This thread again

Yesterday I was at Cragside and noticed how the fruit glasshouse is rotting away. The National Trust is struggling for money and volunteers across the country it seems and an internet search reveals a number of complaints. Predictably there are voices bemoaning the so called 'woke' environmental and social justice initiatives. But this is just noise. Irrespective of any questions over whether or not we 'should' save historic structures (and on that one I'm flexible but would say generally there is a debate to have here, centring largely on 'for what purpose') the real problem is a nationally systemic one I think. Across almost every sector of UK life there is a lack of investment. It seems that more than other European countries we have taken to heart and mind the neoliberal idea that private enterprise and markets will solve all ills. Some of us always regarded that as nothing short of one rule for the rich and another for the poor and it's no surprise to find evidence that it's not working.

Walking around the gardens I was struck by spring flowers in colours that I associate with Easter as they're so much part of this time of year.

These colours I thought, where else have I met them? And what came to me was those butterfly prints we'd make in primary school... Fresh and bright.

Another image came to me too; that of Notre Dame restored and splendid and I mused again at how if it were a UK project it would be beset with delays, spiralling costs and the like. See previous post here.

Something of various thoughts was in my mind, and later reading this and that, I came across a commentary on the Red Thread koan pointing out that one way of looking at this koan is 'what is the strand that runs through your life, yet is so obvious you miss it?' I find this a valuable reminder, the Red Thread can stand for so many parts of the ongoing unfolding of our lives. Musing on this question I considered what in my life this could be. Was it the inquisitive side, interest in engineering and the built environment, exploration of the 'spiritual' side of life, my intention towards authenticity, the philosophical, etc...? But nothing particularly struck me.

Then on Wednesday morning DC sent me a picture from Bristol of a monument to Isambard Kingdom Brunel with the caption 'Your hero'. Although I've always been a bit sceptical of 'heroes', certainly as a teenager I was impressed by this man and there is no doubting his contribution. As DC said, he was a dude. DC and I have an informal list of dudes- people who... well defining dude isn't so simple but you get the idea. I knew IKB died young but I couldn't remember at what age so looked it up and in so doing found the following obituary:

Brunel was the right man for the nation, but unfortunately, he was not the right man for the shareholders. They must stoop who must gather gold, and Brunel could never stoop. The history of invention records no instance of grand novelties so boldly imagined and so successfully carried out by the same individual.

I found that moving! And that points to my Red Thread.

In Bristol, a city arguably built on slavery, stands a monument to a man who through ingenuity and struggle built structures we still use. Across the UK there are wonderful historic buildings, many built on oppression and exploitation. Our politicians are either frightened to speak the truth or peddle culture wars. The National Trust (who are NOT wrong to set in context the origins of the estates which have come to their custodianship) struggle as alluded to above. There is no real debate about what is needed going forward in much of our national life. Around the world stability is weakening and is threatened by oligarchs as history plays out familiar troupes. Power is allowed to concentrate and serve the few. And yet we are capable of what IKB achieved, of what those medieval cathedral builders and modern cathedral re-builders achieved, of seeing beauty and alleviating suffering. Through our minds and bodies we can do so much that is obviously good. It is NOT appropriate to make woke mean something wrong. It is wrong to wage war, to build jingoistic narratives, to mistake unfair socioeconomic conditions for nature. What I find moving in that obituary is a tacit understanding that it's good to act beyond short-term greed. Of course there's projection in that, but I think we know that it's good to do what serves our communities.

And the Red Thread? It's in the way we see and relate.

