flowers from far away

Posted on February 9, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #110: New Delhi: The computer feels cold to touch, hands stretch out over the keyboard and the soft spaces between the fingers are exposed to the chill. Make them into fists; stay warm, too cold to type… melancholia of late winter. Sit there for a while. It takes quite a long time to realize I could just stop what I’m doing and go up to the roof terrace in the sunshine. Around this time, the shadow cast by the tall building next-door moves away and there’s a patch of sunlight where I can place my chair and sit in the warmth.

Get up from the desk, out to the hall by the back door and up the cold steps to the top; habitual handle-grab, shoulder-push on an old door that’s always stiff, squeak, it opens… bright daylight enters, birds fly across my vision in a blur of random directions. Blue sky, and clothes hanging on the line, the smells of outside, vent pipes, clay-tiled rooftops of other people’s houses, other people’s laundry.

There’s new warmth in the air – I notice it immediately, walking around our small urban garden and checking out all the plants that live here in flowerpots and containers. Everything has that dry wintery look, but there are some signs of life, shoots appearing in the crumbling earth… an innate sentience. Take a photo with my camera phone, seeing the flowers as stars and planets. Tiny white blossoms form in clusters. So small, there’s a feeling they’re arriving from far away; distant galaxies seen moving towards us in slow motion.

I didn’t know. It was here all the time, and everything that happened prior to this, everything going on unseen, below the surface of the earth… before the flower, the seed and before the seed, the flower that created the seed; a sequence of patterns that started before I arrived in this place, flowing from the past into the future, always seen from ‘here’.

I place my chair in the patch of sunlight and sit down; a fundamental response to the first signs of that easing-away from the coldness, the unique warmth of Springtime, a softening around the hardness, a release from the upset, the injured and the slow spinning wheel of seasons takes it all away. Listening to the green parakeets chattering in the Eucalyptus trees opposite, there’s only the moment in which everything appears…

“… appearances are so intimately one with Consciousness that there are in fact no appearances as such, that is, existing in their own right. Rather Consciousness is the sole substance of all experience.” [Rupert Spira]

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outside-in/inside-out

Posted on February 3, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #109: New Delhi: The early morning flight from Bangkok to Delhi leaves in darkness and the sun rises along the way. It takes only three and a half hours; have breakfast, fall asleep, wake up and pretty soon we’re descending. Up go the flaps down go the wheels; we’re on the ground and rumbling along a bumpy runway. Get ready to go, reassemble the parts of who I am and out of the aircraft into the vast arrivals hall. A long walk to immigration, miles of pale tangerine carpeting, entry stamp on my passport thump. I’m through. Find a place at the luggage belt to stand and wait and watch the bags move past the centre of my vision. Feel dizzy… all journeys merge into one; can’t remember what my bag looks like, panic for a moment then remember. I see it, grab the handle, get it on its wheels and leave through the green Nothing-To-Declare exit. Driver is waiting, into the car and we’re away in the traffic.

Adjust my watch back 1½ hours and step into an earlier time, a continuation of events that started before I got here. The flight from Bangkok disappears; a memory replaced by present-time experience – there’s no feeling of ‘me’ having arrived in Delhi, it’s like Delhi has arrived in ‘me’… outside in & inside out. Delhi fills my vision; all the sensations, noise and commotion of morning rush-hour traffic on the airport highway. Car horns honking all around: pap-pap, pee-pee, pah-paah, PEEE….

There’s a hold-up, maybe there’s been an accident. What’s happening? The sound of car horns increases in volume, and slowly we get nearer and begin to see the cause of the obstruction. There’s a vehicle positioned right across the road, but it seems to be moving… wait and see. It looks like the driver is trying to turn round. Yes, he’s doing a three-point turn into the oncoming traffic. What? At this point, the noise of horns stops for a moment; uneasy silence, everybody thinking wow, we don’t know what’s going on here, but this guy must think he has a very good reason for deciding to do this, and they edge past him cautiously. The driver completes the turn, after many stops and starts as the flow of traffic continues to swerve past him whenever there’s a space to get through. Then he’s coming towards us, driving carefully against the traffic flow and assertively looking everybody in the eye.

