It's a Sin

I've just watched the final episode of Russel T Davies' It's a Sin, a drama about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980's. I'm reduced to that place of our deepest humanity where we see the madness of our human condition: the struggles and anxieties, the joy and the sorrow on the canvas of our sacred nature. This is a special place for in it there is acceptance and forgiveness and we expand in a timeless peace. And yet it includes a tinge of the prospect of more pain. Pain which of course gives joy and love part of their meaning. There are tears and I wonder - what is being felt here? Accepting my homosexuality only in my mid twenties whilst compounding the shame and isolation society's homophobia had sewn into every fibre of my being, had protected me in the 1980's from HIV and AIDS. But it had also robbed me of the friendships and loves that the epidemic might have taken away from me and/or me from them... Life of course has thrown up other challenges and those struggles rise through layers of being to be felt in the space unfolding now. And there is a gentle holding of the shame, the fear and the confusion. Time is passing; I'm no longer in the timeless space. Sat at my desk I write this. A 5 Rhythms wave I assembled is playing; I'd been playing it earlier and knew the tracks would help with the writing. There is emotion, energy, joy and life in the music and the feelings produced are good - the dissolving of little lead jackets on each cell which in turn releases the knowledge of their forgotten existence producing both relief and pain fades and is replaced by a light playful gratitude for life and the need to dance. I move sympathetically to music, the emotion and the process of writing as Le Vent  Nous Portera by Noir Désir plays...

It is good to have combined this music, a 5 Rhythms wave, with the process of writing. I realise how valuable both practices (writing and dancing) are! The tracks flow on: Baby Elephant Walk by Henry Mancini, La Valse à Mille Temps by Jacques Brel, Waltz From Maskarade by Aram Khachaturian... and at this track I am back fully in the expressive vitality of life - the yearning and the swirling, the sheer joy of the madness - marvellous! I started putting these tracks together back in 2018 but couldn't fully get the whole wave finished to my satisfaction. The theme is mystery and the motif is a swirling motion but there is also a digeridoo track with a strong focused energy... I should finish this wave and play it with the dance collective. Oh how I miss dancing the Rhythms together with other people in a big space. The Covid pandemic has put a stop to all that just now. Across this planet we humans are faced with yet one more plague. And the thing about this one is that to control it we are forced to stay physically apart from each other. We cannot gather, hold each other even in sexless embrace, see and feel the light each of us radiates... In to My Arms by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds plays now. It's the last track of the wave... The lyrics are:

I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms
And I don't believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that's true
But if I did I would summon them together
And ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my…

This post is for all the ways of loving and all the losses our coming out of the garden facilitates and for the space in which see that garden.

God's Own Country

Last night DC and I watched God's Own Country. We'd seen it before when it first came out, at the cinema (oh happy pre-Covid days) but it had come to my mind a few times in recent days and I wanted to see it again. It's a beautiful film about struggle and softening. Gheorghe a Romanian migrant worker comes to work at a small struggling family farm run almost single handily by Johnny, an isolated, frustrated young man who has too much placed upon his shoulders and reacts with binge drinking and aggressive casual sex. Johnny lives with his father, who has had a stroke, and his grandmother. There is bitterness and anger in all three characters, and the life is hard. Gheorghe is used to harsh conditions; calm, wise and gentle, he coaxes life into all he comes in to contact with. But this is not Cold Comfort Farm; there's no romanticism or satire here. The film turns on the relationship between Johnny and Gheorghe, a relationship which opens Johnny up to love. Johnny is emotionally unavailable; there is anger in the furtive casual sex he engages in and he is lost to himself, struggling to square the circle. The sex he has with Gheorghe is transformative. Gheorghe arrests the anger in Johnny's sex and allows a powerful space in which it is naturally allowed to soften in to love. The sex between them, in contrast to the tight, addictive, restrictive bursts of lust fuelled release Johnny has previously known, affords opening; it cleaves the men open and thence together. In the process Johnny eventually releases the fight with himself and his situation and sees what it is he wants: Gheorghe and a life together as lovers running the farm - together. Again this is a gritty path and not a romantic one; but the concluding scene where Gheorghe opens the farmhouse door for Johnny to enter what is to be their home is a metaphor for the film: Gheorghe has opened Johnny to life.

