is there anything?

Posted on May 20, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #266: Delhi-Newcastle flight: There’s something about these long, high altitude journeys – this flight is only 9 hours but long enough to realize, as the hours and miles go by, we have totally left our place of origin… everyone seated, seatbelts fastened, and facing the direction of travel, committed to going ahead with ‘the plan’ which is still in its unimplemented state at this time, and rushing towards that reality at 600 miles per hour in a huge forward-facing directionalized force – teeth-clenched momentum.

Where we are in the meantime is so obviously unimportant, there’s a small fold down table, a reading light, a TV screen. Look outside and we’re in a nowhere place. A strange fractured light, clinical bluish-white, in a place of no-place, just the sensory receptors; eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin-feeling, and mind, in a shared space. Seeing the events without the story. Seeing the seeing; awareness of the awareness; knowing the knowing.

Suddenly, in my thoughts, I’m with my mother in the low-ceilinged, curtains-drawn, Care Home on a wet afternoon in Scotland. Holding her hand and there’s this very long outbreath… I’m waiting for the in-breath to come – breath in, breath in! But no, she stops breathing… just like that. I see the moment she dies and it’s like this is her last teaching to me: this is how you die son, just watch me… and I see her move from present time into the past tense – completely.

So there we are. Is there anything remaining? This story comes to an end, disappears in patterns of thought. Old thoughts recycled from yesterday and the day before, and the absolute totality of thought. Layers upon layers of interconnected thought. All of it clouding over and gone in an instant, but is there anything in the space of no-thought that just resonates with mother’s presence somehow?

The great relinquishment, and seeing her death led to a major letting-go thing. It doesn’t take much more than a moment before the Me and supporting cast remove themselves from active engagement with the story. Then an immense sense of gratitude. Slip over the edge of having-it into the empty space of not-having-it and see how life goes on same as usual without all the backup.

Enter password, unlock, and give it its freedom. For me, roots pulled up and a commitment to spending the rest of my life in someone else’s country. It’s irreversible and knowing that, helps somehow. But there’s this thing, is there anything remaining? I think there’s something of mother here, but I don’t know if that’s the psychological result of me coping with the loss, or is it a separate resonance coming to me from what remains of her.

We’re coming in to land over the South side of Newcastle, and I’m thinking about the new-born baby boy I’m here to visit up North. Is it morphic resonance? I do feel a particular warmth in the center of my body when I think of the child. Is this the resonance from my mother passed through this child who would have been her great grandson?

Looking out of the aircraft window now; how do these thoughts fit with all these millions of people going about their business down there, no time to see if there’s anything else but Science to believe in? Here in these fleeting altitudes there are no thoughts, they’re all maybe still in the somewhere-place back over the curvature of the planet. My face turns forwards with everyone else’s, waiting to see what this journey brings.

Photo shows the east coast of England, south of Newcastle

the look of flowers

Posted on April 24, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #261: New Delhi: looking at Facebook pics of my niece M aged 13, in New Zealand, reminds me of how it was when I was her age; studied many things in school but never learned (or escaped from learning) what lay beneath the overlay of becoming some ‘body’ – a person with a job, an identity and this is ‘me’ how are you?

Intuition told me it wasn’t the whole story. Living a lie, I must have thought. Nobody taught us about the art of living (or maybe I wasn’t listening), somehow missed the bit about being at peace with the sense of I-am-ness, only that jittery feeling of physicality, and living on the edge. Mind searching for motivation in situations that offer comfort, gratification in pleasure, gratification in displeasure too, justified raging and things out of control, everything thrown to the wind.

Stumbling and crashing through the successes and failures of many lives, and coming to India more than thirty years ago – there to be suddenly awakened to The Whole Thing. So much can be said about that, but now here in New Delhi on a Sunday morning, no traffic noise, just blue sky and birdsong. Flowers seen in a passing eyebeam with that look of being looked at.

Then, ‘regret’ arrives from somewhere thousands of miles from here and in a great expanse in time. It appears in the form of a small boy, bowed head, scruffy uniform, string showing at the collar, latch-door key kid. Headmaster in a huge voice says, ‘you have to think about what you’re doing before you do it, okay?’ Small boy nods, says some words of respect, and shuffles out of the room. Headmaster was talking about mindfulness decades before it came to be what it is today – for me, it was something intuitively know but still unlearned.

