dealing with the headache I have now and it’s been quite succesful.

the buddha today

Posted on January 28, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: The images of Gautama the Buddha we have today portray him as a person from the educated class, someone we might recognize as not unlike many of us who have the ability to see ordinary life at a distance, without any immediate financial concern about things in general because we live in a society that takes care of itself (as it was for Gautama before he left the palace). Or maybe we’re desperadoes, adventurers with a special genius and exceptional skill and energy that creates equanimity in times of brinkmanship and it’s the sheer confidence in our ability that allows us to see this truth; the suffering of the ordinary worldling is caused by wanting things to be different from (other than) what they are, and never managing to reach the desired state.

There is another a form of Buddhism that reaches the ordinary people of India through the Ambedkar conversion from the socially oppressed Dalit caste to Buddhist, in the hope of a better life. This has become a political issue and some would say the Buddha was an activist attempting to create social change – I think most would agree that, sadly the politics of the situation has confused the Buddha’s original teaching. The Ambedkar Buddhists are the fifth largest religion in India. The Dalit Buddhists I have met, those with university degrees at doctorate level, are actively searching for a way of integrating those parts of the Buddha’s original teaching.

In the West, people have to structure their lives around employment. Their innate ability to be happy is exploited by commercial strategies and a fleeting, temporary happiness has come to be built-in to the system. People can’t escape from that unless they step out of the social momentum they’re in and this means there’s the risk of losing everything. So they’re trapped in the system.

As Pankaj Mishra says: “Buddhism has always attracted the elite of whatever society it has traveled to, partly because you need to have traveled through a certain experience of materialism in order to arrive at the sense that there is something problematic about desire and longing, how they don’t lead to happiness, and more often than not lead to unhappiness. If you are still struggling to fulfill your fantasies of wealth, power, status, Buddhism is less likely to appeal to you.” [‘An End to Suffering’ Pankaj Mishra‘]

Maybe we are seeing some similarities here reading this while stretched out on the sofa with an iPad at this very moment, giving some thought to the situation of Gautama leaving his comfortable home and stepping into the unknown, in search of a spiritual life. In Thailand there’s the option of living in the monastery for a period of time in order to follow the spiritual path. In fact you can spend your whole life there. This kind of choice is held in high regard by Thai society. In the West we are in one way or another committed to our earning capacity. There is virtually no spiritual option of this kind in the system – other than self-study and the support from nearby Buddhist monasteries. A Google search for Theravada monasteries in USA and other parts of the world will explain that anyone is welcome to share in the one meal of the day, free of charge, the activities, Dhamma talks in the monastery and accommodation can be arranged.

“You should live as islands unto yourselves, being your own refuge, seeking no other refuge; with the dharma as an island, with the dharma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.” [selected from the Buddha’s final words]

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Note: some parts of an earlier post included here: https://dhammafootsteps.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/the-way-out/

a lake of sleep

Posted on January 21, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Take all my meds out and put them on the table one by one; colors and shapes like planets from another universe. Swallow, swallow, and swallow. Have to open my case from the journey to get here. Bend down to find the zip, forgetting about the baseball in the head… rumble, crash forwards against the inner front of the cranium – bash! It’s the headache that lives with me, okay, it’ll settle in a moment.

Zip open the case and it seems like it’s totally occupied with a flat pillow gradually inflating to its normal size – a small pillow but it’s soft and I have to have it everywhere I go because other pillows, I find, are cruel and lead to sleepless nights with headache problems all through the next day. Fling that on the bed. Inside the case it’s still a little cool from the aircraft luggage section. How strange. All these ironed T-shirts folded flat, enveloped and layered inside this cuboid capacity; memories contained, waiting to escape from the case. Find some nightclothes and put them on – balancing the baseball in the head. Get into bed; cold in North India, and the heating we have is inadequate, but there is always the HOT-WATER BOTTLE! Yay! Jiab calls it the hot-water bag and the connotations are strange, which she doesn’t realize of course so I find I’m unable to say why and it’s left as hot-water bag. Winter is so short here I keep forgetting to explain.

