Fireworks

DC and I attended an impressive fireworks display on Saturday then had dinner with friends. The display is paid for each year from the previous year's donations. I recalled contributing last year as I dropped my money in to the collection bucket. This for me generates a great sense of community; here we are, this crowd of people collectively contributing and collectively enjoying the fruits. Great stuff.  As the winter starts to set in bonfire night is as a much a festival of light in the short dark days as it is a reminder of gunpowder, treason and plot and DC noted that Diwali would start on Sunday. I enjoyed the fireworks yet noticed too some sadness; a similar feeling to the one generated by new year's eve. It's the empty celebration. This is not the pregnant emptiness of our true nature but the hollow emptiness of jaded form. Yes it's fun to see the display and be in a crowd of cheerful people yet somehow the very scale of the display and impersonal nature of the crowd left me feeling remote. The streamers, starbursts and showers of lights formed by the fireworks seemed to distance me from the excitement they are supposed to create. It's a trait in me to slip easily in to this sort of melancholy and I observed the slip and shifted my attention but not before I recalled that feeling in childhood. I turned to DC so as to feel our closeness and not focus on the fact of aloneness; the eternal paradox of interconnection and separation. More rockets flew upwards some with whistles. Great explosions of stars formed a carapace of smoke which gave greater dramatic effect to subsequent multi coloured explosions by reflecting their light; a slowly shifting and fading backdrop glowing with the shifting play of light and dark. The huge bonfire a conflagration of leaping flames lay off to the side sending sparks off into the night sky. 'Heretics be warned' said DC. 'Mm' I said. The noise of the blasts grew and could be felt as a shock wave in the torso. I looked at the smoke and thought of those who have suffered in war. Beyond the smoke and any cloud the firmament remained.


The display over the crowd dispersed filling the streets. A queue had formed at the chip shop and others made their way through the supermarket. DC and I hurried back to our friend's house to get dinner going and meet up with others who would have been in the crowd watching the display. There was a sense of people moving towards their food.

It's taken me a couple of days to get round to writing this post and the ideas I had on Saturday for it have faded. Today I visited someone in hospital. His company has done some work for me and we have got on well in the short time we've spent together. I knew what this visit could be about before I arrived at his bed side to hear him tell me that he had been given twelve months to live. He only received the news a few days ago and it is still 'sinking in'. Our lives are a strange mixture and very fragile. Yet as the fireworks end and the embers of the fire cool beyond the clouds of our delusion the firmament remains; not as a solid carapace above us but as the unborn.

The merit of this post is for Bill and those who love him.

What is it that wants to happen?

There has been a lot of toing and froing between Scotland and Newcastle for me of late and various job interviews. One such led to an offer of employment. But the offer was to go back into a design office with a very unhealthy set up. No thankyou. The process has confirmed for me my desire to stay related to the industry but not under crazy conditions. Truly looking at what one wants and facing the consequences can be both painfully difficult and liberating. The thing with desire is not I believe, so much that it is a 'bad' thing so much as truly looking into the desire to see what it is about at a deeper level is scary. This is not clinging to the surface features of desire but listening to its depths. Yet this deeper calling is what gives life its meaning and purpose. It may or may not bring happiness but it will if given sufficient time and energy bring an honest expression to life. This expression is I believe the very reason for our coming out of unity, out of the void. And, it is by looking into the depths of desire not just the surface that we might find our way back to unity and to a peace within the midst of the storm. Such looking and listening, sitting with what is emerging and acting from the deepest gut is in my experience often clouded by a whole range of thoughts and emotions. Which of the panoply of these stories and sensations is the deep gut, the heart mind? That is the question I ask in challenging conditions. Or put another way, what is it that needs to happen? It was tricky sitting with the panoply arising in the job chase of late but I am now sure I made the right decisions.

Recently a friend sent me a link to the revolverheld unzertrennlich music video. There can't be a gay man (particularly of my generation) who isn't touched by this video. The beauty of the video is I would suggest, in the acknowledgment of the (deeper) desire for unity, in the response of the heart mind. As ever, our humanity is in form's expression of emptiness. This is desire's true meaning and purpose. It will not always bring the surface fun, joy and excitement shown in the video but it gives body to the life we lead and life to the body we live it with. It is not so much work to live verses live to work as living the work of one's life.

Altar

Occasionally I consider setting up a more formal altar. I sit zazen each day and do have a Buddha figure in the location(s) I sit but I have not set up the usual altar arrangement. Why not? Because despite the help that 'props' of one kind or another can be, at bottom I am not given to formalistic ritual; I am more given to the aspiration to be in meditation not just 'on the cushion' but off it too, to see the world as the altar of my life, my life as the unfolding of a deeper movement of which I might glimpse. I don't want to set up 'out there' or other spiritual places and I find formal altars allegorical. And yet, I notice that I do have in each of the places I regularly sit some setting which represents the divine, a divine here and now, immanent and transcendent. The arrangement and location of altar and the place to sit zazen for me immediately bring to awareness the form of meditation and ask the question 'what is meditation?'; to just sit, to take aim for no target without trying, to notice as much of what is unfolding without becoming, not to reject and not to cling, an open, alert awareness including inside and outside the notion of self and other. Where in this is the altar? Where does the heart mind sit? And if this is a koan on the cushion how much more so in daily life!

We each have our way of being in the world; life's expression of itself in each other. I recall:

‘Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.’

(Adorno, ‘Subject and object’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 497–511 (p. 500).)

A quote DC finds 'always brings a lump' to his throat.

Can we find the altar of our lives in our interactions and treat each unfolding moment be it a joy or a challenge as a sacred theatre? Even if I fail in this aspiration is the holding of and returning to it not an altar? Without the failing there would be no challenge and no meaning in the aspiration. Can I remember to keep returning to the precepts? I can given time. I can't all the time. Each time drama unfolds it takes me time to work it through, to gain insight into what has been brewing. I need to stay with it yet not become it. The place holding this is the altar and the drama is the offering. When at last I see it, there is the heart mind.

Small 'altars' integrated into (physical) items of daily living:

Music is a great pointer to spirit

Nature inside and out

Unfolding in time; growing and flowering before passing

Confetti angels with trumpets - my dear friend always puts them in his cards to me 

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?'

Desire; not so simple methinks

A few times recently I've recalled this post about Blue. There is intended in the post a pointing to my sense of a sort of coming home to myself. I find this post on Jade Mountain Buddha Hall interesting in that there is a picture of a blue moon lit sky starting a post about desire.

Seasons

Sitting at my desk, looking at my computer I notice a small patch of light slowly drifting, as if floating through the air. I pay it attention to realise that it is a small rainbow and one of a number now cast upon surfaces in the room. Ah, I thought, the sun is now low enough to shine through the small glass angel shaped rainbow maker hanging in my window. A pleasant way to be reminded that autumn is approaching. Another year is slipping gently by, sometimes at an alarming rate. By August gardens take on a spent look and September is preparing to make that clear. Soon it will be fast approaching Christmas. But summer is not gone yet.

I feel an acute need for a new spring in my own life. This is a chronic condition and one requiring both the effort of action and the non-effort of patience! There is a need to notice saṃkhāra-dukkha and the necessity of the creative act. The economic conditions are still difficult and new opportunities seem few. I find it challenging to face what can seem like my own lack of imagination yet I know that there is a lesson in surrender; not a giving up but accepting. In many ways it is a good summer, one still here, and I must not let desire for any kind of spring bring on the worst parts of winter! It is another glorious day today and I feel it calling me to walk in the countryside.

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.