What I find stimulating in this film is the exploration of confusion and struggle counterpoised with acceptance, softening and love, and the role sexual energy plays in the process. This is a film about embodied existence: weather, mud, farm animals, physical work, the human body and its reaction to life. Johnny's grandmother alludes to the life having been in part responsible for his father's debilitation and calving and lambing show the fecundity and vulnerability of life and the raw visceral reality of flesh. The breath, heat and desire between Johnny and Gheorghe explode through the cold damp environs of the landscape and later resonate with the spectacular scenery. The film stays real, and whilst a flash of DH Lawrence crossed my mind, I smiled at the irony of the flash and saw the half baked creative madness of our fetishes and fantasies. Johnny's impulsive eye-eye, eye-crotch, eye-eye pick-ups and associated fast sex before returning to his pint or whatever he was halfway through contrast with Gheorghe's love making and Johnny's learning to love. This too is visceral. And there is a sense of something trying to come through, to emerge. Here I think we see the contrast of struggle - an attempt at forcing and controlling life - with allowing; not as separate aspects or ways of being but rather informing each other and weaving us. The Tao flows effortlessly, but is it not in our relationship with it that our spirituality is to be found? Somehow, for me this film pulls together the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of what it is to be human and invites softening. It is a film about transformation.

Our True Home

And so I have found myself slightly swimming about in strange waters. DC and I are in the process of moving house. It's been a bit of a rollercoaster but we're increasingly becoming excited by the proposal. What of course is so stressful about moving house is that it is not just a big financial step to sell and buy a house but that it is fundamentally moving home. And it is home which is questioned here. What do we want our new home to be, to be about? What is home in the deeper, spiritual sense. The second question informing the first. And so practical questions about physical location, build quality, and all related potential  unknowns merge into the most important existential question of all. A question that this morning DC and I found ourselves sharing whilst getting ready for the day in the bathroom (such is the wonderful mix of the mundane and the profound that is our habit). It seems we had both been sitting with it - him in his traditional Indian singing practice earlier and me both on and off my cushion (ie in formal and everyday meditation). The conversation unfolded so as to posit an axis spanning the materialist view at one end and the mystical at the other and set parallel with an axis of there is no God at one end to we are all God / Source / Buddha at the another. The conversational path towards these axes traversing for DC the notion of an all powerful, all seeing and perhaps directing or intervening God in the western Christian sense as existing or not, whilst for me traversing the way in which our karma, our conditioning, reveals our Buddha nature, for we are conditioned beings. And so together we stood there and came to that place where the ever present but more often than not hiding in plain sight question came into focus- what is the relation between our everyday experience and the deepest reality? With life somewhat shutdown due to covid restrictions, social interactions curtailed and the world viewed through the window of video conferencing (MS Teams, Zoom and WhatsApp video calls) DC and I have been other than our constitutional walk around the local streets and for me very occasional site visits for work, largely holed up in our hutch together. And it has been a busy time not just due to the potential house move but also with work. (I am grateful for that and find I really enjoy my work and like my colleagues.) So, due to covid it has been for almost a year now a different sort of everyday to that which we are used. For some covid has meant a time for inward reflection and there has been time for that. However, as I've been still working I've not had the space to go on an inward journey in the way that can be renewing spiritually. And because I've not been able to properly meet up with the folk who in one way or another make up my sangha I've been feeling my way through all these recent months have been bringing up in a somewhat haphazard way I suppose. So this morning in the bathroom when DC asked me about karma I understood straight away that what we were both sitting with was something that might be put thus: is the unknowable ground of being to be seen in simple rational western philosophical terms, ie to acknowledge that there is no Archimedean point but to believe that that alone does not have any mystical significance, or in terms of the perennial philosophy, ie to make that acknowledgement leads naturally to believe in a greater significance. Or to put this more succinctly where are each of us sitting in our experience of emptiness. Those strange waters are a kind of testing of faith. A faith in nothing which somehow becomes everything. I walked from the bathroom to my study, to the book shelf, to look for something which might ground this (no doubt through the poetic) in to some... I went to The Gateless Gate book of koans and flicked through the introduction and contents pages. DC joined me as I read from Mumonkan, Memorial to the Throne:

        Blue sky, broad daylight, and a peal of thunder,

        The earth and creatures' eyes are opened;

        All the universe is making profound bows,

        Mount Sumeru dances to the ancient music. 

I was just considering this, did it speak to me now, might it convey something to DC... when DC said yes! And we both at that time alighted on the thought that a work of art does this - it lets us see something deeper. I could feel our question encompassing the nature of a work of art; it is an illuminating consideration but I feared we might loose the purity of the original existential question in philosophical contemplation. My intuition was to stick with the felt sense of the unspoken question; the nature of the divine.

It's now evening and I've written this post in exploration of those waters- just what are they? What are those thoughts and emotions? What has come to me is captured by the title I've given this post and is I think perhaps summed up thus; it is our engagement with life as a dialogue internal and external, that is both mundane and profound, our own experience and yet not separate from anything or anyone, empty in the fullest way and in many ways immediate and yet unknown, that is our our home. Where is it and who is it that sits there? Do we not somehow know that we are so much more than we can see? I sense we do.