Get in and lay down. Baseball rolls to the back but I can feel the meds building a thin soundproof wall around it that means I can’t feel the pain. Staring up at the painted ceiling, the solitary light bulb of a rented house it has no shade – must do something about that. Thinking about this and all the other things I have to do, want to do, would like to do. Thinking about things I thought about already, last night, the familiarity of thinking about it. It’s just there; not attached to it, not caught by it and free enough to see it, like Dolphins diving down and up to the surface and down below again. It’s not the content of thought; it’s the context, the awareness of thinking, the IS-ness of it. Watch the in-breath, the out-breath…

What’s going on here? I try to be in present time and the mind goes quiet. This quietness means the “now” just comes along by itself. It’s about the awareness of it – the human condition, investigating this…the meds are having an effect, the pain is gone. The Teaching on sila (virtue) is something that makes me feel good about myself, there’s the sense of being sure I’m on the right track. It means I can focus clearly, get things properly sorted out. Now I can close my eyes and get comfortable, thought processes that maintain themselves hesitantly, and other things without substance appear and fade away. If I don’t reach out for the next thought, there’s nothing there. The darkness is filled with light, moonbeams just at the edge of vision. “We cannot see we are filled with God because we are filled with a concept of God” That reality is beyond description. Best to leave it undescribed.

“The same intelligence that grows trees from seeds,
that lets birds fly,
that waves the ocean
and gives birth to new stars – that same Intelligence
also breathes your breath, beats your heart,
and heals your wounds.”
[Annie Kagan]
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Note about the quote, I don’t remember where I found out about Annie Kagan, it was one of my WordPress blogging friends. Please let me know if you recognise it, thanks

high altitude pain

Posted on January 15, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #187: Bangkok/Delhi flight: The journey is by way of a series of crowded corridors connected like tubes in a telescope, one inside the other, becoming smaller and smaller, reduced to squeeze us into the self construct; the way we are and the lifetimes lived with it. The ‘me’ in the body, the voice in my head, the narrator telling the story. This is how it is… and already there’s a sense of distance from the world (‘this’ was). Keep moving, we pass through security as if it were the eyepiece of the telescope, examined through a lens; cameras watch us standing in line. We are subject to causes and conditions… shoes off, gentlemen remove belt, anything in your pockets Sir? Take off watch please. Enter the X-ray cubicle, stand with legs apart, arms extended, wind blows clothes aside and hair ruffled. I’m suddenly aware the viewer behind the lens can see everything underneath clothing. Shoes on, thread belt through loops, pick up watch and things. Collect computer from tray put it back inside bag and get organised. Step out of there, aware, balanced, easy breathing and it’s okay right now (except piercing high frequency air-conditioning sound, waiting for pain to arrive but it doesn’t come), sensory mechanisms function without my involvement. Continue with the slow foot shuffle (high pitched voices, mysterious kerfuffle), but we’re all moving along here. I’m like an antenna receiving data; seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognitive functioning receptor, waiting for things to happen.

Hand passport to officer, look at the camera, facial recognition, the self I inhabit… this is who I ‘am’ (the same as everyone else ‘is’). The officer stamps twice, thump… thump (the sound of it), walk through and out to the duty-free extravaganza (piercing light enters neural pathways), suddenly blinded for a moment in the reflected glow of gold watches, jewelry, the made-up lips and eyes in vivid, max-pixel pictures, videos of popular celebrities, cosmetic dentistry, facial alterations, images in unflawed focus and good-looking lighting; commonplace works of art, masterpieces of trivialities. I could use the television analogy; I’m watching this channel and all the other people are watching their channels – and if there were separate channels for every single being in the world, that would be the correct analogy.

We’re in another tunnel sloping downwards, becoming smaller at the end where painted ladies wait, show me where I have to go; turn right into an even smaller tube with seats on either side of a corridor, and I’m in my numbered seat. It’s made to measure, low ceiling, knees touch the seat in front, elbows touching the guy next to me, hairy arms. It’s like being on a bus at night, except less space. No view from the window, can see only the blank video screen at eye level, 18 inches in front of me… everything is too near and a feeling of blackness. Try to read my book on the Kindle but the words appear strange, three-dimensional, as if embossed on the screen, the lines of text are not straight; flowing in a gentle curve. Then I feel the pain behind my right eye like a sharp steel knife entering my head, and pushed right up to the hilt. Gasp! The painted ladies bring me a plastic glass of water. Searching in my pockets for the meds…the huge pain has reached its max, the steel blade withdraws; a devastation of everything, catastrophic, frantic looking for something to hold on to, or let go of, and it all tips over like a building falls on its face in slow motion, desolation, wreckage and some relief as I see it’s not happening to ‘me’ – it’s not ‘my’ pain, too big for that, much too big. It’s the force of pain on its own, like the huge wind blows, the vast rain falls, a storm at sea. Swallow two capsules, lie back, close my eyes and the curve I was seeing earlier becomes the curve of a thick dark smoke rising up from my head, swirling up through the paper-thin structure of the plane, the sky above and space all around.

