Snow

This picture is not the one I was looking to take this morning but it will suffice to illustrate what came to mind as I looked out on the snowy scene about the house. We are fortunate to have a view across several tree filled large gardens and this morning the trees were white with snow and the scene was still and clear. I immediately thought to take a photo and write a post but I knew my eye and mind together were capturing (/ making) an image which the lens on any digital camera device to hand would not replicate. Sure enough, as soon as I looked at the image on the screen my doubts were confirmed so I headed out for a walk with a view to getting an image. By the time I'd arrived at my intended subject(s) the snow had started to melt and  the image above was the best I could get. There is too much action in this picture, movement is prevalent; the tyre marks, the car, the foot prints, the people in the distance... BUT, there is also the stillness in the snow covered trees. And in that respect it's not a bad picture. The picture I was looking for was all stillness, all white branches, spacious and light filled. Why? Because that was what greeted me in my first glimpse looking out this morning and I responded with a silent  ah! The 'ah!' I then thought, is because scenes like that show the stillness which even the busiest times and places are cut through with; the very stillness which holds all. The poets write of such scenes because they do indeed seem to point to the very truth of reality; we find ourselves in zazen. The scene seems to help us 'take aim for no target without trying'! I guess this happens in part because snow covers up variation and smooths everything out into basic forms. Colour is reduced yet where present it is more vivid. The extraneous noise (literal and metaphoric) is stripped away and we are left with a more direct experience.  Of course this is in part because the scene is novel for us but it is also because virgin snow implies that movement has not (yet) taken place. Foot steps are not present, moving and melting is yet to come... Not that zazen is about stripping away anything. Zazen isn't about anything. Just seeing moment to moment, non-dual.

I had my porridge and looked at the news on the internet. Two stories took my attention, one about garlic smuggling and one about DNA samples from gay men. The first story just sounds bizarre! But in fact it's about trade and not paying import duty. The second story raises questions. The thing that jumped out of this story for me though, was this: 'a former soldier from Salford, was convicted of gross indecency in 1983 because he had sex with another soldier when both men were under 21, which was then the homosexual age of consent'. When I beat myself up for not coming out sooner it is because I forget that that was the climate back then! I turned sixteen in 1983. I went out for my walk.

Normally in a post I like to tie-in the various strands to one common theme and that gives me the title. This time I am going to leave it at that... 

Misguided feeling

Somewhat out of the blue came an OCD flare-up at the end of last week. Well, maybe not out of the blue; there was a bit of stress to trigger it. It has passed now. For many years I used to think that I had got over OCD and just had some residual habits left. I used to think this because I would recall how it was as child up until about thirteen when it would be excruciating. At about thirteen I found I could control it; I could just stop the rituals and tolerate the discomfort and it would subside. I would go cold turkey, I had discovered what I now know to be called Exposure and Ritual Prevention. At that time I (and for that matter most people in my world) had never heard the description Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I had no name for what I was experiencing, was terrified that people would think I was crazy, was ashamed about it and received no professional help. It must be six or seven years ago that a therapist suggested to me that my OCD was probably not so much cured but (well) managed. Thinking back to the excruciating times between nine (when I think it started) and thirteen I thought 'no, it's nothing like that'. And that was and is true and I am not consumed by the compulsive need to carry out nulling routiens. But the therapist was right in some respects and much of my anxiety did and does still manifest in OCD. There is a particular flavor to it; an insidious gripping doubt coupled with a feeling of great peril a sense of responsibility and a need to make it safe. It being some aspect of life and more generally life its self. Such feelings cloud rational judgment and skew the perception of the odds of things going wrong towards the bleak. As a child I had seen emptiness too soon, way before I could cope with it let alone fully understand its fullness. OCD was a desperate attempt at control. In some way it probably helped me survive the awful feelings that triggered it; that is why we adopt such strategies. And like all attempts to control the world out there, it ends up controlling one's internal world. I am experienced now in observing my own body-mind and see much more clearly how thoughts and feelings resonate. So called rational thought has a lot more to do with the feeling of the thought than might be supposed. And it is in the feeling of things that the stickiness of OCD resides.