The White Crow

Last night DC and I watched The White Crow, a film about the young Rudolf Nureyev. The title is, I feel, particularly fitting. The portrayals of both Nureyev (by Oleg Ivenko) and his teacher Alexander Pushkin (by Ralph Fiennes) were exemplary and in each for me could be seen something of the utmost importance. The tension towards the end of the film as events narrow in at the airport and around Nureyev's defection from the USSR to the West bring to focus the many ways in which this 'something' is so often stifled. And, even though I knew as an historical fact that he would make it, somehow the chance that he might not was palpable. And yet by the end of the film I had that feeling of having only seen something 'as if through a glass darkly' and yet for all that more clearly and there was a slight feeling of needing a drink, the thought of which I decided to let pass without action, rather to sit with the feelings.

Reflecting upon salient aspects of my experience watching this film I recall: the calm, centred expansive and controlled Pushkin; the form of a chair in Pushkin's apartment; the depiction of Nureyev's wonder as a child at the world and his thirst for experience of what was important to him; the clarity of focus in Nureyev as he cut through the stifling conventions of society. It is perhaps, too obvious to remark that (whilst understated) the whole film is perfused with Nureyev's potent sexuality. What then, in this mix and my own karma to elicit my feelings of having seen something 'as if through a glass darkly' and with the attendant (dismissed) thought that a night cap might be in order? It is I think this, that what we see in each of these; Pushkin, the chair and Nureyev is the emergence out of chaos of beauty and it is seen dimly because it exists in relation to the observer. And that fleeting thought of a nightcap was in reaction to the enormity of the perceived gap between my everyday experience and the possibility of a perfection so impossible as to render itself little more than a perverted glimpse of the deeper possibility afforded by a harmonious allowing of natural unfolding of the Tao. It is then obvious that a softening in to this allowing reveals the illusion of the gap and at the same time demonstrates the natural eroticism of experience and the beauty of it when attended by clarity.

I've read that Nureyev was like a child trapped in an adult's body. But is it not that he was to an extent simply less trapped than the bulk of us are? This returns me to Pushkin; his self control is liberating and he makes the point in the film that he teaches technique but that the dancer must use this to say something. And here I think we have the nub of the matter. Just what is it that we each really want to say? And more fundamentally to whom? What is seen through a glass darkly is the reflection of oneself as the very mirror itself, it is the resolution of the paradox of separation and the answer to the koan is the experience of beauty. Somehow in the portrayal of Pushkin and Nureyev both Fiennes and Ivenko bring this to life. And for me personally there is something in the Russian idiom the white crow - the outsider, which (at least in this film) is evocative of the shaman. There is I think, a shamanic quality to Nureyev as he's portrayed in this film and it elicits the potential for transformation.

Dance

I just did a zoom session with the dance collective I usually dance with. We danced at home in lockdown to the music and connected as best we could through the small video images and chat log. I quite quickly felt so sad; memories of dancing together in a public space with the feel of the floor, the space, the people, the sounds, the altar, the hugs and smiles... all so many months ago. And it's not just a social dance, no, it's the heart connection; the inner and outer connection; beings together setting aside the wrestling with any struggles to just be in them and to feel the space, the vast vast space that holds us, and to dance it. To dance it what ever it is, good, bad or indifferent, happy and joyous or more difficult. To hold a space for ourselves and each other, to let the body feel it and breath and move. Oh how my body mind and spirit need that. No wonder I've felt ill at ease without quite being able to say what was the trouble... oh sacred space to dance how we need this.

I've not been doing these zoom dance sessions as I found at the start of lockdown that they didn't really work for me. But I'm glad I had this connection. The dance at the physical level was little more than a jig about, barely a warm up by my usual energies BUT the memory of breathing and dancing oh so important! Dance dance wherever you may be...

Oh how I hope we can all dance together again soon!

Sands held apart

2020 has seen the world plunged into the Covid pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have placed a pressure on our whole society opening up cracks which previously were ignored. We can see how this has affected our lives and livelihoods and how the gap between the haves and the have nots has widened. I'm grateful for being able to work from home, manage my time and work commitments and feel relatively insulated from the economic devastation which many face. The restrictions have had an impact on people's mental and physical health and for some the virus has been fatal. Again other than some flaring of my OCD (possibly related possibly unrelated) I remain relatively unaffected. I miss the physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual benefits from ecstatic dance which at present cannot take place as a group of people in the same space. Zoom sessions don't do it for me. I miss seeing friends and the natural flow of everyday life, cinema, theatre, travel etc. But basically life has settled into workable ways and there's little to complain about in real terms. And yet more than for a long time I feel an anxiety. I could place it on Covid restrictions (I'm not particularly worried for myself about the virus, although I do feel I need to be careful for my parents but the restrictions do generate difficult mental / emotional conditions), I could place it on the political situation in the UK (we probably have about the worst UK government in modern history and there has been some stiff competition), I could place it on the climate crisis, I could place it on the general losses that seem to come around in middle age or it could be that with life restricted there is simply more space for those sorts of negative feelings to grow. And it's probably all of those. This does indeed feel like a time of passing, of endings. And it seems unclear just what (and when) will be the new. A period of transition may be lengthy and the outcome uncertain. Indeed, will humans wise up and get responsible for the environment soon enough to survive?