Another recollection illuminates this. As a child in school I always disliked PE and games. I'd neither interest nor ability and could see no value in sport. In those days the 1970's, the whole set up was such that to question the value of sport and competitive games was so bazar that the argument had to be made. And make it I did. Why, must I try to engage with this pointless business when it was obviously doing me no good whatsoever? By the time I was 12 or 13 I'd actually managed to extract from my form teacher who also took PE and games a confession in my school report that he had to agree that it was 'all rather pointless'! I was sensitive, thoughtful and interested in how things worked yet I was in an education system that was very much a product of its time. It was in some ways informed by the Plowden Report which likely generated some 'child centred learning' and was likely both of benefit to my age group and may have in other ways held us back a bit where it was poorly implemented. Who knows, but it didn't result in what we would now recognise as a really diverse educational environment. And whilst I seem to recall music and movement classes in primary school (I don't recall my reaction to them) they vanished by middle school as I recall. And whereas these days as I understand it, a conversation around what PE and games options might suit with yoga, dance etc. on offer, none of that was in anyone's mind in the '70's and '80's once we'd progressed beyond primary school music and movement... PE I could get some slight point to, provided I was allowed to go at my own pace and not have to engage in some kind of competitive tedium... I wasn't averse to clambering about things it was uncontrolled relatively high energy objects such as fast moving balls or people I disliked! Games meant football, rounders, cricket and for some rugby. Under virtually no circumstance was I willing to engage with these. This generated some consternation amongst peers and teachers. What I think is interesting is not just my lack of interest and skill in these but the mindsets at work. Clearly, many people enjoy taking part in and supporting sports teams. But for me the entire endeavour is nothing but a pointless tribal pursuit; I clearly don't have the key ingredient. I understand that the cooperation within the team and competition with others and the skill and chance etc. are all what provide the stimulation for a lot of people but it's meaningless to me. What I do find meaningful is that life is full of struggle and we can if we openly explore the available information, make things better. That's what I find moving in that obituary. The Red Thread for me is in the not playing sports games, not competing for enjoyment, not conforming to narratives and values because they're held by the majority to be true. It's in the exploration of what is and how it can be engaged with to make things better including with limited resource. The not and the in do the revealing of the thread and the koan.

The winter here in the Northeast is quite long and by this time of year most of us are ready for spring. And so it is so lovely to see the flowers doing the only thing they can - flower. The rot in the fruit glasshouse is doing the only thing it can too. We shape and shift our environment with our minds and bodies but the wider forces of the universe are on a far grander scale... The Taoists would have us be in harmony with 'nature' to be ourselves without getting in our own way, our 'natural' selves before ego and fear twist us. Those fears are part of the koan and the repeating patterns part of our Red Thread. A thread made of both our true face and the faces we wear as we move thorough the not's and the in's... a dance sometimes in the light of awareness and quite often in the dark of confusion, the patterns of light and dark reflecting our threads...

Departure

On Friday evening DC and I watched the 2016 film Departure. We both enjoyed it and noted that it had way of getting under one's skin. So on Saturday I was musing just what is it that's resonating there. The film is about lots of currents in various relationships and is described in various reviews as a meditation on desire. Indeed one of the characters Elliot, a dreamy teenager with aspirations to be a writer says he wants to write about desire...'the way it runs through your fingers like water'. At this point I think it becomes clear that the writer is using the character for his own exploration of desire and there's a slight failure of film's plausibility. But this failure soon dissipates. Thinking about this line I note that for me desire might better be described as like water soaking into blotting paper and running through fingers like cream, coursing through the body like electricity, celebrated in Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric... And here we have it, the resonance, the reality of our paradox - we are both all One and all separate, we long to be the fullest we can be, but we can't do it alone, we are our interactions. But this is not all that gets under the skin for gay men of our generation. Elliot is gay, and in the film we are invited to consider where he lies on the journey of realising, accepting and coming out. He doesn't appear to have much gap between realisation and acceptance, there's no indication of repression. Repression wounds. It amplifies separation in the human paradox. It holds us in the bud, denies flowering and turns us against ourselves. Eventually for most of us we break the bonds and out we come. But we carry grief for the lost years. This then is the added element getting under our skin. And we all have aspects of ourselves that get lost in our everyday lives... This meditation on desire then is wider than we can know... And that wideness gets under the skin...

The title of this blog is taken from case 5 Mumonkan and I consider that this case is basically asking us what are we and how do we live our life given that we can't ever capture the totality of the unfolding situation and neatly live it using only the power of our own reasoning. No, we can't control and be 'right' and just and true and free of pain in all moments. No amount of knowledge, planning, control and the like even with the best, kindest and 'highest' of intentions will do it. But the key is our intention. And here we return to desire. In 'spiritual' discourse desire, craving and similar words are often described in their problematic manifestation and indeed there are many ways in which we must see through their turns and snares. Less well explored and pointed to in the red thread koan, is desire's messy creative passionate compassion. Without this we are the withered tree hermit saved only when the old woman comes to chase us away and burn down our hut! We have shunned life and become trapped in a small selfish existence. But if we are to respond to life with warmth and an open hearted intention then its creativity, its desire to be, to flower, is an expression of that intention and vice versa. This is wider than we can know...

