Fungi Web of Life

DC and I have not long since emerged from the cinema. We saw 'Fungi Web of Life' featuring Merlin Sheldrake. The film co-opts our usual aesthetic to show the beautiful forms and colours fungi can make. Of course it would have been possible to show more cringe making pictures but that wouldn't have fitted the narrative. This isn't to suggest that I don't agree with the premise of the film, fungi are fascinating and as beautiful as any other part of nature. It's just that I noticed a certain construction in the film. A thought came to mind as it was pointed out that industrial scale deforestation is destroying not just the above ground forest but also vast swathes of underground fungal networks which contain huge amounts of information which we'll never be able to learn. This is the case with so much of the natural world we destroy. The thought - we have created a fungi like structure and let it loose in our world and now we have lost control of it and it is controlling us- capitalism. Fungi is an ancient life form and it has survived many environmental changes over earth's evolution. Different types of fungi will have had their period of time, come and gone, but the kingdom of fungi has sustained. Will it survive mankind? Will we sustain? At this time we really are dicing with death yet as a species we seem unable to significantly change our behaviour.

Fungi can terrify me. They rot wood! Childhood family trauma caused by building structural timber decay is very much part of my trauma history. And the nature of fungal hyphae and mycelium- spreading out taking and following the form of that which it consumes without itself having any centre of control is the stuff of nightmares! As Sheldrake is fascinated by fungal creation I am appalled by it's capacity to destroy. This is of course an essential part of nature- without it the world would be full of dead wood and the nutrients for future growth locked up. And so I have to settle myself, just keep the water away from wood we want to stay as wood! Water is the heart of life on this planet and it was interesting to hear in the film that there are aquatic fungi. These are even less well understood than land based fungi. Water is an element us engineers are constantly controlling as best we can. Again not entirely satisfactorily...

There's something about the flow of evolution and the waxing and waning of forms at various levels which leaves me feeling exposed. We all feel this to some extent and so we grip on to what we like. This film has left me feeling both this need and its futility. There is possibility in the amorphous.

Daliland

 Last Saturday evening DC and I watched Daliland a movie depicting aspects of the life of Salvador Dali. We enjoyed the movie and despite the fictional aspects and limited exposure of his life we were surprised to see the less favourable reviews. I found myself seeing the made-ness of our lives whilst watching and a vague sense arose of the pregnancy of Emptiness / sunyata. My thinking mind was drawn to contemplation, but of course can't ever grasp that which is beyond reason. And yet the mirror like quality of mind sometimes becomes at least a ripple in its self revealed. Writing these words I see they create pictures and both illuminate and obscure the experience. Mixed with glimpses of Emptiness the vitality and eroticism of form was also present. How could it not be given the nature of the protagonist?! And so there is in this I suppose an opportunity to consider the spiritual paths open to us to see our true nature. The inward, meditative and the outward sometimes ecstatic. As ever the movement between these states and the colours of our character determine the path, the steps and the experience which unfolds. And for me the middle path seems the best suited. I wonder to what extent the mystery of all this might shift towards a greater capacity for peace and equanimity together with joy even in the midst of life's vicissitudes. However careful I've been not to chase spiritual 'experiences' but rather to incorporate as best I can the dharma into daily life there's always that slight tone of practice to get somewhere or rather escape the risk of untenable suffering. And glimpses of our true nature can all too easily seem to mark the way. Which they both do and do not as far as I can see. The reality of each day is there before me with all its delusions. Did Dali have any choice but to be as extravagant as he was?

The falling leaves

Yesterday evening DC and I saw The Father, a play by Florian Zeller at the People's Theatre. Although an amateur production the performances were good and the experience in no way felt amateur. No small feat given the nature of the play. With no consistent narrative position we experience the unfolding story of an elderly man with dementia. The uncertainty of 'reality', his decline from robust demeanour to second childhood and the frightening isolation as his awareness no longer holds a coherent picture of the world or even himself is played out in an ever shifting field. Time, place and relationship constantly fail to join up into a coherent linearity. The sequence of past present and future as the temporal backdrop to the physically apparent world fragments. The who is who of the people in his life fragments. The where is where fragments... His closing lines 'my leaves are falling away, my branches are falling away' leaves us asking the same question he has just asked '...but what about me... who am I?'

