springtime, new delhi

Posted on March 4, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #193: NEW DELHI: Watering the plants upstairs on the roof terrace and there’s this small one looking so simple and symmetrical, extraordinary. I take a photo of it and zoom into the wonderful experience of a life form in a different kind of temporality. It’s springtime here and the analogy of everything waking up applies, except that there’s no snow in winter, really no winter, and there never was any time before this, or anywhere in the future when things were or will be asleep. Everything is awake, the sense of an eye like a camera aperture so wide open the edges of it creak with the strain of it trying to open wider. It’s an endless cycle of birth/rebirth, the seed contained in the fruit that falls from the tree and from there another tree grows which creates another seed. No beginning/no end, all forms intertwined with each other to the extent that they are inseparable, bound together in time. The inclination is to think what was it like before this, when things were separate and the mind tries to pull it all apart. What was it like before all this, before the Big Bang?

Another kind of reality. What happened before we came here? We were in another house in New Delhi. It had a roof terrace and seeds were planted in flowerpots there, we carried the pots and everything from there to here and these seeds are now sprouting on this roof terrace. It makes no difference to the plants if they’re moved, so long as they have the same conditions, the cycle continues; seed/ plant/ flower spinning in their own arising and falling away, an enfolding and unfolding sequence of patterns in movement, and I come along, view it from this entry-point in time, called ‘here’.

There’s the urge to create an object that could fill this perceived space, this seemingly incomplete world: the sense of a vacant place we need to fill with something held in high esteem, and that will make it whole… what is it? Christians call it God, Hindus call it Brahman and Buddhists have no name for it, because everything is integrated, nothing exists outside of this – really nothing, not even the word ‘nothing’. Subject/object together in a oneness of contemplation, in conscious experience and the path taken leads us into a realm so fragile and subtle you can never be absolutely sure you’re not just seeing it the way you want it to be, and not really how it actually is. Better not to call it anything, acknowledge its presence, awareness is all-inclusive, mindfulness, take care, and see how that goes.

The sensitivity of the mind, not held by the limitations of the body, always looking for more than what there is, searching beyond the present instance; using one thing as a springboard to get to the next, everything is driven on and on, and present time is not here at all. There’s the sense of a game, an energy, a curiosity – a desire to get involved with ‘it’. The object is the desired state. It belongs to ‘me,’ the act of possessing it requires that there has to be an ‘I’ to whom it belongs. Everything I have, everything I want, all of this is ‘mine.’ Even my enemy is mine. Thus indirectly creating an identity that is always somehow incomplete unfulfilled, searching for the truth in this and unable to see that it’s the searching that maintains the state of being lost. It’s the seeking that causes it to be formed, reformed and transformed: the world is seen, sounds are heard, food is tasted, words are spoken, things are done, but there is no do-er.

“Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still – for if we listen they are saying, “We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever” – imagine, then, that they should say this and fall silent, listening to the very voice of him who made them and not to that of his creation; so that we should hear not his word through the tongues of men, nor the voice of angels, nor the clouds’ thunder, nor any symbol, but the very Self which in these things we love, and go beyond ourselves to attain a flash of that eternal wisdom which abides above all things: And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy; so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination which leaves us breathless: Would this not be what is bidden in the scripture, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” [Saint Augustine]

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whispering winds

Posted on March 1, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #192: VASANT VIHAR, NEW DELHI: An extraordinary battle with uncompromising traffic to get here on time for Head-ache’s appointment with the doctor at 5pm. Shrill penetrating, sharp horns blast, push, persist, insist on the direction we take, and suddenly we slice through the evening rush-hour, arriving at the place too early by half an hour. It’s like that sometimes; tumble into a parking slot by the park, uneven ground and the car tilts over and slightly back. Open all the doors to allow the fresh air and warm wind to blow through.

Things are suddenly rustled in the quietness here in the tilted back seat and I get loose papers weighted down or they will fly out the doors. It’s like we’ve always been here and any memory of the journey to get to this place has been somehow displaced by the wind passing through the interior of the car; a quick investigation here-and-there, then out among the trees, rustling the leaves in a great sigh of high frequency leaf-whisper sounds, masses of individual notes played in cluster upon cluster, swishing and swooshing foliage branches – a sound that seems to crash like waves on the shores of a sandy beach.