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul...

And as I might have said to Elliot, Whitman's rather said it I think, but it's so sweet to see you try and how I would have liked to have been able to spare myself the wounding though its healing would repay the wound ten times and more.

A Handbag?!

Yesterday DC and I enjoyed the glorious spring sun walking along the beach from Alnmouth to Boulmer and back. Whilst walking (and reminding ourselves and each other to enjoy the sparkling sea) we discussed thoughts raised by our recent viewing of the BBC's The Great Philosophers (a history of western philosophers in 15 parts). We've not been watching in order but rather selecting episodes which look appealing. We will get round to watching them all I'm sure. The series dates from 1987 and is quite wonderful in its no nonsense, no frills straightforward serious approach. Just two erudite people sitting on a sofa illuminating at a reasonably high level the writings of some of the finest minds. No fancy camera shots, no trips around the globe, no pandering to short attention spans and competing for an audience. Much of our discussion was to reflect that one way or another we're all dancing around the same handbag of the empiricism v idealism conundrum, this ultimately leading through questions of causality towards the question of free will. But we decided to stop short of that question for we had quite done the rounds of something which had made it already a largely irrelevant question. I'd approached the ideas from a Buddhist perspective; interdependent origination which to me, through emptiness (śūnyatā) takes the handbag away.

We stopped at Boulmer and drank tea from a flask and enjoyed my mother's home made cake, which was lovely. That she and my dad are still despite their frailty able to make cake and that we all share so much love despite the inevitable frustrations of life is a constant source of amazement to me.

In the evening we watched the film Pride about the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). It's a feel-good movie as opposed to a detailed documentary but I think the take home message is not weakened by that - connection, community, acceptance, care and compassion are what give life joy. And as I write this a phrase which is a favourite of DC's comes to mind - "distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other" by Theodor W. Adorno. For my own part Adorno's “Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole” reminds me that all my fears and frustrations must surely stem from the beauty of the possible. I should add at this point that I've not read the original works of any of these great thinkers and I'm grateful to those that both have and have produced works that I might appreciate. The film Pride covers the interaction of the LGBT and mining communities, a coming out story and the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. There's a moment when the fictional character Joe 'Bromley' is taken by the hand and kissed in a night club. The scene marks his initiation, is late in the whole story of his involvement with LGSM and is suffused with warmth and the ripening of his coming out. It is sharply contrasted by later scenes of his parents hostile response and the victimisation and queer bashing of other characters. But eventually we see Joe leave the parental home and thus take another step to come home to himself. The sound track to the film is a rich and joyous one and very much in harmony with my own dance inclinations. For me emptiness / śūnyatā doesn't take away our individuality it invites us to truly expand into it. It's an enormous ask - to truly respond with openness to each moment, not to shrink back in greed or fear from what is being asked but to be the living embodiment of the highest potential available to each of us. This is our humanity, our compassion, although it comes with clouds of confusion and fear and is inevitably way bigger than we can grasp or fully meet. To truly live is to dance this koan. It isn't enough to only read philosophy, or think about it in the abstract. Sooner or later we will be faced with the 'chopping wood and carrying water' of our everyday lives. But can we JUST chop the wood and carry the water - FULLY in response to that enormous ask? Can we live each apparent choice of our everyday lives in each arising moment as the bright colours of the distinct dancing with each other in mutual co-operation, support and enjoyment? In our everyday lives we are described by neither empiricism nor idealism, we are suspended between heaven and earth. We must not recoil like Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest exclaiming 'A handbag?!' for we are all in and dancing around the handbags of delusion. Much easier said than done. And even then always with our own little grab bag of karma...

Reflections on ECC New Year retreat

 DC and I spent last week in the lake district on an Edward Carpenter Community new year retreat. I took the following photo just after arriving.

Looking up Wastdale towards Wastdale Head / Great Gable.