In a split second I see that moment there and then encapsulated in the here and now of present time. The boy in a state of anxious urgency every day, no real home, slightly unstable and the struggle to get it right without anyone to reassure him that yes, you can use intuitive guesswork even if you have nothing to go on. The built-in reasoning of mind in these circumstances is enough. So I’m the adult here, now playing the part of headmaster, saying, ‘yes kiddo, you’re right, and it’s allright, you can do that, no problem!’

Even now when I see the English word ‘ignorance’ translated from the Pali word ‘avidya’, it brings a slight twinge of anxiety of school days, built-in conditioning and authoritarian adults. Then, reaching out to that kid with the burden of failure, standing before the Headmaster, I can correct the thought enslavement of ignorance, because it’s not that. You need to have the context of stability, look at this state of not knowing, and being as open as you can to it, see that it’s not not-knowing, it’s ‘knowing’. Then it becomes the Pali word ‘vidya’ The seed of knowing planted deep in the ground of what is not known… the metaphor of the lotus rising from the mud.

Looking through M’s photos of her in New Zealand, being who she is, and for me it’s surprising to see it’s as easy as that. Thus stepping into my own timeline to make these corrections so that everything unfolding from there and then to here and now is free of obstructions – gone is the dark fear experienced by the schoolboy and in its place is the light of knowing.

“And the bird called, in response to the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, and the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.” T. S. Elliot, The Four Quartets

Photo: sunflowers in our garden. I took the photo not expecting to see the bee in the flower head!

holo

Posted on April 8, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #258: New Delhi: I perceive the world as a solid tangible thing, I see, hear, smell, taste, touch and in the mind’s eye I believe this to be so. But it’s a hologram – outer and inner, subject/object split as One; all of it is holographic. Therefore, the planet Earth seen from outer space, shining with color, is holographic. If that is so, all neighboring worlds, seen to be dead planets, could be teeming with life and we can’t see it because our sensory mechanisms are not compatible with their operating system, so to speak. In the same way, those other world populations are seeing their holographic extension of themselves, and can’t see our world for the same reason.

An idea for an SF story… the way it is, so clear to me now, waking up after a short snooze on the sofa and the headache almost gone. Birds twittering in the trees outside, they react to the drop in temperature as the heat of the day turns towards cool. Let’s see, it must be around 4 pm, raise the remains of my headache up from the sofa, legs over the side and stand up, feet into slippers: flip, flop, flip… over to the window and look out.

Trees standing around here and there, pointing at the sky and contemplating the situation: if a tree falls in the middle of nowhere, it makes no sound – it’s nowhere so, nobody’s there to hear it. But if you split the word into two parts: ‘now’ and ‘here’, somebody’ll hear the sound of it, because it is ‘now here’, and that’s a time/space location in the hologram which makes it real in this context. You could say, because this is so, I am. You are. We are ‘here’ in our world and out there is just ‘out there’, the abstract realm where: you are what you is, and you is what you am…[Frank Zappa].

There was a time when I wasn’t here, not born yet. The world just going on without that person called ‘me’ in it – there’s an anonymity about this that’s quite liberating. The day before I was born, everything was just going on, birds twittering in the trees as they are doing now, and all the other random events taking place as I was birthed. And all those I was to be connected with, one way or another, arrived from what I’d call the past, dissolving into circumstances of present time as it falls away into the future, encapsulated in the timeless moment we are in, always. Nothing out of place, as I see it now, and here at the open window on the second floor of the house where the treetops are level with the window and higher… birds twittering more and more, as the day turns towards evening.

“The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind. From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.” [Agnes de Mille]

Photo source

unfathomable and vast

Posted on March 24, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #256: New Delhi: No memory now of the journey, the three-legged hop from Chiang Mai, Bangkok to Delhi. Nor the specific sense of that wormhole spiraling through space-time, large enough but no bigger than my body size, songs of the mind, and belongings – things we cling to/ clings we thing to. The urgency of speed, an immense engine sound deafened, hidden, obscured and bubble-like enclosure built over it, designed with the dynamics of flight … the same plane flying to and from the same route all of its working life, and the ‘to’ becomes the ‘from’… no end, no beginning. Maintenance crews service the parts whenever it lands – both ends of the journey. From the engines’ point of view, everything is stationary. It’s the world that moves.