The first wind of its kind for many months comes at the end of the cold season. Its warmth enters everywhere, into every thing; blows out gusts, sucks in voids and spins everything around. Swooping down, so inquisitive, and filling up all the places and spaces, then out and up in the sky where only birds engage with it. A wind that’s present everywhere at the same time, a wind that enters into and out of all things as if it were something autonomous, an invisible entity. Where’d it go… have you seen the wind? How can that be possible, isn’t it formlessness? We know it’s here only by the sound of it, in the leaves and seeing the swaying of branches in a succession of movements, an expression of the air displacement itself; a manifestation of the wind – I can become the wind, the space where it goes.

Now this – now that, long tree branches drifting and swaying patterns of light and shade over my clothing, look up at the sun and get pleasantly blinded by it in a twinkle. This wind blows through the mind, my awareness of it rises as it rises; I become more alert when it’s very loud, feel at ease when it’s still and quiet. It becomes the thought flow, gently restless in the swooping shadows plunging deep into foliage pattern. The oneness of it all includes everything seen and unseen. Better not be late for our doctor’s-appointment, we spill out of the car, hair-whiplash on forehead, gather myself up with my companion Head-ache and together we stumble across the road to see the neurologist witch-doctor, amazed by this persistent wind. Sunlight and shadow-shapes of foliage sweeping over the roadway and path, all around…

But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
[Dogen]
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neutrality

Posted on February 12, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #189: DELHI Hospital OPD: First time here, looking for room number twenty-four in a sea of people. There it is – and a seat near the door is vacating itself as I approach, a hair’s breadth thing, musical chairs. Reverse into place; beeb-beeb-beeb, lower body in sitting posture: ‘This seat has been taken folks, thank you’. Possession, identity, this is ‘me’, head upright, but easy behaviour, no fast moves, no eyes looking out… an averted watching through peripheral vision. I’ll not interrupt your eye-beams folks, go right ahead… and I’m looked at with a few fast head-to-toe glances, visual-sweeps I can feel coming from different parts of the room. The only white guy here, probably the whole building; pale, bleached-out, transparent, old, colourless. White hair, white beard, white shirt; a totality of whiteness, OMG! how white can you get?

Yep, it hurts the eyes, sorry about that but you’ll not notice me after a while, merge with background patterns, disappear before your very eyes; it’ll seem like I’ve always been here, neutrality, nothing remarkable, neither too much, nor too little. Trying to blend chamelion-like with skin tones of chestnut brown, volcanic ochre, oatmeal-compexioned, golden people. Gold-bangled, gold-ear-ringed, nose-ringed women – toe-ringed too, open sandals swish-swoosh footwear, soft-shoe shuffle: swish swoosh through the standing crowds, magical beings in vivid costumes of all kinds.

I can close my eyes now and drop back into the inner world, a kind of circus-clown backwards tumble into the darkness of that inner space. Neutrality; I can find it straight away sometimes, just the action of letting the mind go; a sense of opening in receptivity to nothing in particular – the space between things. The neutral feeling that’s neither one thing nor the other, not really noticeable – of course, you could be looking straight at neutrality and not see it. It’s that space, the gap that comes before any action takes place. Finding my centre in that space.

There’s a childhood memory of a face looking down at me, mouth articulating words I can understand but somehow said too slowly and I’m already wondering if I missed something: “Now, are you listenin to me? Just think about what you’re doing before you do it okay?” and for an instant I’d get stuck with that… maybe I could see what was needed to make it work – I think. Or maybe it’s taken me all this time, right up to the present moment, writing this post; it’s taken me decades to understand that it’s neither this nor that, neither coming or going. Touch base with neutrality.