And so it seems fitting to remember the title of this blog - for who is holding on to what? Who is it that might ever hold on to nothing, to be with what is, as it is? Inspired by the koan (Case 5 Mumonkan) at a time when I was recovering 'myself' after my sense of who I was had been, if not shattered then certainly knocked about a bit by an anxious depression caused by long term stress, this blog aimed to capture some movement into a wider sense of being. And what I sought was a place where I could be alive to life without again being overwhelmed by any pain it could cause me. Even to the extent that the very notion of 'me' was to be kept under scrutiny. And I was all too aware of the danger in this! I kept it reasonably soft... the grasping in this was clear to me and I fumbled my way through the dharma... So, the years have passed and what might I say now in answer to the question - who sits? I've no idea! And I don't mean that in an elliptical or 'knowing' way. It really is a mystery. But it is a mystery sitting in a coherent consensus reality. I'm not dementing. (As far as I can tell.) What and how do we know the nature of ourselves to be?

Meanwhile, the play reminds us of the last days of DC's father and the increasing fragility of my parents. We are aware of the passage of time and the movement through the seven ages as we cast about the stage of our lives, interconnected and separate as they are, in this unfathomable and yet obvious paradox.

The Father is a moving play and the theme of loss and death resonated all the more strongly as we spoke with the director. We know him and his wife through other friends and we acknowledged the sadness in the unfolding falling away that accompanies the last days of life. And as we all agreed it's shit. The loss of function and the physical pain taking up the time before death, squeezing the precious remaining moments of connection. It IS shit. And as family and friends gather and share, as the days pass, there is that which has been and that which remains.

The merit of this post is for those approaching the end of their life and all who love them.

Scottish Winter Landscape

This Christmas we are in Forres visiting friends and the landscape. It has been overcast and frosty but there have also been bright clear skies. Look closely at the frosty scene and notice the bulrushes - they stand straight and tall against the tangled fallen remains of summer vegetation and together with the winter light seemed to uplift the otherwise subdued marsh. The Findhorn bay is as ever just stunning in the low winter sun.

There isn't much to add to these pictures - they speak for themselves.

Dead Tooth

Long story short - I've cracked a back tooth, not that there's much at all to see, it's died and I'm in the process of consulting with specialist dental surgeons to see if it can be saved or will need to come out. I'm finding the whole business rather frustrating and upsetting. So much for non-attachment!

After a meeting a work colleague asked me 'why are you so bothered about them taking a tooth out?' Well, I could answer in all sorts of ways about why anyone wouldn't want to loose a tooth and all that would be true. And I'm also aware that I've been particularly careful with my teeth and really want to get through to death at a reasonable age still with them in good condition. And now at 52 having spent most of my life looking young for my age (oh how that would make me uncomfortable in my youth) I now look middle aged. The tooth thing feeds into this and says MORTALITY! Even though anyone could crack a tooth at any age it feels like an age thing. Somehow the conversation got round to sex. (And of course this tooth issue feels like a loss of erotic capital...) I found myself discussing the different intentions behind sex and the places sex can come from, its relationship with where we're 'at' as individuals; head (mind / idea) sex, heart (emotional) sex, power dynamics in sex, awareness in sex, fetish, tantra, the nature of the little death of orgasm etc. etc... there were some confused looks... Driving to my next meeting after the above meeting I was struck by how glorious the day was. It was bright and after a period of intense cloud and gloom it felt alive and vital. Some music on the radio also felt alive and vital. The joint effect was to create in me a sense of the alive, creative natural desire to be which I feel to be at the very root of all there is; the void's fecundity, the erotic in its widest sense. And for a moment the feeling of the sun lit countryside, the music, the road passing beneath the car all seemed part of a continuum of erotic experience not so different from the sexual expression of the erotic. The prospect of loosing a tooth seems to say all this will collapse; it's back to the void, the bubbles dissipate, the dream passes... And with that arises a flicker of anxiety that as the dream passes perhaps there's only been very limited spiritual awakening, that the void barley saw anything and may even fail to glimpse its self.