Arriving at the Delhi house then, with ears sucked out and everything familiar yet creepy, the coldness of known objects that’ve been unheld for all this time. And dropping stuff here and there, releasing context plug-ins from the journey. Freed from having to have everything to show officials, and always in the background searching: where’s my passport ‘now’? Biro pen to fill in Landing Form, boarding pass with some words written on the back. Crumpled up tissues, a wrapper, and bits and pieces from the journey. Checked-in bag dropped, remains where it is, wide open like the mouth of an opera singer reaching the high note: laaaaa. Contents of pockets’ fly out, liberated, what it’s got in its pocketses, wallet opens, low value currency bills and little old folded notes from a former life, which always seem to be there.

Body expanding, filling out to normal size, and so I go up the three flights, to the top where the steps become narrow and steep, and the stiff old door is reached. Teetering on the topmost step, just enough space to negotiate this particular door lock from some time in history, which opens by means of a remembered turn-key and shoulder-shove. Thus propelled on to the roof, I jailbreak the house and everything out here is pink. Birds quietly watching the sun go down.

I remember now, it’s the crows that perch on the highest branches, and as far as the eye can see all around this massive landmass, broad enough for every imaginable thing, encompasses all kinds of ways of being. I’m expanding and stretching out from the cramped confines of small states of mind, in countries like Thailand, Japan, UK, Switzerland where they believe things come to an end. Pink sky at the end of daylight… unfathomable and vast.

“Beyond the mind there is no such thing as experience. Experience is a dual state. You cannot talk of reality as an experience. Once this is understood, you will no longer look for being and becoming as separate and opposite. In reality they are one and inseparable like roots and branches of the same tree. Both can exist only in the light of consciousness, which again, arises in the wake of the sense ‘I am’. This is the primary fact. If you miss it, you miss all.” [Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj]

terrestrial ocean

Posted on March 17, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #255: Bangkok: Elevated passageways and corridors in the mind creaking like we’re on an old sailing ship, swaying with wind and air currents, the swell of the sea and the flip of waves at their peak. These lightweight structures hold the sails, huge areas of stretched canvas sailcloth – I can only see a part of the whole. The creak and strain of long hemp ropes, tarry old wood decking and a wide-open sky. Then the pain comes, ringing the urgency bell… see how it triggers all systems in a wild inarticulate way… make way! Allow the alarm to ring and let there be absolutely no resistance, no tightening up, just letting it be there… the worst of it subsides and the emergency mode is switched off. In the Buddhist sense I’m drawing attention to an awareness of Suffering and the cause of suffering, but not just labeling it; ‘the cause’ of Suffering is the 2nd Noble Truth, no, I’m asking, what is this ‘cause’? No labeling from here on.

What is the cause of Suffering and what is the cause of the cause? The desire for it to not be there, the confrontation, the avoidance, resistance… obstructing it, subverting it by any means. Running away from it, wanting things to be different than the way they are in a totally impossible way.

Childlike, I can see my (child) self as a baby, attending to whatever object appears, comes into range, immediately focused, the totality of each thing, as it arises – conscious experience without language.

Flickers of memory like this… food is a wonderful experience, it’s not Food, it’s Wonderful, it’s not ‘wonderful’ – no words for it, it’s a feeling(?). Then, just as easily, the bad, the awful – then the aftermath of the disaster, early childhood systems of understanding the world – but for my (child) self there’s no ‘understanding’, because there are no words in infancy to describe anything. Catastrophic! I am the cause of this hurtful chain of events. How it was then, and how it is now are no different. I am the same ‘me’ as I was then, language acquisition is here now, I’m expanded, filled out, developed and extended into the world but still the same ‘me’ (time can disappear in this kind of investigation), so how can I help protect the ‘me’ that was then, with the ‘myself’ that is now, equipped with adult skills?

Meditation. I’m sitting on the meditation cushion like a chick in the nest, cheep-cheep… waiting for the return of the Parent Bird (mother, father, both or neither) and, beak totally wide open, like a suitcase lying open on a bed waiting to be packed with things, my (child) self perceiving the Parent Bird visiting the nest (or not visiting), and for me now seated on the cushion too, there’s the acceptance, the wide-open giving-way-to it.

Maybe also in adversity, how much I’d prefer to not do this any more, because the recognition of the familiar forms of interaction between my (child) self and authority figures in the family group are too scary – for a moment I ‘see’ the blocking… but there aren’t any words, it’s something felt.