The first thing that comes to mind is: this is just so… wrong, and I’d like to dwell on how wrong it is, but it’s too weird – searching for something to blame, but can’t find anything with sufficient blameworthiness. One thing is certain; it must be pretty scary to be doing what he’s doing. I see him in silhouette as we pass, gripping the steering wheel, alert, tense, determined. I watch him through the rear window; an enigma, a complete reversal of everything we think of as logical. The rush of traffic engulfs him like water moves around a stone in a fast moving river, then he’s gone.

Up front, in the normal directionality of things, we appear to be getting through the congestion. Traffic picks up speed, acceleration; honks, squeaks and toots all around as if the cars were jamming with each other in an improvisation by Miles Davis on trumpet.

“Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside of them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.” [Rabindranath Tagore]

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a world of things

Posted on January 27, 2015 by tiramit

“Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them.” [Matsuo Bashō 1644 –1694]

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: It’s the last day, I’m leaving, this is it… the end – no more departures and arrivals I’m leaving now for the very last time. The house is to be sold, the rooms are empty, all remaining things ready to be put into boxes for the recycling people to collect after I’m gone. Right now it’s all arranged in two groups: a) stuff to be given away and, b) ‘stuff that I can’t let go of YET’… still some reluctance, lingering over things I want to keep. Gazing fondly at a pile of books, a framed picture, pondering, hesitation, attachment… but how will I get all this into checked-in luggage for the flight to Thailand? Some time spent considering this but, impossible, let’s face it. In the end it’s a decision pushed along by the momentum of leaving; there’s a car coming for me in the afternoon. Out of time, ok, pack up and leave… and I move everything into a), the stuff-I’m-giving-away group. That settles it.

But I’m tugged back… did I just do that? Hands reach out to take the stuff back again. Pause for a moment to think about it and everything stops, emptiness, there’s nothing there… thought is an elaborated construct built in a landscape of no-thingness. An awareness event turns up out of nowhere, the kind of thing that couldn’t happen in any other circumstance: let someone else have these things. It’s the letting-go thing, the generosity of easing, the release of all that tight energy – giving it all away, giving it all back to the world, returning to the context of how it all arose in the first place. I stop for a moment to think about how that feels, but there’s no thought, everything is still wonderfully clear and completely empty. There’s a world of things, then there’s not.

Suddenly it feels like everything I’ve been holding on to doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s okay. The loss is only there if I ‘think’ it into being. Sit down, close my eyes and everything becomes invisible. Feel the pressure points, lower back, seat in chair, feet on floor, elbows on the arm rests – but no body, no head – it occurs to me that sometimes the universe doesn’t exist… takes my breath away. Only a curious intensity in the place where the thought used to be contained; something that really never happened… years and years of nurturing a dream about something that wasn’t there.

Last thing to do is bless the rooms, hands held in anjali in that small dwelling: “Wishing in gladness and in safety, may all beings be at ease…” There’s a clear sense of closure. Going through the door… I’ve been in this house 36 years and it’s gone in a flash. Standing outside, blinking in the bright daylight, surprised to discover it’s a just a day like any other day. A last look inside, sunlight extends in from the doorway… goodbye little house! Pull the door closed, lock. Get in taxi, door slam. We’re off across the landscape…

‘When this exists, that comes to be. With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the cessation of this, that ceases.’ Samyutta Nikaya 12.6

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Many thanks to Jeff for: ‘stuff that I can’t let go of YET’ – source: Leaving Lexington. Photo: a stand-alone Sycamore tree at the top of the hill

the light of memory

Posted on January 23, 2015 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: [post written in New Delhi] The old house is sold. A printout of the email from the lawyer signed, enveloped, stamped and sent by DHL to England, 4000 miles away. A small packet of A4 paper folded once, bearing all the correct documentation, tucked away in a bundle, squeezed into an aircraft for a night and a day. At the other end, registered, signed-for and unlocked, unpacked, seals broken, it’s confirmed by officials, checked, stamped and placed in a folder and delivered by a guy on a motorbike to an office in East Anglia. Smoothened out in the bright white electric light of a cold January morning (by a mature female hand probably, cosmetics, manicured nails and a silver ring), and there’s my signature, exposed for all to see; idiosyncratic squiggle recognised by law as being ‘me’ saying ‘yes’ I agree to the foregoing; I relinquish, renounce, I have read and understood the above-mentioned; box ticked, it’s all yours… sayonara, goodbye little house that sheltered me for 36 years, my small cave, hollow, burrow in the side of a hill. Everything there that was ‘me’ is fading away, even as we speak, already feels like I was never there. It’s like a death… all that remains is a memory of so many comings and goings, arrivals/departures, and in the 36 years I was there I never stayed longer than 3 months. There are only the journals left; words written in old notebooks, hard-to-read writing in ball-point pen etched into the surface of old yellowed paper:

OCTOBER 10, 2012: Today is the last day. Getting ready for the flight to Thailand… that familiar feeling of departures is in the air. This time tomorrow I will not be here. I’ll not be in a room that has split floor boards stacked in a cupboard next to the fireplace in the sharp coldness before the fire is lit. Yes, at least I’ll be away from this stunningly cold house where I have to wear a coat indoors, going around with kindling, paper and matches first thing in the morning, rushing to get the fire lit, the flames going and some heat started up. I notice a certain… vigour in everything that seems to be necessary to keep warm. Words come out in steamy puffs of breath, and a kind of gasping breathlessness: haaaaah! It’s cold.

There’s a fragrance of cleaning products around the house. Yesterday was a day of hoover and broom and the place is clean now, pity I’ll not be here to appreciate it. Everything gets a major clean-up a couple of days before I go. It’s always like this; then, on the last morning, I have breakfast, wash out my coffee cup, place it on the edge of the sink; wash my breakfast plate and leave it to dry in the dish-rack – it’ll have plenty time to dry…. The house is locked up, sealed like a time capsule until I return; into the taxi and I’m gone. The house remains as I left it, exactly like this, for countless days and nights and afternoons and early mornings, sun peeps in the window, nobody at home; all through winter, all through Spring and then one day I come back, open the door, break through the spider webs, trip over the mountain of junk mail and enter into this same moment enclosed here now. Same cup sitting on the edge of the sink, same plate in the dish-rack. And the whole house says: Hello, how’ve you been?

And now I know I’ll never be back there again. Stirring the ashes of a fire gone out, a life I think I wanted but never had – maybe I should have tried harder… maybe it was meant to be the way it is. Maybe I’ll go there one day with my Thai niece M – we’ll drive down that road and I’ll show her the house where Toong-Ting used to live. Slow down and stop, look at the old place for a moment and drive on. It’ll all be ancient history by then …

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all…. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.” [Eugène Ionesco]

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house on a hill

Posted on January 14, 2015 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Chiang Mai: I used to have a house on a hill in England, so far away from here – it’s just a memory now. I had it for 36 years and it was sold just a few days ago… feels like a part of me has become extinct. Another part of me says, what’s gone is gone, let it go because I never really lived there. I’d stay there for a while, go away to Asia for a year, then come back; very long grass in the garden and generations of spiders.

Curiouser and curiouser it was part of a larger building owned by my Great Aunt Liz, a spinster, a recluse and she could read fortune-telling cards. Aunt Liz gave me the house by Deed of Gift in 1978, then became a bit distant and elderly and quite stubborn about allowing me to help.

I’d send Aunt Liz postcards from the places I’d been and bring back gifts but she became more and more remote. Our communication dwindled and in the end she hardly spoke to me. When I knocked on her door, she would open it on the chain, smile and say: ah, so you’re back. You’re looking well… then close the door. I’d hear the lock go: click, and I was left outside.

This is how it was, a kind of companionship, no more than that. She was probably disappointed that I wasn’t going to just come and settle down in that place and be what she’d imagined I’d be. But what could I do? Her decision to create a situation for me to have a ‘home’ next door to her was just so kind. There I was in the centre of rural life and the simple rumbling-along of things, but… never for very long, always moving on to somewhere else.

She died in 1989… I was in Japan and it was impossible to return. I negotiated with a relative who inherited Aunt Liz’s part of the house and to cut a long story short, eventually I owned the whole building. Contractors were hired to renovate the place, but it was two or three years before I managed to get back. The house on the hill had long since become a dream… years and years spent thinking and planning how I could go live there in the end, and just get old sitting by the fireside. These last few days I have revisited that same place in the midst of these rememberings, knowing that sometime soon I have to disengage from it – it’s not my house anymore it’s somebody else’s. People I don’t know walk around in these rooms where I used to be, sit by the fireside stare into the flames.