This is the 'classic' view and fortunately the air and hence the lake surface was still, giving rise to a mirror where they met. Even if the water had been rippling and thus the reflection not present this would have been a striking view, with the mirror it is more so. The clarity of the reflection was so precise yet still preserving the wateriness. It wasn't until reviewing the picture that I noticed the stick in the bottom righthand corner. Zoom in and look at this. It has a majesty of its own.

Seeing this scene I immediately saw the parallel reflections - the mountain in the water and both in my mind. Many Zen koans point to this. For a second I mused on this before realising it didn't need any words.

Later in the week the moon was full and delightful in a clear blue evening sky. Viewed directly it seemed to occupy far more of the visual field than the tiny dot which appears in the following photo.

 

The moon is the small white dot fairly much in the centre of the picture. Almost insignificant in this picture, it assumed far more majesty when viewed with the naked eye. Again, I mused briefly on the moon's appearance in Zen koans. And recalling the mirror of the above picture I remembered Chiyono’s Bucket koan. This koan tells of a nun's enlightenment when the bottom fell out of the bucked in which she was carrying water. Her poem is translated thus:

With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together, and then the bottom fell out. Where water does not collect, the moon does not dwell.

I felt no need to dwell on these observations more and doubtless took myself back to the fireside for a warm. It was a cold week and the log fire was a very welcome companion!

The week was spent in the company of a lovely bunch of gay men and the heart energy was warm and nourishing. As ever living in community we're all there making mirrors for each other should we have the eyes to see ourselves in the reflection.

New year's eve we made a bonfire and celebrated the turn of the year with fireworks. After a bit the smoke from the fire seemed more troubling to me than the benefit of the warmth and I returned to the warmth of the fireside which benefited from a chimney. I took the following picture as I looked back towards the bonfire.

I find there's a magical quality to this picture and the word crucible comes to mind. It's so playful. An alchemy of love.

The week stitched together this and that with heart connection and was permeated with a gentle love.

It was nice that new year's eve was mid week as this let the week have a larger shape than had there been less symmetry.

Light filled the week in many regards.

One evening the sun cast a marvellous red glow upon the fellside in a hue resonant with that often pictured on Uluru / Ayers rock.

I overheard a snippet of conversation about the sacred nature of Ayers rock.

The English lake district is full of majesty. Mountains often feature in Zen with the streams that flow down them as the Buddha's tongue. The sound of water in nature reminding us that we see with more than our eyes.

There were long walks and short walks, high walks and low walks.

The wabi-sabi of this hut caught my attention. Looking at it now it seems to be sitting calmly in the tides of time as the sky sails by. And it was regarded with gentle affection by one of my walking companions who pointed it out to me as he led us onward. We nestled in the landscape full of our own reflections.

Later in that walk there was soft deep muddy ground with no obvious firm footing but we managed to traverse it without drama. I spied no lotus plants but it was an earthy reminder of the elements as had been the occasional day with icy winds and the amelioration of the fireside. I'd looked upon those of our group who seemed to be almost frolicking in the frigid water of the lake in their lunchtime swim with a sense of the exhilaration they would encounter and a sense of my own mortality! Ash does not return to firewood although we are both elements and the space that holds them. Yeah, yeah, whatever, says the little hut as I regard it in the picture now.

Friday evening brough the soiree and such talent! My 'turn' was later in the show and having watched so much enjoyable joy filled creativity I wondered how my opening to Shakespeare's Richard III, 'Now is the winter of our discontent...' would go down. In the end it was fine. At my last ECC event I'd 'done' Hamlet's 'To be or not to be...' Another 'heavy' one. I did consider Jaques 'All the world's a stage...' from Shakespeare's As you like it. But I'd done that for other groups and fancied trying something different.

Saturday brought our completion heart circle and I shared that I agreed with what one of the other men had said on a previous evening - living this way WAS normal - it's the world that's regarded as 'normal' that's 'shit'. The natural state of the human condition is one of heart connection, care, compassion and co-operation NOT dog eat dog.

Retreat from the world to come home to ourselves is the start of the voyage to the world. Through the reflections of our mind we land in the ocean of our heart. Yeah, yeah, whatever, says the little hut...