Simply how it came to be the way it is, but no words. A wetness at the eye, a glimpse of my (child) self receiving conscious experience, and the perception of it has shaped, formed the person I am today – it is the person I am today.

Then the pain comes back, deep stabs of it like bolts of lightning passing through, but the intention to allow space for the pain is still there. As the immensity of it become less and less, acceptance opens more and resistance begins to fall away. I see now the intention to be open and accept the pain, hidden from ordinary wakefulness, buried deeper than the pain can reach.

It’s this that tells me, when all other options are gone, there’s no running away from it now, I have to turn around and go back into the pain… for a split second the pain eases, an extraordinary and out-of-this-world feeling.

Absolutely no escape from the pain… then finding this window I know that’s always here, and everything is swept away like a flood of water finding its way through a landscape, rapidly filling up all the spaces and getting into all the corners… I am a sailing ship on a terrestrial ocean.

valentine 2017 falling in love again

Posted on February 14, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #250: New Delhi: Completely blown away at the Bahá’í Lotus Temple with the monk, Bodhinando – and it could be that an experienced young meditator like him, now entering the world for the first time after 5 years of intense practice, was just giving off this unseen bliss and harmony when sitting in meditation. Or it could be the dome itself, the amazing acoustics with fragments of birdsong, trills, chirps and whistles from the high windows up there; acrobatics of sound echoing 40 meters above our heads.

When we started the sit, I was struggling with head pain and didn’t think I could do it… pressure over the right eye. I couldn’t get up and leave without disturbing others, so the only way out was ‘in’. I tried getting focused on the in-breath/ out-breath, but the mind scampered away, again and again like a playful puppy. I persevered with it, over and over, did my best but in the end, gave up, or it might be better said that I gave in; whatever… ready to get up and go. But, just then, things started happening, triggered by that decisive acceptance, release of tension, and a huge enfoldment began, with everything tipping over, collapsing into a gentle falling.

A slow-mo picture of what happens when falling off the top of a tall building and the fun aspect of it is there’s no ground down below. Pieces of thought imagery flying past me in the fall, some are on the same level as the whole thing remains in free fall like this. It was a giving-in to it, a kind of birthing, a relinquishing, transitioning, and a swoon, a falling in love again, again.

The fall was without gravity; direction ‘down’ had no particular meaning, nor was ‘up’ or ‘through’. I use word ‘me’ object, and ‘I’ subject, as location points in the description of the event, and not as me, the Person walking around in the world. In the slow spinning enfolding through all directions and dimensions, the ‘I’ aspect was everywhere, all around, above and below, and inside and including the ‘me’, the Person who is normally separate, walking around in the world.

Then there was a small noise, and in response I opened my eyes; a shocking brightness of the here-and-now… what’s happening? Some people were leaving and the rustling of their clothing had drawn my attention. Closed my eyes again and the inner enfolding sensation was still there. It continued like this and when we left I carried it with me, looked at my watch and maybe an hour had passed, completely enthralling.

The word is Jhana perhaps; there was a familiarity about it. I must have experienced this years ago, and knew how to just go with it and when the opportunity arose, I gave up (gave in), relaxed the intensity, and everything was enfolded in the fall. As we were walking in the huge grounds surrounding the place, I was describing the thing with Bodhinando and asking him about it. I remember he looked at me once with small smile, and didn’t reply. Then I was going to ask him again later but forgot what the question was…

Love is everywhere on Saint Valentine’s Day (and every day). Upper picture: the interior of the Lotus Temple, click on this link for more from Wikipedia. Photo above: Heart shape in the folds of a blue towel our taxi driver had placed on his seat in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, North India… and Marlene Dietrich from 1930, falling in love again.

vulnerability

Posted on January 28, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #246: New Delhi: Touch-screen tap, and there’s another photo in our Thai network of the floods in the South near the Malaysian border. A rail track, after the floodwaters have receded, showing how the foundations of the track are swept away. I’m shocked to see something I have always known to be totally flat, become structurally altered – nature as terrorist amidst nature as vulnerability? The way we see the world has to include the fact that it may all be utterly different in a moment. The very small window of experience we have of unity is become widened to include unexpected political change; everything is irredeemably lost… then rebuilt, and the memory of how it used to be after a year, is gone – after a generation there’s no memory of it at all, other than how history has it recorded.