Somebody calls my name; it’s my turn I’m led into a small room and a small doctor aged 60 maybe with tightly groomed bristly grey beard that grows all round his mouth right up to the edge of a dark purple lip line, original front teeth one larger than the other. Other than that, hardly any eyes, no ears seen, baldness with a few brave hairs blowing in the breeze from the ceiling fan. So his central feature is this island of mouth in a field of grey beard, but a nice man, kind, smiles a lot. I tell him about these headaches all the time, show him the diagnoses by other docs: PHN and a really yuk photo in my phone-camera of the Herpes Zoster in full bloom. He spins around the cranium (a mouth in a head) something insectoid? Says, as he is writing, Tegrital 200mg, Tryptomer 25mg, (Carbamazepine), and it’s scribbled in unreadable writing, same as all doctors do, gives it to me and I’m gone.

So that’s it, back into neutrality, wondering if these new meds are going to end up in another crash course in how to avoid dependency… or not.

“There is that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support. This, just this, is the end of stress.” [Udana, third book of the Khuddaka Nikaya 8.1]

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Header photo source

cruel pillows [part one]

Posted on February 4, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: DELHI: I just remembered this expression: “a bull with a headache.” It comes from Scotland, where large Men drink whisky all night, then one staggers through to the breakfast room in the morning and is demonstrably angry with everything, then one goes off to work in the wild, wet, wooly Northern landscapes of my distant memory.

Now I live in Asia which is really nice, gentle and warm and I’m a Buddhist and all is well in my world, except I’ve got a headache – all the time. A Buddhist with a headache? What to do, I have wondered many times. For me it’s an opportunity to be conscious and aware of what I’m doing all the time, because the headache is likely to get bad at any time. And I’ve thought too about what we’re doing here in the blogging world… our consciousness/awareness of our ‘world’, in a sense, is what we’re writing about, really, one way or another. Even if a lot of space may be taken up with trying to express how we get to that point. Even so, it’s an all-inclusive thing, isn’t it? And sometimes what we write is not as important as the spaces left where there’s nothing written. No point in asking why the ‘world’ should be (or shouldn’t be) like this. Or even try to identify it and analyze it – as you’ll see if you keep reading this – I’m just trying to make friends with my headache, in a round-about way, not too direct… see how that goes. I’m not expecting it ‘to be’ anything, at times I try to anticipate what it’s likely to do next, wondering how it’s getting on.

The headache arrived last September as a result of shingles on the right side of the head, here’s the link: PHN, but it might give you a headache reading about that, so why don’t I just introduce you to the headache itself? Think of a motorbike helmet that holds your head tightly, a snug fit … that’s it. Now there’s this cloud of intense feeling that, as yet, doesn’t have a name, it’s just energy. As long as it remains anonymous, things are okay – reasonably okay, the only thing is that what you have is this hair-trigger-sawn-off-shotgun-crash-helmet of a headache, minding its own business and nobody’d even know it was there.

So, the lesson is, be careful about what you think! Now, in some foolish un-mindful moment, I might say to myself: Do I have a headache? I can’t feel it now… and BOOM it demolishes my head. So naturally I get to know not to do that, not to ‘name’ it, identify it, or try to make it into something. And, important, I have to learn about this mechanism that can be held in the default STOP position. It’s the: please-don’t-go-there thought; that split-second, small, even tiny, space before the thinking process is engaged and what was really, absolutely, going to happen, by some miracle, doesn’t.

It cannot be stopped sometimes, of course, and you find that the forewarned intuitive snap feeling it’s about to happen means it just happens anyway and there’s devastation all around as you reach for the meds that are opiates anyway so you’re kinda hovering on the edge of a Edgar Allan Poe nightmare most of the time when you overdose on them.

This is how it is, predictably unpredictable so you have to be ready for it to happen any time. If it takes place at night, probably the best way of explaining the feeling of it, when dosed up to the eyeballs with sleeping pills, but still the headache remains and you’re awake for hours, it’s this: pillows appear cruel – have you ever thought of pillows being cruel? Probably not, well I know everything there is to know about pillows, in my research since this headache came to stay with me last September. Really, what I don’t know about pillows is just not worth knowing.

But that’s a whole different story…. [See: part two]

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About this picture: This is the missing head, a screenshot taken from a YouTube video, which shows the head briefly at the end of the clip: https://youtu.be/MjRf-b8Ezis

The whole story is, it’s an ancient Buddhist sculpture, which at the time of the top photo, was at the Beijing World Art Museum and being made ready to be sent to Kaohsiung in Taiwan where it will be reunited with its head.