How long do memories remain? One time I was sitting there burning some old floorboards removed during the renovation of Aunt Liz’s bedroom. The wood was dry and old and good for kindling. They were also painted along the ends – she had a carpet in the middle and painted floor boards all round the edge. It all came back to me when I found it… stuck in the paint on a piece of the floorboard, a human hair – a single strand of hair, quite long. It got stuck there as she was applying the paint. I kept it for a while; would hold it between thumb and forefinger for a moment and pull the tension of it gently… still attached to the painted wood. Then one day I placed the wood piece in the flames and watched it burn away.

Everything is always in the process of ceasing to be, turning into ash. There’s a reluctance to leave, drawn towards the extinguished fire; something peaceful about the absence of everything…

As fire, through loss of fuel grows still [extinguished] in its own source, so thought by loss of activeness grows still in its own source… For by tranquility of thought one destroys good & evil karma. With tranquil soul, stayed on the Soul, one enjoys unending ease. [Maitri Upanishad 6.34]

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a world of lost passwords

Posted on November 16, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #102: Delhi: I’ve forgotten my password… fearing my papers might be stolen, password discovered and, of course this is how the whole paranoia of Identity Theft unfolds, I dreamed up some devious way of encrypting it then forgot how I did that. Now it’s gone… this elusive quality passwords have, they slip away secretly if you’re not holding on to them or buying into the created anxiety scenario that sells the product; insurance to cover the insurance to cover the unforeseen event; an imagined disaster. Rearrange the furniture of the mind; if you’re a Buddhist, having your identity stolen is no big deal because it’s an assumed identity anyway. There never was an actual ‘self’ in here, anatta, selflessness, and spiritual generosity. I’m pretty sure there’ll come a time when banks don’t offer loans to Buddhists anymore; they don’t meet the criteria, don’t have the credentials; that tenacity of clinging to ‘me’ and ‘mine’ is noticeably absent… Buddhists are not a safe bet, at any time they may close the agreement and happily give everything away. Banks don’t like freedom from suffering; enslavement to sensory input keeps them in business.

So I feel reasonably okay about losing my password, what’s gone is gone. It’s my Thai account and they will fix it up for me – I’ll be there in 2 weeks so I’ll be able to explain the situation; go and see the same bank teller lady I’ve been visiting over the years, who will look up when I come to her desk with my queue number ticket and a recognition comes into her face: You’ve forgotten your password again, right? It did bother me at first; aging, memory loss, an inability to retain passwords, and also that she might think it’s all a made-up story… how could anyone forget their password so often? And the real reason for coming to see her again and again is that I’d like it if we could get to know each other better… we can’t go on meeting like this.

But there’s a sadness in her eyes…. it’s been so long now, years pass between our meetings, I go away, forget my password and come back and see her again, she gives me a new password and we observe each other silently. She looks well, but older. It must be this job she does; working in a bank, selling security for finance that may or may not bring wealth or ruin, manipulating a hypothetical danger… unwholesome livelihood, hovering always on the edge of anxiety. Even now I can see the lock-down procedures starting in my head – falling into the trap of believing it’s real. Let it go, let it go.

It’s a death, it’s gone, my password dwells now in the world of lost passwords where there’s no urgency about who is who or what or which object belongs to who or whom and the things we cling to, the clings we thing to, have no adherence, glue dissolves, unsticks – structures collapse, fall… form and formlessness

“… like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel. Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon, like a carousel that’s turning, running rings around the moon. Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face, and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space – like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.” [The Windmills of Your Mind, 1968]

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Photo: Jiab’s visit to the Southernmost tip of Kerala looking out towards Sri Lanka

transparency

Posted on November 8, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#101: Bangkok Suwannabhume Airport: Looking out from the interior of this coffee shop into another interior; the glittering glass-paneled B concourse, and through that glass window to what’s out there; blue sky, a concrete horizon and planes taking off. I am contained in a transparent interior, inside a larger interior, contained in a reality construct, the steel and glass of this moment. It’s the same place I was in last time, and the time before that (the ‘Mango Tree’ coffee shop, near gates B1-B6, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods). We started coming here a year ago and Jiab comes when she’s travelling on her own… sends me phone-pics of fruity drinks and ice creams she consumes after the photo is taken. This is my departure lounge; the Delhi flight leaves from this coffee shop, rather than gate C5, which is simply the entrance to the plane. A kind of applied personification in an airport vastness, anonymity and incidental eye contact with a few individuals. I see their birth, their death, their merging in a sea of people all on the way to/from somewhere else… going or coming. We’re all just passing through.