Even though I’ve been studying Buddhism for 20 years, I’m overcome sometimes with fear, unwilling to let go of things I’m travelling with, fearful that some low-hanging part of the assemblage might drop off, be gone forever. It happens anyway, the hours and days disappear, become lost and appearances arise then fall away. Who I am at any given time, may change according to the context I am in. There is only a semblance of self, choosing to remain as the embedded and reclusive ‘me’, gazing through the windows of eyes and out at the world going past. By default, hidden away in inner landscapes, peopled with characters I choose, and planted with trees, and flowers, and built with homes, and mansions with hundreds of rooms.

“Maybe death’s hour too will send us out new-born
towards undreamed-lands, maybe life’s call to us will never find an end. Courage my heart, take leave and fare thee well.”

[Herman Hesse, Steps (Stufen)]

karma of circumstances

Posted on January 24, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #245: New Delhi: Arriving at the breakfast table like a ship docking in the harbor. Sliding in to coffee and bagels. Spread butter on toasted bagel, then honey and slices of banana. A piece of it held between finger and thumb comes into vision for a moment and it disappears somewhere below my nose, as head tilts forward in a teeth/tongue snatch, chewing, chewing and swallow. Wonderful, the world enters my body – gratitude (“give us this day our daily bread…”). Transfiguration of flesh, blood and bones, fingernails and hair grow.

Hands and face wash – hot soapy water dribbling down bare arms, coldness in the chill air. It drops off at the elbows in two puddles on the floor… sudden déjà vu, memory of an unreasonable fear, guilt. Must have been a childhood scolding. Dry it all up, headache like a cue ball colliding with the inner walls of the skull. Always like this, in every new circumstance, reassembling the parts of who I am, and nothing seems to fit; searching for a ‘self’ to be satisﬁed with – or dissatisfied with, or upset, or angry, confused, depressed, gloomy or sad.

I’m drawn back across the years to how it must have been at birth. Sudden embodiment in a separate physicality, immense sound, trauma of coldness that has no name, the shock of air entering unopened lungs. All the early events from there on that are internalized; unexpected fear, huge sensations – everything happening without language to give it form so it cannot be understood. All the hurt and pain deeply embedded in who I am today.

My life is conditioned by these energy imprints, which are as present now as they were “then” – the past doesn’t exist, ‘clock time’ doesn’t cover it. There is only the karma of circumstances contained in present moment awareness.

I’m so glad to know this, if I didn’t have the PHN headache condition, I wouldn’t feel as motivated to look everywhere for a cure, and thus begin to uncover the mystery. A handful of meds swallowed with a swig of bottled water and in a short while, the headache is gone, everything begins to fall into an easing… long sigh of outbreath. I cannot find language that fits the moment.

The melancholia of winter. It takes a while to notice the sun shining through the kitchen extractor fan. Around this time, the shadow cast by the next-door building moves away. I can go up now to the roof terrace and sit in the sunshine… footsteps on concrete steps, flip-flop, flip-flop, flip… disappear up the staircase

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

[Rumi]

Special thanks to Miriam Louisa Simons who introduced me to “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown. Study notes from this form the main part of the post.

all that is born

Posted on January 19, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #244: New Delhi: Early morning light, people wrapped in shawls, long scarves bound around the head and tied under the chin. Dark faces, eyes looking out and they see me for an instant in a diamond eye-lock as I struggle to look away. They look with curiosity; I think they see me as one of those lost in maya, not in the real world for them, I’m living in a dream. They might laugh to themselves, but not in a hurtful way – I’m pretty sure they see me as a naïve person, like a grown up child, dependent on support mechanisms I pay for with an impossible wealth, as far as they’re concerned, removed from everyday values. They’re right, from where they stand. It’s true, and I’m in awe of them, their existence is unreachable. The actuality of their lives, I know nothing about. My ongoing practice of ‘self’/’no-self’ investigation, and awareness of awareness reflecting upon itself, is maybe something they know about so completely and utterly that if I were to ask the right question, I’d be swept away in the tidal wave of their wisdom. A received knowledge from generations past, centuries and thousands of years for them is the same as today, an ordinary reality.

Inside the dark interior of their houses, I see shadows moving in the dim light of an old-style incandescent 25-watt bulb, flickering in unsteady current, candles, oil lamps and small cooking fires. Pots and plates, carefully placed on the stones outside to dry in the open air, and I feel these things should be inside the house, in a plate rack in a drawer inside a cupboard, which closes with a magnetic door-fastener click.