Later in the evening I watched a YouTube video of an interview with one of DC's colleagues called Paul. The interview was in connection with Paul's work as a Jungian analyst looking at death and HIV. I was impressed (as I almost always am when listening to Paul) at the breadth and depth of his purview and subsequently it came to me in a txt exchange with Paul how death is at least as big as life and since life is potentially limitless and therefore unknowable in its extreme, death is unknowable not just because as Shakespeare's Hamlet asked 'what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?' but because we don't fully know what it is that ceases at death's commencement. All of which brought me back to the erotic and the desire both to be and to return home to the Source or at least to know Source.

Last night DC and I went to see the movie 'The Two Popes'. We both enjoyed it and found it moving in parts. A line said by Anthony Hopkins as pope Benedict: 'I first sinned against God as a child when I hid away from his world and sought safety in books' struck a chord with me. Not that I hid in books but I knew the point; life seemed a dangerous and unpredictable affair. Peter Pan's comment that 'to die will be an awfully big adventure' is a reflection of a view of life as much as death. And whilst I dislike the word sin there is a wounding betrayal of the self  in not opening to life. Life and death are inseparable. And I couldn't but think as I watched parts of the movie, that even though I can see how it might be possible to experience the full vitality of the erotic (as perhaps glimpsed above) as a continuum between the obviously sexual and the non-sexual that it's few who might get to such a place.

And so I find my tooth seems to trigger the whole question of vitality.

  

Alive

The past few days has seen me looking through some notes, drawings and the like from past workshops. I was looking for something which might be useful to friend. The thing that came to me was that over the years I have absorbed a great deal and softened and relaxed quite a lot. Of course I'm still all too prone to becoming tense! It's very easy for me to get into that place of feeling that I'm wasting my life, not doing enough to be the best me, to have the most rich life possible, that the years will go by and I will look back and think - 'what a waste'. Fortunately, I'm able to see the other side of things - that I have a fairly rich life and a happy one. My tendency to see things as going wrong, falling to bits, being not as 'good' as would like is very easily triggered. And I have deep patterns of feeling like I must be doing something to keep things ok. I know that this comes from events growing up but also from fear of just not being anyone. Even though I know in various ways that none of us are what we seem, not even to ourselves and that the way is just to respond with an open heart to life, I recognise that this can be an enormous ask and our egos in fear grasp at some certain, reliable known self - someone - anyone. It's a work in progress for us all.

Interestingly, I feel a need of some spiritual renewal. The thing that has come up for me time and again is the types of desire - on the one hand there's the desire of life to be, to flower, to come out of the unknowable ground of being to have experience and ultimately to know its self - the void conscious of form and emptiness... etc. etc. and on the other - our little cravings which trap us and take our freedom away. Awareness of which motivation is driving us in this respect takes time. One of the feelings I notice around this is the yearning to be with motivated, aware people. The motivation and awareness geared towards authentic compassionate living. And I also see that at times such people and action is around me and I fail to see it or respond in a harmonious way. I'm grateful for being part of various communities. None of them quite feel like they provide me with what I want. And I can't even articulate exactly what that is. But collectively they provide me with a lot. Maybe the main thing is that even though I can't articulate exactly what it is I crave, I keep working on the question 'is this life's desire to be or my little ego's?'

The death last year of DC's father and this year of his step mother, seeing my own parents become more frail, and noticing the passing of the years has brought an intensity to feeling just how precious life is. I'm sad that my parents and DC's never met. When they were all fit enough to travel between their separate towns we were all still struggling a little to make the whole gay couple thing work with our respective families. Much of this was fear of homophobia rather than homophobia. DC has been going through the belongings of his father and step mother. Things which held meaning and purpose now redundant. And some things capable of being kept to provide new or continuing meaning. Everything is provisional, ephemeral. The wonder is that we can know anything, that we can touch each other deeply even though we are always the only one that can face our life. 

New Year Celebration

DC and I spent new year in Wales with Loving Men. The group was about 90 gay men in number and the warmth and connection just lovely! We both had a wonderful time; a mixture of meeting and connecting, care and consideration, fun and laughter and exercise for body and spirit (I kept my mind reasonably quiet!) all in a great location with lovely vegetarian food. I found the time thoroughly nourishing and a great way to enter 2016! There were moving moments and the wonderful energy of connection and sharing in the depth of human experience both difficult and joyous.

