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?

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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 ]

Photo: Louk Vreeswijk

Storm

Posted on September 17, 2012 by tiramit

Switzerland: Just before the storm started I was having this problem with the internet upload speed; trying to get a post into Publish but Mbps too low; let’s see, okay try again; waiting for it to come up with the WordPress site to click on the upload button, maybe it’ll do it this time. Nope… stuck again and I start to take it personally, caught in thinking this is ‘bad.’ And, pretty soon, it gets blown out of proportion, turns into a small crisis, like a fire burning down the house. The intensity of feeling is incredible. This is what a very low internet speed can do.

Am I in withdrawl? Focus for a moment, just there at the desk, feet flat on floor, watch the breath, stop the mind, and suddenly I’m in an empty space, surprised to discover it was that quick! And without the wandering thoughts, there is just silence! Just the physical awareness of the body, comfortably seated with this inactive thought process… I could hear the storm really loud around this time; lightning and thunderous bangs and crashes across the sky – a perception of vast distance.

It’s like someone in the floor above has gone berserk, pushing over huge pressed steel cabinets and metal desks, metal oil drums, BOOOOM, BADAAANG, and a small silence in between, then the echo of it returning from a long way away in the immense space of night sky. Still sitting at the desk in the violence of the heavens and the room is brightly illuminated by a flash of lightning very close, followed immediately by another overwhelming CRASH. The lights go out, and for a moment I’m thinking the sound is the bricks and masonry of the building tumbling down.

I fall to the floor in a crouched position to protect the head and then up from there quickly out to the front room, and exit by jumping over the balcony from our place on the seventh floor? No, can’t do that, look here and there, no damage I can see. The flap of wings as birds roosting on the balcony rail are stirring a bit, but they’re not really getting in a tizz about this. If the buildings were to fall to the ground, no problem, they’ve got wings and can just fly away.

Back into the room, waken up the computer and I get a connection right away, loading completed immediately. And that’s the story of how I got this post done in a room full of flashing lights like a Press event taking place and uploaded no problem – harvesting ambient electricity? The sounds of war and bombing raids; the noise of it was colossal, somebody said later it’s because of the Jura mountains reflecting the sound and the lake resonating like a huge sheet of metal; an area of about 500 square kilometres.

The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. We don’t even have to call it suffering anymore; we don’t even have to call it discomfort. It’s simply coming to know the fieriness of fire, the wildness of wind, the turbulence of water, the upheaval of earth, as well as the warmth of fire, the coolness and smoothness of water, the gentleness of the breezes, and the goodness, solidness, and dependability of the earth. Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. [Pema Chodron]

Link to: Weather and the Four Noble Truths, Pema Chödrön

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Loving-Kindness to Animals 1

Posted on July 18, 2012 by tiramit

I was on a cliff path by the sea, in the North of Scotland, cold and windy, and there were all these nesting gulls making a terrific high-pitched screaming sound. Suddenly this large gull flew past my head, so close I could see its eye looking at me as it passed. I felt its body heat, was aware of the complexity of its massed intestinal organs, lungs, heartbeat and all this in just that ‘gull’ moment caught zooming through the air. Some piece of it’s time zone made an impact on me – an unexpected contact with a living creature in nature that you don’t normally have. It was protecting its nest, I was the predator, a wild animal on two legs; an egg thief coming to steal away its offspring.

I hurried on out of the nesting area, chased away by the gull, and spent some time in thought about the carnivorous relationship I have with the animal world. A friend told me about these two girls, twins in fact, who had their 15^th birthday and their parents asked them what they would like to have as a birthday gift. After some discussion – twins always have to agree on birthday gifts – they decided they would like to ‘liberate’ a lobster. I saw on a webpage that scientists believe lobsters can live to 100 years but the normal life span is about 15 years. I’d not heard of the Lobster Liberation Front before. Mum and Dad said OK to the plan and they went around all the storage areas where lobsters are kept for consumption in sea food restaurants, chose a lobster, bought it, put it in a bucket went out to sea in a boat and set it free.

I am a vegetarian, mostly, it’s a sensitive area. The fact that I sometimes eat animal products is not something I like to think about. There was one time in rural Thailand I was walking with Jiab in the fields around her home, and she takes me to see the little cow they have there. It has a bamboo bell around its neck: takata-takata. We stop and look at the cow, and it looks at us. A miniature creature, it comes towards me with cautious movements and swinging head in motion with the way it walks, raises it’s head and points a snuffling, sniffing wet snout in my direction; large snorts, extends long tongue and sticks it in it’s nostril (how do they do that?), comes a bit closer and quite a bit of sniffing of the air around me – not in Jiab’s direction. This cute little cow is curious about me due to a certain familiar milky smell coming through the pores of my skin? Thais don’t drink much milk so I was thinking, wow! here is proof that the (Western) body releases a noticeable odour of milk. I know this little cow has never been near to a Western person before in its life. The smell was familiar; a naïve recognition of an upright, standing-on-it’s-hind-legs member of the species – a cow person?

But we are carnivores. And there’s this unpleasant conceit about being at the top end of the food chain bothering me now while eating a breakfast of grains, nuts, fruit and cow’s milk. Jaws move in a slightly circular motion; down up, down, up, down, grind, grind, and swallow. I’m an animal too. I consume the environment, whether it’s other animals, fish, vegetables, eggs, milk – we are the cow’s babies (there’s a thought!). And cutting up vegetables is a bit of a sacrifice really; every time I start to cook food there is the opportunity for this kind of contemplation. Vegetables and fruit may not have the obvious characteristics of sentient beings but we may eat their reproductive organs along with everything else [link to: Buddhism and Beef].

There’s a couple of lines of text somewhere in an essay by Tan Ajahn Buddhadassa, that I cannot find at the moment; it’s about consciousness of all the things we eat, bits of animals, poultry and fish and how all their ghosts will come back to haunt us in the end. Pretty scary, nowhere to run, everything we are: mental, physiological, flesh, blood, and bones is a composite of what we have eaten, internalized. And it extends back through the generations to the beginning of time. The cellular substance of what we are is a genetic composite of all kinds of animal fats and enzymes and there’s just no getting away from it.

So, it has to be about being aware of the reality of it all. Contemplating the eating of meat helps me to see the true extent of my voracious appetite for all consumables. Things I feel drawn to consume surround me – and I mean, here, non-food items: ‘mind’ hungers for mind object. Consciousness is dominated by habitual ‘mind’. Remove habitual ‘mind’ and there may be something like a deluge of reality comes along and with it comes a deluge of understanding. Somewhere in there is an explanation for the fact that people eat animals.

When Acharn Mun was at the end of his life, weak and lying in a village in NE Thailand, a very large number of his followers began to assemble. He asked the bhikkhus to take him away from the village because the villagers would have to kill many animals to feed those people. They took him to a nearby town where there were market places and various kinds of prepared food could be easily obtained. Shortly after that Ajahn Mun passed away.

‘From the day of my ordination I have never thought of harming (animals), let alone killing them. I have always extended my loving-kindness to them, never neglecting to share with them all the fruits of my merit. It would be ironic if my death were to be the cause of their deaths (‘The Venerable Phra Acharn Mun Bhuridatta Thera, Meditation Master’, page 201 – 202).

[link to: Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta Thera, Wiki]

[link to: Image source]