A pregnant woman gazes at me for a moment as I go by; deep eyes, there’s something supernatural about this woman. I look away. Everything in this neighborhood is alien to me. The houses all look like they’re only partly built. Bare brick walls and there’s one incomplete upper floor, or some part of the house seemingly under construction. I heard it’s because they don’t have to pay tax if the house is still ‘being built.’ These half-built houses are everywhere; a family living on the ground floor and upstairs there are bare brick walls reaching up like pillars with just the sky where the roof should be. There’s an underlying uneasiness about it all, it seems to me, inadequate shelter, no protection, and a fierce tenacity of holding on to life.

There are others in more hazardous circumstances, street people and those with no dwellings at all, the dispossessed. Beyond that the sadhus, bearded men with matted hair in yellow robes, colored pigment smeared across the forehead, incense and candle-wax – hovering in a kind of other dimension – a living statement that all that is born, ceases. We die because we were born, there’s birth and death in every moment. So obvious, but almost all of the time I can’t see it.

Death is drawn to sound
like a slipper without a foot,
a suit without its wearer,
comes to knock with a ring,
stoneless and fingerless,
comes to shout without a mouth,
a tongue, without a throat.
Nevertheless its footsteps sound
and its clothes echo,
hushed like a tree.
[Death Alone by Pablo Neruda]

Photo by Melinda Ruck
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

fortuitous solstice

Posted on December 22, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #238: Chiang Mai: I got to the airport too quickly, no Bangkok traffic on the route out of the city, so I had to wait for the check-in staff to arrive at the desk. I must have been the first passenger. Okay, good, more than enough time to make it to the departure gate. Stop for a Starbucks Cappuccino on the way, check my emails, and then it’s an amble rather than a walk. A very long, straight corridor, reaching so far, the end of it truly is a vanishing point; it disappears into nothing. As you get nearer, the vanishing point slowly becomes visible; there’s a yellow sign pointing to a left turn. You make that turn and finally arrive in the busy departure area sticking right out into the large open runway, seen through huge windows on either side. I see the flat horizon line all around and a few aircraft standing at different gates. Various things happening, aircraft service vehicles, passengers’ luggage being loaded.

So I stroll along to gate 54 and there’s my plane, Thai Smile Air, bound for Chiang Mai. Interesting, take a photo of it because, no reason, that’s what you do these days. Examine the photo; zoom in to see the opening where the luggage belt enters the aircraft. It really is so much like the body of a bird, plumage shifted to allow her little chicks to sneak under that soft belly and warmth of the nest. The surprise came when I noticed the red bag going up the belt was mine – the first to go up, because I was the first to check in. Was it really mine? (See photo), I had to enlarge the pic as far as it would go to identify the white ribbon around the handle, the purple Thai priority label and small white sticker from inspection scan at the entry to the airport.

Yes, it was mine, bearing all the characteristics that defines it as ‘my’ bag. I notice how that’s a whole thing in itself, of course, the action of searching for your bag among other bags coming along the luggage belt and reaching the point of seeing it, the identification – the familiarity of that whole event, the taking-place of it . The difference now is, I see it in this unexpected context. There’s the coming together, the re-cognition of parts that were separate before I saw how they became form – unknown until I see it now.

A curious returning to the observer effect in physics. Ground zero, everything spreads out from here. The coming together was preceded by the slow amble along the corridor and pause for a moment in a place we normally ignore in the rush to get to the gate. Taking the photo of the plane for no reason other than there was plenty of time to do it. And this action coincided exactly with the movement of the luggage handlers placing my bag on the belt.

A fortuitous crossing of paths, you could say, an event occurs that has no name until I make it so, I decide it is mine, it becomes something, and “curiouser and curiouser” (said Alice) that this should occur on the Winter Solstice (21 December 2016) identified as Christmas Day in the Fourth Century AD by Roman Emperor Constantine.

Having seen it like this, the memory disappears totally in the one-hour flight to Chiang Mai. Quick to get out of the plane and waiting at the luggage belt for the bag to arrive, waiting and waiting… all the other passengers get their bags and leave. Has mine been lost? A moment of panic, then it comes along the belt, the last one out because it was the first to go in.

“I looked in temples, churches and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart.” [Rumi]
————————-