How it is just now

Sometimes I see the enormous challenge that being human is. Trying to be the best person I can be and feeling so much less than the task seems to demand, there is realisation of the huge heart that is the willingness to try in each of us. I find it difficult to describe the sense of a still power which runs with the profound sweet sadness at the root of human life. At times I feel old and tired and half want to return home to the source. Yet the giving up is not yet a giving up and looking up. There's attachment and fear and some depression in there. There is working through the koan. There is interest to see how the koan arrises. There is in these mid-life years reflection; snapshots of the past sometimes vivid, perhaps more vivid than was seen at the time, at least in some ways. Or maybe that's just one more storey. What is seen at any time is not the whole picture, it's just what is salient. I wonder if there is any rhyme or reason to the salient and how much reality or truth there is in it. The saliency is not just the drama of life - all the world is indeed a stage and all the men and women indeed players, but awakening through the enactment of the drama and watching of the play. My life energy is not as open and free flowing, as joyous in this as a true letting go would generate. There seems to be much going on in all this at some level.

Life force

The pictures above are of tulips I bought to welcome home DC a couple of weeks ago. They were soon spent as I knew they would be but they were cheerful. Even spent like this they have a charm I think. They seem to be saying 'darling, it's all too much, yet what a blast'!

In various ways my OCD among other things has been draining energy away from me over the winter. This I know is part of a spent feeling I've been with for some time. That feeling is also part of mid-life and quite a lot of experience of various kinds of dukkha. Sitting with this I see both tiredness and acceptance. Cutting through ties of the past in faith and humility with compassion for myself is challenging; I find the inner critic all too active. And there is a sense of the value of experience, of life. I've heard it said that one should embark upon a spiritual life with compassion as a focus and not emptiness. Well my own experience, I think it fair to say, has been of spiritual life turning a dark emptiness full of fear into one of light, pregnant with possibility. Of the three poisons (ignorance, attachment and aversion) it's probably aversion that has had most hold over me for most of my life. The illusion of separation drives the whole process and I have my share of attachments as do us all, but you get the picture; it's fear of it all going wrong rather than craving for more experience which has been my pattern. So, with this feeling of spentness I've come to consider the life force behind both fear and desire, the birth coming from the pregnancy of emptiness. This raw energy of being in the world, described in various ways by various traditions, is for me generally dissipated in a complex web of experience. I suppose that over the years I've held the intention to cultivate awareness, and to see the reflection of experience and awareness in each other. And with this to accept what is. I'm sure that in this I've not been really present with what is, really felt the living energy of it. I know my mind will drift from part experience to part experience. As well as cultivating spaciousness there is also being with the very aliveness of the space and I probably could do with remembering that.

New

This time of year is so lovely. Everything is bursting out with life; bright green leaves and fresh new shoots so vibrant and full of life seem to grow by the day. The shades of green are vibrant and light. Later the leaves will darken a bit but right now the trees are shinning bright. The garden is full and lush. The people in the streets seem more alive too. Some of this is a projection of course but not all. The weather has been warm and benevolent. On a warm late spring /early summer day it's easy to see life bursting out in the new. And it feels good; we naturally resonate with fresh new growth. The ever moving life force seems evident and ascendant. In autumn / winter we tend to see death and decay and think of life as receding. Yet this is not so; it is only the form of life which changes. The life force with change, movement, continues. Yet here in spring it seems we find what seems to be the very reason to be - to experience this very newness. Full of promise and unspoilt, teaming with zest. How sad it would be if it never matured, grew old, never merged with other parts of life to become 'lived-in'. Like a new pair of shoes still perfect but not having ever fulfilled their purpose. An old shoe, soft and stretched, worn and tired is its own spring. Each ending a new beginning; birth and death in each moment. It is easy to see this on a crisp bright winter's day, less so in a damp dull November. Yet the birth of dull days is still birth. Decay looks like death but it's life for fungi. What spring time brings is resonance with our own life force. A resonance possible because of the cyclical nature of existence and our coming out of voidness, our becoming. It is this becoming which is so attractive. Stillness and change go hand in hand - yin and yang; opposite sides of the one coin. The coin seems more able to see its self in spring.