Long columns of us waiting to be X-rayed, instructed and directed by officials guiding us into and out of security portals like water passes through rocks and stones in a continuous flowing stream. No resistance to it… the coldness of regulations; a physical sensation in a body that’s somehow become transparent. I notice how the energy feels rather than how I can ‘be’ negatively energized by it. Everything is so much not what we think it is, there can’t be any assumptions; just letting it take place and being okay about it is enough. Disengage from thinking it should be something other than what it is, and everything that’s currently bothering me about that disappears for a moment – long enough to be able to see it’s possible to let go of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts completely… the peace that’s in that.

Surveillance cameras protrude into the space I’m in and suck out all data, send it to a room containing video screens, dark and gloomy, where security people with bulged-out eyes scan the images of the crowd, zoom-in, zoom-out. I feel I’m being looked at, studied… I’ve just been jostled slightly, pockets rifled. I can’t see them but I know they’re there. This whole thing is a performance, there’s a sudden urge to do a song-and-dance act. Maybe it’s a more serious drama production; Japanese Kuroko stagehands, dressed in black, appear on stage with the actors and rearrange the scene as the play is going on. They’re there for everyone to see but become invisible. The mystery of how we can be unaware of things in plain sight – mesmerized by politicians, illusionists’ sleight-of-hand; everybody acting out the story of their lives without questioning it, improvised dialogue according to the karma of causes and conditions.

Coming near to the end… the last camera, passport stamp, thump! And I’m suddenly through the barrier, blinded by the lights of the glitzy duty-free, gold Rolexes, impossible jewelry and stumbling towards my place in the coffee shop. Waiting for the flight to be called, the great leap up into the sky. A heightened feeling, a quickening, I know all this is happening – mindful alertness, awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware…

“The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn’t have without them.” [Suzanne Segal, Collision with the Infinite]

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‘… awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware’ – reference: Is Awareness Aware Of Itself?

agreement

Posted on October 25, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#99: Chiang Mai: The day before yesterday I got my computer back from the repair shop… the stress of these last three months with it crashing all the time has been too much. No reliable way of getting it fixed because I’m travelling all the time and things being as they are in these Asian locations, making do, and looking out for an opportunity all the time. Meanwhile having to use the WordPress app for iPhone – really too small and going cross-eyed. So I bought an iPad mini which my 10-year-old niece (M) grabbed immediately and I had to go back to using the iPhone again – this is how it is…. Then when the laptop came back there was this small revelation – maybe it was just the relief that the stress wasn’t there anymore. Hard to say how or when it changed, some time after what we call the ‘now’ moment – perception arises after the event, it occurs in hindsight… things are seen to be in agreement. Everything attached to the former is suddenly gone… there’s something in the air.

Even before it happened, there were signs that it all seemed to be moving towards this kind of integration. Walking down the lane to the main road, mid-morning traffic, I see a tuk-tuk (3-wheeled taxi) arriving, just as I emerge on to the thoroughfare, and it stops right in front of me. I climb in and off we go; no traffic hold-up anywhere, no red light at the junction, just one large right turn and down the straight road to the mall building. Get out, pay the driver, into the mall, up to the second floor and I’m thinking the repair shop’ll not be open yet… probably have to get a cup of coffee or something. But all the lights are on, staff behind the desk, no line of people waiting… how can it be as easy as this? So I go in and hand the guy my creased and crumpled stapled-together papers with repair-job number and signed receipt for $680(!) They had to send for the parts from Singapore (incredible) and it’s taken a month already; there’s a kind of grumbling discontent hovering like a shadow at the edge of vision; grumble-grumble-grumble, and I’m waiting for the trigger: he’s going to tell me it’s not ready yet… I’m going to fall back into the justified-outrage film-loop thing that plays in the head… but it wasn’t like that, the man comes out from behind somewhere and he’s holding my laptop, says it came back yesterday. Here you are, he says, and gives it to me.

Unbelievable, put it in the bag: thank you very much, bye-bye, and downstairs to street level. Another tuk-tuk just happens to come along, get in and away on the long straight road; no red light for the second time, wide swerve left and along the narrow lane to the apartment. Up in the elevator, get inside and searching for the power cable for the laptop – can’t find it, maybe it’s lost… oh no, grumbling discontent returns… ‘self’ as the victim-of-circumstance default. Then while I’m looking for that, I find another power cable, the one for my little projector, wow! I’ve been looking for that for months… and sure enough, I find the power cable for the laptop; it was where I left it. The missing pieces of the jigsaw fit exactly, and it’s a huge relief to have my machine back.