Relaxed with the seat back, pain gone and all that remains is the sound of the engines at 600 mph and altitude 38,000 feet. The mind makes a ‘story’ out of it, a stretched sense of reality that includes the video I’m watching in the darkness. Memory allows all kinds of out-of-context events to be there and acceptably part of it.

Landing, bump… bump, long lumpy runway to get to the airport buildings, then the clamber and struggle for overhead baggage, push, shove. Intrude, squeeze as they do here, full body contact with total strangers, and out into a tunnel again, more tunnels becoming wider, wider then a corridor and out onto the miles of ochre coloured carpet with patterns of planets and stars. High speed moving walkways and we’re in India.

“God is a mythical word, a mumbo-jumbo word that is the invention of the priesthood. Actually, to ask whether God exists is absurd. God is existence, the very isness. When we say God exists we create something out of the word God, then God becomes a thing. But God is not a thing, nor is God a person, he is pure existence. The word is misleading because the word personifies. It is better to use the word existence. The totality of existence is God.” [Osho]

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Photo: Free internet image
Quote: Source, God is Existence itself – Osho

every picture tells a story

Posted on December 29, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #182: Bangkok: Some kind of cute little long-tailed dove-like bird has built a tiny nest in the ceiling fan we never use that’s outside on the porch; formerly the porch was where compulsive smokers would sit and flick ash into their ashtrays. Then smokers became less and less, dwindled away, became non-smokers like everyone else or joined la résistance, an underground movement. The fan hasn’t been switched on in years, the ashtrays were removed and everything was renewed, painted and no one ever went out there again.

So the birds decided it must be for them. We’re now standing behind glass doors, watching a bird arriving with small twigs held in the beak and squeezing through the bars with the structure of twigs to create a small nest base inside the metal guard. The process strikes a memory of another post in this blog from our time in Switzerland [Birds on the Balcony 1] about pigeons nesting on our balcony up there on the 7th floor. I had no camera and made a sketch of it.

The nest was in the old Christmas tree bucket we’d just put out on the balcony after Christmas had been and gone. Some of the bells and everything still dangling from the branches, the faded coloured paper of Christmas-Past… a forgotten thing. So the bird(s) just went ahead and built a nest in the abandoned tub. Strange really because the wrappings were intact, it was as if it were a continuation of a pagan rite. After a while two eggs appeared, which became two living beings with wings – and I saw the whole thing; their getting fed from the beak of the parent bird and the flapping of little downy wings. The birds on the balcony were the main focus of my attention for a long time. I feel I know such a lot about rearing birds, I’ve been through the whole thing.

Early on I realized they build their nests near human habitation because the proximity to humans is a good thing; humans chase away crows. And it was then I knew I had a part to play in this little family situation, patron and benefactor, and sure enough, security system… I had no time to prepare.

One day, I was looking out at the two cute little baby birds all huddled up in there, parent bird off to get food leaving me in charge, and suddenly I become aware of a black shape in the centre of my vision. It didn’t immediately click in my brain that it was a huge crow because maybe it’s so black, mysterious and a peculiar invisibility, a photographic negative, something that’s not supposed to be there, glinting a kind of deep purple and blue… a being materialised out of the unknown. And I’m kinda, speechless; hypnotized by it’s presence.

It slants its head with long pointed beak in the direction of the baby birds and makes a hop in their direction. I fall out of my chair, knocking over a few things in the scramble to get to the balcony door; collisions with the furniture: then a primal roar: ‘AAAAAHHHHHH!’ and wild flailing of arms, fling open the sliding glass door and the crow was gone, two little birds happy and safe, barely aware of the interruption.

My relationship with the birds became quite bonded since the visit of the crow and I felt a certain sadness when they both got their flying sense and left the balcony. Now another opportunity arises to see the beginning, and not the end….

Beauty is not caused, it is.
Chase it and it ceases,
Chase it not and it abides.
[Emily Dickinson]

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