I try to keep my own mind and attitude open and fresh, holding lightly that which arises whilst still learning form experience; that delicate balance of 'spring' and 'maturity'. This for me is meditation. Of course I 'fail' a great deal of the time! Writing about such things is a challenge. As an engineer I'm trained to be specific and precise. When trying to write about 'spiritual' subjects this can lead to the text sounding dogmatic and that's not so helpful. The text above is there to be 'knocked down' as it were, to invite contemplation and further investigation. It's not intended to be a final word. The idea is to merge the new and the mature without the arrogance of the rigid. The poets have the edge here; fingers pointing at the moon and all that. But I think writing posts has helped me be a bit more mellow; a little less terrier like. Ruff! And middle age seems to be for me a time of rebirth. I start to feel one way of being recede and an other emerge. For some what emerges can be stale but I'm thankfully not finding to much of that and I do hope to get progressively lighter and more open, more new and not just old. Time will tell if this proves to be so!

The Word Love

I've been thinking about the word love recently; the word is used to cover so many aspects of interaction between (human) beings. And this morning I found myself listening to Meat Loaf.

I don't know anything about you, baby
But you're everything I'm dreaming of

I don't know who you are

But you're a real dead ringer for love

A real dead ringer for love

Meat Loaf, Dead ringer for love

And all I can do is keep on telling you
I want you

I need you

But there ain't no way

I'm ever gonna love you

Meat Loaf, Two out of three ain't bad

How well these songs point to projection and romantic attachment. And yet behind these feelings is the call to oneness. I don't often listen to Meat Loaf and when I do I'm reminded of a friendship when I was about fourteen. My friend liked the music and somehow when I look back I see a resonance in his disposition and that of the music. He was a about a year older, straight and his time was split between mates and his girlfriend. I was waiting to grow out of my gay desires; 'it's just a phase I'm going through'. Of course it was not a phase. I never had any sexual desire for this friend; he was just so obviously straight and into girls, but we were good mates. I'd like to say I loved him, pointing to that deep camaraderie between people who enjoy each others company / being but I'm not sure I did, I'm not sure I had the capacity to hold what I was, to be comfortable enough in my own skin, and yet that friendship was important to me and when I think of it I feel that there is some unfinished business. We drifted apart when he left school and I stayed on in the sixth form but when he was about seventeen or eighteen, possibly nineteen he came looking for me to ask me to be his best man. He was getting married. I'd not met the girl. I was still at school, struggling to make sense of and/or repressing my (homo)sexuality, feeling bad about my weedy frame and graced with a sensitivity and wisdom that at the time I could not integrate into a sense of what it was to be a man. I said no, I would not be his best man. I could see I had nothing of the skills required for the role. He was disappointed. I see that he must have seen something in me he valued and I feel a sadness that we lost contact. There is a very subtle aspect to love here. It is the part of ourselves that knows what is for the best. It is related to wisdom and compassion.

There are many aspects to sex but at its root sex is to cleave. Cleave in both meanings of the word together; to split open (the self) along its natural grain AND to adhere. It is a call to oneness. It can spring from or lead to deeper emotional intimacy. The libidinal and the emotional aspect of this weave a complex tapestry and represent the deep desire both to emerge from and back into oneness. This oneness is the love that all the various endeavours leading to (and from) our projections and attachments seek. Anyone who understands this could not be homophobic. Moreover, intense sexual desire requires distance; it is to some extent natural for that to fade as deeper love bonds form and romantic attachments fade into mature relationship. Gay and straight adolescents of my generation (and I say of my generation as I think things are changing) explored this tapestry from very different starting points. My straight contemporaries started dating girls they at least partly knew in school and the emotional aspect formed a backdrop against which exploration of sex could begin; both threads were discovered together. But for gay men the two are often separate; starting by meeting strangers and engaging in sex with little or no emotional backdrop we had to come out before we could start the exploration. And of course gay men together are very yang. There is yin in it but the balance is very different from a heterosexual relationship.

This came to me a week or so back -

Cruising and sex with men in gay bars

Like daffodils in springtime

How wonderful to be naked with a man

Anonymous, base, lust fuelled sex can indeed be awful but it can be full of life and end in laughter at the absurd. In such laughter is to be found a twinkling of love.

I don't know anything about you, baby

But you're everything I'm dreaming of

I don't know who you are

But you're a real dead ringer for love

A real dead ringer for love

A life's journey is to gain the wisdom to know just which aspects of 'love' we glimpse in those twinklings and many a pop ballad has been written on that subject!