As a child I was particularly sensitive to unwholesome energies. I still am. This colored how I understood my OCD.  I perceived some malevolence that I felt I needed to protect myself against. It felt like somehow my (intrusive?) thoughts could make bad things happen and I would have to cancel them out with (what I now know are called) nulling routines and magical thinking. I realised that I was making some kind of a deal; I do the routines and the bad things won't happen. And that meant that there was some force that had power to do bad or stop it. And that force was thus not nice because the default seemed to be to do bad. There must have been (at least) two things happening here; 1) OCD - a psychological response to the feelings of vulnerability and the associated need to control, 2) a sensitivity to the energies around me. A mix of genuine spiritual insight (and sensitivity) and magical thinking was playing out in the experience of a sensitive small boy. When I look back on that boy now I see he has a radiant sensitivity to his inner and outer world and I wonder just how separate they seemed to him.

Now OCD is part of common speech (although I wonder how much people understand about it) and I have a far greater appreciation of the nature of life / the universe. And that appreciation is inextricably linked to the Three Jewels. The interesting thing about last week's flare up is that yet again I see that insight alone is not enough. The same stuff comes up. BUT it passes quicker. In that respect insight is enough.

As It Is

Back home in Newcastle for a week now having spent the past year living and working with the FF. (Most of the previous year was also spent with the FF.) I notice that I have been missing my room in Cluny a bit; I clearly got a bit attached to it. This is probably a good thing as it shows that I was happy there. Some attachment is inevitable and probably part of healthy engagement with life. Practice no doubt lies in how one responds to the attachment. I decided a month or so back to take up a place on a one year masters degree starting in January, hence my leaving Cluny. In the intervening period a job interview came up together with a subsequent rejection. This and no doubt a few other, yet to be clear to me, factors have cooled my feelings about the masters degree. So, I am wondering just why I did leave and what I might best do next. I miss the buzz of being in community. Even though I didn't directly engage with many people for much of the time, there is still being 'in the field' as they say. Back home it seems much quieter. Great to be with DC but definitely quiet not having all those people coming and going. And until I start the course or something else, there is not the purpose which life in the community affords. The challenge to get meaningful work, relationship and home all in the same town seems to remain. I can make my home wherever I need to do so, the other two I can't dictate to.

Christmas is not my favorite time of year. It has a sort of in-build failure; however hard one might try not to let it get built up into something it can't be, there is still an expectation of... Of what? Salvation, satisfaction through consumerism, great social interaction? Probably all that. And of course it's just another day but with the hint of peace on earth, presents good and not so good, interactions good and not so good. I'd love a Christmas without the consumerism. Not just in my own experience but also in wider society. That would totally shift the field.

The weather is grey and the short days are dark and wet. At this time of year nature is holding her breath and I've said for years that we ought to hibernate. Looking at the economy and the environmental problems we face it seems to me that we need to back off all the busyness and look towards what we really need. Interesting then that I dread the prospect of being without purpose. But there is a difference between backing off the busyness and lack of purpose.

Looking back over the past few years (and more) I see I grown some wonderful relationships with people in the FF. I've made a difference there and that is good. Even though while I am in the FF I find the (excessive) feminine energy tiresome and often crave a bit more dynamic, male energy, I never the less recognize that some (probably feminine) part of me is clearly nourished by the particular opportunity to serve which the FF offers. It has been suggested to me that I am wrestling with two sides of myself; the gentle, feminine, laid-back and the dynamic, male part. The key is probably something to do with dynamic action that responds but is not driven. Again, it will, I suspect involve facing and releasing more fear.

On the bright side, DC and I picked angel cards; I have Joy and he Sisterhood / Brotherhood. May this coming year be filled with joyous connection to sisters and brothers. Over the next few days I'll be tuning into  how that wish might best be served.

Cairngorm

Cairngorm across Loch Morlich

I took this photo with my phone on panorama, a clever feature which joins photos together. I was surprised just how well it works.

Cat

This picture of domestic bliss jumped out at me tonight walking through Cluny lounge.

The cat in front of the fire, so life like it looks like it might move is a toy. Yet it seems to fill the space with a purring energy!