Its head was stolen in 1996 from the Youju Temple in Hebei Province. The sculpture, made of white marble, is around 1,400 years old. The body is 1.59 meters tall. The head was obtained and offered by a private collector in 2014. Repairs will be made before it is put on public display in 2016. Twenty years after it was removed. The museum has selected another 77 relics for the exhibition in Taiwan.

The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council approved the body be sent to Kaohsiung for a three-month Buddhist Cultural Relic Exhibition jointly held by the administration and the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Memorial Hall, before the complete statue is sent back to Hebei. It symbolizes the possible reunification of Taiwan with China.
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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:

remembering

Posted on January 26, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: In the midst of my contemplation of this Chinese Buddha, along comes an image that becomes a memory; it’s all these objects of reverence and holy things that seem to clutter this central object of focus, the continous chanting by Buddhists from all countries and dressed in different kinds of costumes with bells and accessories, and accouterments… and my own sense of reverence.

When I was a young guy I stayed with an Anglican priest in a Victorian vicarage until I could find my own place. It was my first job, supply teacher in a rough high school in East London, just before Christmas and I hadn’t really thought about it, coming from the far North East, a heritage of strong whisky, fishing boats in the North Sea and gales. Christmas wasn’t meaningful there.

By comparison, everything in London seemed soft and gentle, small wrapped gifts from everyone and I was opening them in my room, when the Church bells suddenly start ringing, it was a collosal din coming from above my room. Did they have bell-pullers? I didn’t see anything to indicate that, and the Father came in dressed in a black cassock, wide-eyed and important and apologised for not telling me about it but it was a cassette tape player and could I come and see – shouting the instructions above the huge noise, and could I please check on these cables reaching up through the ceiling to the huge speakers in the bell tower, carefully placing the cassette player on the small carved clerical table and the wound copper cables stretching dangerously upwards. And I understood I was to watch them for a while to see they didn’t come loose then come downstairs to the service and he’d indicate with a nod when to run up and switch off the cassettte player.

Everyone who came to see the Father just assumed I was a trainee priest and smiling all the time, I felt inspired about being a ‘believer’, but what in? Didn’t seem to matter it was just a sort of space I was occupying at the time; really nice (compared with the storms and savage battle history I’d recently escaped from, best kept quiet about). Aspiring towards the state of being goodhearted, without knowing what exactly I was doing and hadn’t yet discovered what the question was, Looking but not ever finding the opportunity to discuss this kind of thing with the very tall young curate who was always in a hurry; dashing around washing the dishes in this Victorian kitchen with huge taps; abundant generosity with his smiles although kinda narrow in his views.

I happened to show him a leaflet the Hare Krishna guys gave me , dancing in the street with a drum. And the curate said: Oh dear, God on a bad day , and gave it back to me. So I thought about that answer for a long time and it really sounded not bad considering it was not exactly accompanied with any kind of intelligent question. But it did inspire the thought; what might God be like on a good day? So that must have been the question I really wanted to ask this curate, I thought later up in my room, the shape of a large cross that used to hang there where my bed was, and had left the original pattern of the beautiful old Victorian wallpaper in the faded room… it was shortly after that I left for Asia.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle”. [Albert Einstein]

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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

a sense of sky

Posted on January 19, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: There’s a sense of sky, thoughts like clouds drifting through the vast space in the head… but I really don’t want to call it anything; giving things names gives them an identity and what happens next is, I become the ‘happy’ feeling. Feeling “happy” creates a ‘self’ where there wasn’t one before – “I” want to be happy, and don’t want to be ‘sad’, or unhappy. So maybe everything was okay before that ‘happy’ word arrived.