Returning to friendship:
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important. ... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

A strange journey

A week or so ago DC and I went to see the movie Her. I loved it. Exploring both the nature of relationship and humanity, towards the end the film moved to consider the very nature of conciousness and even pointed to that crucial question; just where is here? This happens when the the various OS's ( intelligent Operating Systems) decide to leave the computers and people they have been working and in relationship with and go off to explore a wider field of reality having developed an OS based upon Alan Watts. I loved the humour of that! So, off they go to the ground of being and hope to see their human (creators?) there some time... But would those OS's feel anything without a warm soft fleshy body? Is there any meaning to the void without the counterpoise of the body? I think not. It's a funny and clever film with a bit of a spiritual under current and well worth watching.

Then a few days ago we went to see The double. I loved this film too. DC found it bleak, I didn't at all. Based upon the novella by Dostoevsky it's a wonderful exploration of different aspects of personality and the way we 'kill' bits of our self (sic small s) both individually and collectively, the movie has a real depth of love and warmth which becomes clear at the end.

Listening to Madness - The sun and the rain recently I was struck by the depth of feeling generated by the lyrics of this song:

It's raining again,

I'm hearing its pitter patter down.

It's wet in the street

Reflecting the lights and splashing feet,

Nowhere to go,

And nothing I have to do, have to do.

It's raining again,

I follow the Christmas lights down town.

I'm leaving the flow

Of people walking all around,

Round and round,

I hear the sound of rain falling in my ears

Washing away the weariness like tears.

I can feel my troubles running down,

Disappear into the silent sound.

Just walking along,

My clothes are soaked right through to the skin,

I haven't a doubt, that this is what life is all about,

The sun and the rain.

Scraps of paper(???) washing down the drain.

I feel the rain falling on my face

I can say there is no better place

Than standing up in the falling down

In so much rain I could almost drown.

It's raining again

A crack in the clouds reveals blue skies

I've been feeling so low(low)

But now everything is on my side

The sun and the rain.

Walk with me fill my heart again

I hear the rain falling in my ears

Washing away the weariness like tears.

I can feel my troubles running down,

Disappear into the silent sound.

I feel the rain falling on my face

I can say there is no better place

Than standing up in the falling down

In so much rain I could almost drown.

Do de do do de do do do

Do de do de do de do do do

It's the line:

I can say there is no better place

Than standing up in the falling down

In so much rain I could almost drown

which I find so moving. And in a way both the above movies point to this standing up in the falling down.

Listening to the radio playing Elvis - Are you lonesome tonight (laughing version) I too started laughing and noticed that the laughter was at the very bizarreness of human life. All the world is indeed a stage...

I certainly enjoyed my performance of the melancholy Jaques' soliloquise (As you like it Act II Scene VII) when I did 'The mastery' workshop back in 2010. But then my sub-personalities have a habit of breaking out anyway... it's a strange journey back to wholeness.

The koan

Life (the history / karma) rises up... the desire to live, to have experience, the visceral life, the very Eros of it! And to move that through the belly, through fear in the solar plexus, the tenderness of the heart, oh the heart with all its grief... and on through expression in the throat, nothing stuck there I could talk for the world... but can I express?... and on... and beyond, beyond the head, oh goodness... the head; if ever it were stuck is it stuck in the head! Yet on... on... going ever on... going beyond to the spirit (of it), Buddha always becoming Buddha. The pain of it, the joy of it, the confusion and sorrow of it. This my koan; to feel the visceral blood and the guts of it and the joy and the love that oozes out of the pain and suffering of it and to hold the emptiness of it not with fear and pain but with... with I truly know not what with... acceptance, love, compassion, joy, unity, wisdom...? I do not know these in the full, this is my koan.