Exile

Being inside (the tent) is smooth, warm and soft. Being outside is jagged, tight, hot or cold, prickly or hard. It doesn't matter what the tent is. At the deepest it is the separation of the original fall; the exile from the garden (of unity). In the everyday it is generally separation from other people at the individual and collective level. And separation is often from our self; fragmented parts and lost parts. Experiences that might have been but were only glimpsed in the imagination still seek expression so that some aspect of the self might flourish. Might flourish that through the self, the Self might see and thus make the whole point of the original fall; we come out of unity to have experience. (The tree of knowledge so often taken only to represent sexual knowledge, is of course the very content of our lives. Sexuality is an aspect of the wider erotic impulse.) Painful indeed then to look on experience with some part of that experience attached to something that never was. And more so if what was / was not puts one outside the (imagined) group experience. The group experience affords living expression of separation in unity. All that I have been is is clearly all that could have been. That which is, is. Yet we all have unexpressed wondrous parts; many unopened buds. There is a sadness in life that many such buds will not flower. Yet if karma ripens such that we see the buds and can imagine the flower then at some level maybe this is the flowering. No wonder this complex of connection and separation takes a life time to mature and then only if we are lucky. If I could go back with the ghost of Christmas past and give the gift of hindsight to myself would this be a blessing or a curse? Would I, in trying to save my younger self pain and my current self grief, rob my self of wisdom? Did being outside let me see a bigger tent?

Did / Did Not Have

A recent conversation briefly turned to the 'non-raunchiness' of a certain 'rather attractive' non-dualist teacher. It was agreed by all present that that was to be expected. Sex is about a hunger to bond with the other, to merge, a desire for oneness, yet also a desire to have. It requires (the illusion of) separation. This is why long term couples can find it difficult to keep that part of a relationship going; they become too close. At least for a certain kind of sex this is true. The picture is of course more complex; human sexuality has many twists and turns (to match the complexity of our being in the world). And a sensual - sexual continuum ebbs and flows with the ongoing dance of relationship. Sex turns about oneness and separation.

Then today I read in the paper that civil servants have had some difficulty in defining consummation of a gay relationship. This it seems is required if we are to have gay marriage.  Ha; I laughed out loud! That old chestnut.  The business of 'really doing it'. It is of course tied with an other slightly more complex than often thought of area; virginity. In a society wrapped up in a heterocentric world view it's all very simple; penetration, penis in vagina. Or is it? In reality people have always known that there are many ways to merge in a sexual way and that it's the opening of two (or more) people to each other that is at the root of all this. Did any rapist ever take anyone's virginity? Can a couple who have been lost together in the journey to orgasm without penetration claim not to have had sex? The civil servants have decided to leave it to the judges to decide.

And I think it fair to say that there is a deeper level of something required to engage in anal intercourse with someone than is required for vaginal intercourse. Defining that something is not straightforward but it is approached in terms of trust, intimacy, meaning and connection; opening. Generally speaking it takes a bit more opening to get it to slip in. Which is not to say that it is in some way a deeper consummation than vaginal penetration. And on the other hand, it is. And of course, if you are less aware of the meaning of any act then it can be all too easy to engage in it at the physical level. At the emotional, mental and spiritual levels of course things are not necessarily following suit. It's not that any physical act can be said to enshrine consummation in the way the law might like. And I am sure there are plenty of male gay couples who have consummated their relationship without ever having penetrated each other physically. At this point the invisibility of lesbianism becomes all too apparent. Society has always be far less concerned, far less fearful of lesbianism than of male homosexuals. It has always been concerned that its males should not be penetrated. The business of consummation in the eyes of the law is probably more to do with power than oneness. Sexually knowing each other is not captured in a simple did / did not have sex with. Sex is complex because it is part of a journey to oneness. The sexual act penetrates us at emotional, mental and spiritual levels. It is about cracking us open. The monk Ikkyu must have seen a wonderful resolution of the Red Thread koan in his relationship with the blind singer Mori. Now that I write this post I recall the sheer complexity of all this... And the simplicity. I start to remember the types of desire to which the koan might point, the energetic aspects of sex, the unique opportunity that gay sex offers to see what we are, the vibrant aliveness of life and the stillness in which it is held. The word intimacy implies both separate and together.