The rest of that day just vanished, busy getting things re-installed, and I wasn’t able to put up the post I’d intended, so now I’m two days late. The world is reflected upon in hindsight. I was going to write something about 23 October being Chulalongkorn day in Thailand and, by chance, it was also Divali in India (lunar calendar)… there goes that agreement thing again, celebrations all around. Another factor in it all is that this is my 99th postcard post, something satisfying about that number. Then there’s this awareness that everything is in agreement, a renewed certainty in the way things are. The return of the laptop puts everything right, it means also that M now has unlimited access to the iPad, and she’ll most likely fall heir to it around Christmas. So I’m glad I’m glad I’m glad, and I’ll be able to read all your posts again, thank you…

“The search for a spiritual path…has to trigger an inner realization, a perception which pierces through the facile complacency of our usual encounter with the world to glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot. When this insight dawns, even if only momentarily, it can precipitate a profound personal crisis. It overturns accustomed goals and values, mocks our routine preoccupations, leaves old enjoyments stubbornly unsatisfying.” [Bhikkhu Bodhi]

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for the upper image source, click on the link: ‘Chulalongkorn day’ on this page

prevalence of ritual

Posted on October 11, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#96: A village near Hat Yai: I’m at the wedding of my nephew in the South of Thailand, the only foreigner in the family… nothing for me to do in an event that’s complex and requires all kinds of engagement… mindfulness. I just watch the proceedings, pleased with this sense of generosity in everybody just being here. I have M, my Thai niece with me and she corrects me if I get it wrong. We set off from the groom’s house in a long convoy of cars, a 20 minute drive, then stop on the highway and walk the last 200 yards along the path to the brides house. Musicians up front with Glong Yao drum, cymbals and reed pipe; an eerie, almost discordant kind of wailing song. I wonder how it must feel like for the bride, waiting in her childhood home, and here comes this haunting, archetypal sound of her future husband’s clan calling to her – getting nearer and nearer and louder and louder until it fills the small room she’s in. I’m thinking of tribal things, fertility rituals and magic that changes the course of karmic events. For me, there’s only this; the sense that the ceremony is heavy with meaning; perhaps too, something about belief I used to think was real a long time ago.

The sad truth is that in the West, divorce is about as common as marriage – religion got deconstructed; the story we believed in came to pieces. No myth to feel connected with, except perhaps the myth of no-myth. In a sense, we’re all married to the economy, worship the consumer god, seek refuge, gratification, fulfillment and consolation in the purchase of goods and services. What’s left over after that, in terms of ‘belief, we have to figure out any way we can.

It’s different here, divorce is rare, maybe it’s the prevalence of ritual that – come what may – locks the marriage into this unbreakable bond. The marriage date is selected by an astrologer, taking into account all of the every-day catastrophes and natural disasters, about which most Western folk are happily unaware. Any begrudged spirits are appeased so that a date can be selected which is completely surrounded by joyful blessings and good fortune – the belief that the spiritual world is real is what causes it to be so. I feel like I’m watching a different movie, maybe more meaningful than the cultural movie we watch in the West, maybe I’m drawn towards this version more, now that 30 years have gone by – or maybe it’s too restricting for me and I’m on the outside looking in. Maybe that’s okay too.

Lengthy ceremonies for many hours, Buddhist monks chanting, holy markings made by an elder’s fingertips dipped in special paste and pressed lightly on their forehead, and a sacred cord sai monkonor is placed on their heads [see below]. They kneel with their arms on a decorative pillow, palms together in the ‘wai’ position, and family members take turns to pour water over their hands.

It was a long day for me sitting outside the house under this huge pink canopy. My niece M came to join me later, and I was facing away from the main group so I make a face of bored weariness for her and she laughs. Do the face again Toong Ting and I try to do it again, but can’t get it right. Do same face you do before Toong Ting! She insists. So I try all kinds of grotesque weird faces, a whole anthology of faces that go on and on until I’m thinking I’m going slightly mad, and she laughs a lot, but obviously tired. Somebody had to take her home. It was a long day for the couple too, when I saw them eventually, they looked exhausted, although the bride was strangely wide-eyed and alert – I was astonished, something about a kind of awareness that takes place at the end of something endless….