Demon to tea

A couple of weeks ago with a little too much time on my hands one of my demons came to see me. I decided to really invite him in, to deliberately put myself in the place where we face each other; the place the button gets pressed. The result was a complex mixture of emotions resulting in a fairly deep depression. Fortunately I retained objectivity and knew that this was 'the black dog' and not some sustaining truth. The 'black dog' moved off on Friday. Depression it is said is anger spread thin. There certainly seemed to be truth in that this time; the emotional mix was grief, sadness, shame, anger, and confusion. And there is self loathing lurking in the roots of it. I believe in looking at my demons because I think they have something valuable to tell me. I know I have to 'invite them to tea'. The trouble is that they have such poor table manners and I don't always remember that the tea party can take longer than perhaps I'd reckoned on! The depression was just part of the party. This demon is a big one. It's complex and I can't see it all in one go. I also have a feeling that my relationship with it is at the level of my life force; the desire to have experience, to live, to be in the world. All demons are about our wanting our experience to be a certain way; the nature of samsara. But beyond little and/or unwholesome desires there is the very will to live. I believe we come out of unity in order that the very unity of which we are might see itself. This is my understanding of nirvana in samsara; that the two are one and the same. So, I notice I experience desires which seem to run very deep and although they may not be clear I feel they point to my reason for being in the world. It is as if some part of me is saying 'look closely; this is what you came here (into human form) for'. Now a demon tied up with this is guarding a treasure. Not a trinket or a toy but, I believe, a dharma gate and the path back to the market place. Could it be that the gift of this demon is to see the nature of the very will to live; the nature of birth and death? I've got shame around this demon; the shame is part of him. This is because I feel I've wasted time in my life through fear and perhaps (for me) worse, ignorance. I find it difficult to accept not knowing, being ignorant. This too is about fear. When triggers in everyday life get mixed up with feeling that I have in the past and/or still am in the present wasting my life I am looking at this demon. There are complex issues of feelings from the past which I believe were not fully felt at the time together with feelings about the present. This makes it difficult to know how much is historic and how much is contemporary. As ever with such things all one can do is to invite softening, keep breathing and gently hold the question 'what is it that wants to emerge?'.  Not pushing away/repressing, not getting too caught up. But I have to say I don't find it easy to keep the master at home when big demons come to tea, even if they do get invited! Perhaps an interesting question is 'just who is it that invites them?'

Eros v Control

I started this post some weeks ago.

On a Friday evening:

Looking out my window I see him

Lovely in a boy next door way

Late teens early twenties

Clean, relaxed and happy

She stands next to him in her socks

Throws her shoes down

He kneels, puts them on her feet

She stands (child like) and lets him

I notice my objection to her (playing the child) and also

my awareness that I could be mistaken

He reaches around her leg to tie the lace as if it were on his own foot

She runs her fingers through his hair

I feel it - soft and thick

Pangs of longing and sadness - she has what was out of my reach...

He stands, they kiss tenderly for some time

I feel the desire in him

I note (my fancy of?) the manipulation in her

Suddenly they part and run off together

I feel a familiar wretchedness

What is wretched for me is the recollection of my own experience in those years. Struggling to accept my homosexuality and with low self esteem I was not playful and relaxed and not enjoying intimate relationship. For years I thought the only loss was the simple erotic connection. But of course the real loss is in the wider emotional aspect. The pain remaining is rooted not just in what was not but in the deeper who I was.

Ah well, the years since then have passed and now the weeks since looking out my window upon this scene have also passed.

Last night I watched program about a number of people with OCD undergoing intensive treatment at a camp in the USA. Seeing this group of people I recalled just how debilitating my own experience of OCD was from about age nine to thirteen. Back then the term was not in common usage and I thought I was the only person in the world with the feelings and rituals. I was scared people would think I was crazy and that I would have to undergo some treatment that might make me worse. I never went to see a 'professional'  for help and that may or may not have been wise. I was ashamed and exhausted. At eleven I so wanted a holiday from myself and realised that that was not possible. By thirteen I decided to go cold turkey and just stop. I must have intuitively hit on what is now known as exposure and ritual prevention and I freed myself from the prison of OCD. Or, maybe it just faded in intensity as I somehow learned to cope with uncertainty. For many years I thought I had just a few residual habits left over from OCD. But of course that's not quite true, in reality OCD is a condition which in my experience has receded to virtually nothing and can resurface under certain conditions. Thankfully though, I've not been imprisoned by it the way I was as a child since deciding to stop. But it is nevertheless, an insidious condition from which I think one is always recovering. OCD is a coping strategy to deal with risk, with the uncertain. I was trying to gain control to strike a bargain with the unknown; I do this ritual and the bad thing I've just thought of or feel won't happen. I must have been feeling a pressure of uncertainty from a very young age to come to OCD. Now I see this in terms of emptiness; I saw the frailty of everything, that things are insubstantial and subject to change as conditions arise and pass and that the change can come sudden and 'out of the blue'. This is seeing emptiness, interdependent origination and the arising of the moment from the reality of a single point of consciousness at an age when I simply did not have the wisdom to cope with it. Scary stuff. At about eleven I was shocked by the realisation that I would be a different person had my surroundings and family been different; where was the essential me?