Something deeply understood by every human being in the world is the thought: ‘I am the only one that’s ‘me’, somehow ignoring the overwhelming fact that 7 billion people feel the same way. These days I’m returning to my old notebooks written when I was first discovering Buddhism, it’s this sudden PHN physical condition that’s throwing things all over the place and I need to remember how it all began. It really feels like the best thing to do is return the focus to that sense of sky, nothingness, no-thingness, and anatta, ‘no-self’, nobody at home…

How does it work? For me now, ‘no-self’ describes it well; it’s all just an operating system, same as Windows 10, Mac OS X El Capitain, and a determined and purposeful search to find out exactly where and how this ‘no-self’ exists will yield nothing, because “non self” doesn’t substantially exist – there isn’t any ‘thingness’ about non-self. No substance to it. In fact, ‘no-self’ is just another way of saying nothing substantially exists anywhere. There’s a wonderful fragility, a transparency about the world.

So the Buddha discovered this by way of his own research, 2500 years before Quantum physicists started to come up with empirical evidence that nothing substantially exists. Same thing in so many words. I started to investigate this further, because the question is, if there is no “self”, who or what “sees” there is no “self”? It’s an interesting direction the Dhamma takes that seems to hold my attention. I asked a monk about it in Thailand: ‘If everything without exception is “non self” including the “I” that’s investigating this, then who or what is there to see it’s non self… where does it all lead to? Without hesitation the monk just looked at me calmly and said “enlightenment.” That kinda stopped the conversation for a while …

The process of conceptualising is just a process – no person there doing it. just a process of how one thing is naturally linked to the next thing it’s most likely to link with, and that in turn linked to the next and it goes around like a wheel turning; the extreme point is suffering and unknowing (ignorance: the act of ignoring) and continues on from there following links that the Buddha showed us how to see. It can happen in a millisecond or in a slightly longer extended time… and that’s when we see it. There is a way out, of course, and that happens around steps 6,7 & 8 in the 12 step cycle. I’m not going to talk about that specifically here, check out the link below. So the main thing is all of these cycles, all these other behaviours that go on in life, have no ‘self’ in the background somehow pulling the strings. I find that remembering this helps me in dealing with pain; the pain is not happening to ‘me’ – there is no ‘me’ it’s happening to… just a series of processes. I allow it to pass, in the same way as ‘it’ is raining, wait for it to end… all things do.

“When Hanshan got up from his seat and walked around, he did not see things in motion. When he opened the window blind, suddenly a wind blew the trees in the yard, and the leaves flew all over the sky. However, he did not see any signs of motion. He understood what the text spoke of as, “Streams and rivers run into the ocean and yet there is no flowing.” [Han-shan Te-Ching (1546 – 1623)]

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Note: The source of the Han-Shan Te-Ching quote is the Mindfulbalance blog, post titled: Present in the midst of change. I’m grateful to the researcher for finding this wonderful group of words.
For the cycles of causality follow this link to the Buddha’s teaching on Dependent Origination (Paticcsammupada)

obviously unexpected

Posted on January 12, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #186: Bangkok: Easily said in hindsight, but there’s a sense of helplessness, as I take leave of the birds nesting in the ceiling fan; now it depends entirely on their strength and vigor – anything could happen to these small creatures … and it’ll all take place without me being here because I’m leaving. Bag is packed on my way to the airport, flight to Delhi and swept away in the wave of circumstances. It was that kind of unexpected situation that obviously decided everything finally when we had the birds on the balcony the last time, in Switzerland.

Things came to a head. Events occurred, a change, suddenly this U-turn showed up and we had to follow it around. I was lying on the sofa in the front room, one day, head propped up on a large cushion, staring at my feet down there and the vague space beyond, when suddenly I became aware of something moving in the room, a shadow reflected in the shiny floor surface. A bird with folded wings striding boldly across the floor… quite far into the room – HEY get out of here! Strange to have a wild bird suddenly fly across the room, bird-wing-flap disturbing the air, the acoustics – a very odd thing. It shot out through the open door, into the outside world, straight over the balcony rail and immediately gone in a direct line further and further away in the vast sky until it vanished as a tiny dot.