‘The fact that we can never “fully know” reality is not a sign of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is “incomplete,” open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of Becoming.’ [Slavoj Zizek]

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The title of this post is taken from an anthogy of Romare Bearden collage artworks

loving-kindness for the unloved

Posted on September 22, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#93: Chiang Mai: Nine-o’clock-in-the-morning rush downtown in a tuktuk, traffic is okay, no hold-up at the lights, one large swerve to the right and it’s a long straight run to the mall building where I’m headed – have to pay a phone bill, overdue for four months and they disconnected me. Sorry about that… ah well, they probably figured I was out of the country, no problem, I’d be back eventually. Foreigners (farangs) mix with the population here like benign extraterrestrials, disappear sometimes then reappear later.

Tuktuk takes me right into the mall car park, jump out, pay the driver and there are steps straight down into the basement arcade. Ask the lady there at Information for directions to the phone place and set off in the direction she indicates… can’t find it, searching and searching, it’s not there. So I go into this other phone place and ask them if they know where the place I’m looking for is. Oh, they say, this is the place, you’re in it – yes, we changed the name, you see… laughter. Fine, okay, and I’m not sure if I’m happy, or a bit upset about it – what’s going on here? Have a quick look around; everybody wearing turquoise and lime green costumes to match the same colour-coordinated interior and huge logo above our heads. A total makeover, new look with pale pigmented, cosmetic faces of little women who smile all the time.

So this seems to be very welcoming, I give my number over at the desk and it takes a moment to realise I’m not talking to a woman but it’s a small man, not overtly feminized, but wearing orange lipstick and disconcerting dental brace — smiles open-mouthed and giggles… going for the orthodontic barbed-wire look. Some caution required here, these effeminate guys can be a bit bitchy, but he (she) is okay, self-effacing, small gestures, acting the part, making a thing out of not being able to speak English, and doesn’t hear when I reply in Thai. The upset feeling I was having is gone when I contemplate this example of the human condition. Compassion for what that must be like. The gist of it, though, is that they need to have my passport, and I didn’t bring it. There’s no way they can do this without a passport, sollee na kha (uses feminine gender honorific).

What to do? No point in getting upset, this is Thailand, nobody gets upset, if there’s any difficulty, it just goes into slo-mo and everybody is really, really careful… the tension in the air like a wine glass about to shatter when the violinist plays exactly the right high-pitched note in resonant frequency. And structural integrity gives way, POP!… but it doesn’t usually get that far – just prolonged holding. I can feel an accumulation of negativity – something unloved beginning to appear at the edge of my vision, gives me a poke in the ribs, Hey! Yeh, been here before; the aversion is about ‘me’ struggling to accept the reality of it being there. Accept it, allow it in to conscious awareness, let it be there… but I’m still struggling with it. It’s the thought I have to go back for my passport – but it’s about registration, that’s all, it’s normal, should be easy enough.

It’s somewhere around here that I realise I’m concocting this whole scenario based on an attached memory of things that aren’t very lovable – I can’t love that thing; unlovable, unloved. Kinda hopeless and childish, but I can have loving-kindness mettā for the feeling that I can’t do it; loving-kindness for my resistance to loving the unloved. Walk back along the corridor, up the steps and out across the car park, there’s a tuktuk. Tell the driver where to go and we’re speeding back up the way I came, slow down at the lights wide turn left and soon back at the apartment. Jump out, ask the driver to wait, into the building, up in the lift, in. Get the passport, down again and we’re off back downtown again, wide turn right after the lights, and a straight run back to the mall.

Back to the turquoise and lime green renovated place and by this time things have woken up a bit, more people, more staff than customers. The ‘person’ with the dental work and orange lipstick greets me like an old friend. We get the paperwork done in about a minute and I’m out. Texting everybody to say hello: Hi, yes I’m here in Chiang Mai and it’s good to be back.

‘By reminding ourselves to have metta for the feelings we experience – not thinking about them or analysing them but going to the place in the body itself, to the mental quality, really embracing that – really being willing to feel those particular emotions, they become bearable. By changing our attitude to one of acceptance rather than of rejection, to interest, rather than just wanting to get rid of them, we find that they are things we can tolerate. Then they cease on their own, for all conditions are impermanent.’ [‘Universal Loving Kindness‘ by Ajahn Sumedho, Forest Sangha Newsletter, October 1997, Number 42]