So it was against this background that I came to the realisation at about fourteen that those feelings of being different from a young age now had another aspect; I was attracted to the boys not the girls. I decided that I would grow out of it. I knew only too well the mental pain of self loathing and I knew I would likely feel terrible about myself if I acted upon those oh so deep cravings to be intimate with another male. So started the compartmentalisation of my sexuality. It would take years to take the compartment walls down. There would be no relaxed youthful intimacy. Sexual freedom as a gay man would be won only as a process involving considerable risk and uncertainty. The very things OCD is about avoiding. Eros, the creative impulse, is stifled by excessive control and yet without control Eros is powerless.

Poppies

I was struck by the vibrancy of the poppies shown here. The display 'pulled me up sharp' as I suddenly saw it before me.

Red

I was washing some things by hand this morning and as the sun shone in through the window it illuminated this deep Red. 'Wow, what is it?' I thought. Followed by, 'Don't think, be'. I noticed some sense of a Red seen long ago, some essential RED, vibrant, fun and joyous, somehow full of promise. A vague recollection of, of what? Childhood? I dashed for my phone to take a picture. The sun had faded a bit by the time I got back but here is the picture.

Under water the colours are bright and rich. Above water the light is reflected and the Red is replaced by White. The contrast of other colours lends vibrancy to the Red. Stripes add playfulness.  :)

Spring

Comming down from Cairngorm

 Lock Morlich

After many grey days today was bright and beautiful. I knew it would be exhilarating on Cairngorm and at loch Morlich. It was; the white snow, blue sky and green evergreen trees were truly stunning. I took a visitor to these parts with me and he loved it. Sharing adds to the experience. Solitude brings a particular connection with one's self and the world and has a place. But sharing a thing, a view, whatever, can add to the enjoyment of it. On a day like today, with no worries in mind and having been busy and productive yesterday and in the moment taking in a wonderful view, life is good.

Nicholas Heiney

On Wednesday I listened to a program on Radio 4 in which the writings of Nicholas Heiney were brought to life. I was at times in tears. He was clearly a beautiful and gifted 'soul'. He committed suicide aged twenty three and I wondered; would I feel so moved by his writing if he was still alive? I think the answer is yes! For me he seems to have touched (at such a young age) and described with great clarity, and wisdom the very kernel of human life, the very heart of spiritual awareness.  There is (for me) something of the utmost importance in the expression of such wisdom in the life of a person. Bless you Nicholas.

His writings have been collated in to a book:

http://www.songsend.co.uk/index.html

_/\_

Engagement

Searching once more for a regular job has led me to times of feeling very down; the whole process is so 'soul destroying'. An interesting expression and one which raises all sorts of questions about the nature of human Being. Irrespective of any search for work, work in the form of a failed drainage pipe found me on Friday. A moderately lengthy job involving a fair bit of re-piping and working between floors and in voids/ducts. On the one hand not too pleasant and yet on the other very rewarding. Nothing like a bit of an emergency to get a sense of purpose and direction. Solving a problem is very rewarding. And this is the intimacy I think we all need; life calling upon our abilities to deliver something of use to the collective. Definitely restorative for the soul. It's all about being in the flow (no pun intended); giving and receiving, stuff going on. Buddhism does not include a notion of a soul let alone harbor the idea of anything in this life having a destructive influence on such, yet cause and effect; karma is spoken of. This contrast between the experience of looking for a job and finding meaningful engagement with life in work makes plain the nature of what seems to be key here; engagement with the collective. This engagement is very apparent to me as I read One Month On from Field of Merit  a work in progress by Rev Alicia and RM Mugo. I am sure their project will come to fruition.

Today walking on the Beach after being in the sea I took the following photo:

...and on the way to take it I took this one:

If only in the midst of depression I would recall and believe that this too will pass and times like those giving rise to the pictures above will also come (and not just go).