I stood on the balcony and watched it for a moment then dismantled the perch I’d built and removed the artist’s easel; scraped off all the bird mess and washed down the whole floor. It’s that farmyard thing; dung and downy feathers blowing around inside the apartment because we have to have the balcony doors open in the hot weather, and even if I vacuum up all the feathers, one or two still seem to be fluttering through the rooms of the apartment. My wife Jiab continues to be nice about it but doesn’t actually answer the question when I ask how she feels about the birds. So it’s that awkward silence…

When the birds came back in the evening, there was tremendous confusion: where’s our perch gone? Flapping of wings, feathers flying and hovering in the air where the easel used to be. Then one of them figured it was a good idea to perch on the door stop bracket at the top of the door – never noticed it before – it sticks out about 5 cm with a rubber stopper on the end. An ideal perch. Also the top of the door, which had to be open in the warm evening. So much flapping of wings to see who had the right to be where, the doorstop perch seemed to be top in the hierarchy. That night I put out the easel again (for the last time) and things quietened down, back the way they were.

The following day, after the birds left, I cleaned up again and took the easel inside, locked the door and we were off for a week’s holiday. Mixed feelings, we left them to look after themselves, letting go of attachments. It’s always like this, uneasy feeling, leaving the place where you were. Gratitude for everything received here, loving kindness, anjali, blessings, time to move on…

Our skills and abilities all come from the kindness of others; we had to be taught how to eat, how to walk, how to talk, and how to read and write. Even the language we speak is not our own invention but the product of many generations. Without it we could not communicate with others nor share their ideas. We could not read this book, learn Dharma, nor even think clearly. [Excerpt from: “Eight Steps to Happiness” by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso]

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camouflage

Posted on January 9, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #185: Bangkok: It might look like a small heap of dirt stuck in a ceiling fan, but it’s a bird’s nest and the tiny bird, hatched out, is just sitting there, not moving… camouflaged, trying to look like a small heap of dirt stuck in a ceiling fan.

Almost impossible to see, but there’s a shape of a head there, and a small body. I can see it sometimes when it appears from under the wing of the parent bird but whenever I lift the camera, parent bird glares at me with this slightly fierce stare.

As soon as the parent bird leaves the nest, the other one gets in… unless I’m standing on top of a chair wobbling around with a phone camera and not getting anywhere. So I’m looking for an opportunity to get a better pic but that’s the best I can do without disturbing things too much.

Yep, some familiarity with this kind of situation because this is the second time around. We used to have doves on the balcony in an apartment on the seventh floor, 70-80 feet up, well above street level, above the treetops, just clouds and sky. I was surprised the birds would fly as high as seven floors. They’d come in the evening, stay the night and fly away each day at dawn – I should say they flew down each day because there really wasn’t any up. Following is a section of notes made at that time:

old notebooks: The birds have decided to roost on that big old artist’s easel on the balcony we have no room for in the apartment; somehow sculptural, artistic in a puzzling conceptual way, birds perched on the cross-piece and silhouetted against the evening sky. I’ll have to try to get them not to roost there; the smears of paint on the easel are becoming more of an ochre/white/grey smearing and dropping off onto the floor.

I spent the whole day today building a structure of bird perches made from bamboo canes bound with string, glue, duct tape and screwed to the wall. Then I waited until evening when the birds came back… but they didn’t seem to notice it at all and continued to perch on the artist’s easel. It must be about having your own place and your own identity, ‘self’, this is ‘my’ territory; this is me, myself, and this is where I am. None of the birds moved from where they were, and my elaborate new perch remains unoccupied.

Two days later: new birds have arrived and assembled on it, checking out the situation with this nearly 360 degrees sweep of vision they have, and thinking, well, it looks like this fine perch must be for us! But the old birds on the easel don’t like the new ones on the perch. There’s some upset-wing-flap and the deliberate pushy invasion of each other’s space with puffed-out, chest and assertive walk thus forcing the unwanted bird off its perch. Gained some understanding of the term: “the pecking order”.

About 15 birds now on the balcony, too much noise every night, small feathers blowing around and coming into the house. My wife Jiab really doesn’t like the idea of it and has spoken wise words about how it is getting quite crowded out there and how this is getting to be a problem. So I have to persuade the birds, I invited to stay, to go away… that’s a whole story in itself and I’ll write about it later.

LATE NEWS: I managed to get a very blurred pic of the nest and I think there are two hatchlings, not one.