So against this back drop the Findhorn Foundation (FF) has effectively collapsed and we know not yet if or how it might survive. Certainly it seems it is over as I have known and loved it. And whilst I've been away from it for some years now both DC and I have kept in contact with dear friends there and still feel a warmth for the FF. It was always many different things to many different people but for me it was a gateway to a deeper and far more sustainable sense of myself. A journey which would quickly take in Zen Buddhism as kind of map with the FF providing opportunities to explore and synthesise in the world. At a time when we so need communities looking at alternatives to 'the rat race' it is indeed cruel irony that Covid has forced us into isolation and triggered the collapse of not just the FF. And whilst I often commented that the FF needed to look more closely at its inconsistencies and sustainability it is sobering to see how economic realities have caused its collapse; it was all very well claiming to offer an alternative but when that alternative failed to embed the interconnection it so claimed then the scene was virtually set for failure once the world 'outside' the FF imposed a new order. Against this backdrop we are all getting older and our dear friend Erica seems to be entering the closing chapter. Erica, DC and I have enjoyed much warmth and hospitality together particularly at this time of year and so it is sad to feel the passing of those times.

All this certainly shows up that if one foot is on the rock of spiritual refuge then without doubt it is counterpart to one on the shifting sands of everyday life! And whilst I'm aware of the foot on the rock, there seems to be a lot of weight on the one on the shifting sands. So I find the koan arises yet again in what I do see as a pattern for me, or at least it's possible to construct it that way. Emptiness and the uncertainty I feel not infrequently in response when I see it all around me and can't get to the place of seeing its fecundity; how many ways have I been round that? OCD by somewhere around nine years old, that attempt at trying to gain control in the face of uncertainty, seems to indicate that as a child I saw and / or felt the shifting sands but couldn't see how to shift weight or feel enough weight on something solid enough to bear the contradiction between the vulnerabilities inherent in human life and the sense of a (separate) self who felt exposed to those vulnerabilities. A human life is wonderful - we sense that right from the start but it is inherently tricky as the first noble truth in Buddhism points out. Dukkha is always going to be with us as one of the three marks of existence. I wonder what I'd have been able to see and feel if someone had shown me the Buddha dharma as a child. But I guess that the path which led me to it was perhaps one of greater immersion than might be gained by 'fingers pointing at the moon' sooner. Shifting my view I can see the fecundity in all this- there is change and it brings new forms; new life in each moment. It is wonderful! DC will tell me off if I say - 'there are as many worlds as there are beings'. 'I've told you about that solipsism - stop it.' he will say. And I muse at the paradox- we are both separate and utterly One. By some mystery the whole of experience emerges out of the Unborn, moment by moment. Innumerable beings with their own experience all both separate and One. Each moment a movement and yet cut through with stillness. A stillness holding and being all movement. Somehow we do seem to know there is something sacred of which we are and that our lives- our experience, is the expression of that something. And that something only becomes a thing (out of the no-thing) as the shifting sands, waves on an ocean that might see each other but not necessarily the water.

Lockdown has seen DC and I make Saturday evening movie night and we have found some great movies on TV streaming services. We recently watched 'The hour of living' and 'Uncle Frank', both movies which triggered much good discussion between DC and I. In their different ways they brought us to the Red thread koan. In the widest sense it's the whole nature of the creative, being alive, living life, interacting, everything that we are. In the words of the song:

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Come hear the music play

Life is a cabaret, old chum

Come to the Cabaret 

And there is much to be said about how to come to the cabaret; about how to live a good life. But to focus on an aspect of this often associated with the 'Red thread' the above movies look at intimate relationship. George, one of the main characters in The hour of living asks in response to a question about whether or not he'd had sex with the protagonist's father 'when does anyone have someone?' It's a rich question. When do we open to someone's being? There is much to say about sex, love and divinity but the point that George makes is that any physical sex which may or may not have taken place between them wasn't important; what was important was that they could sit silently together and oceans would flow between them. Yet we know that irrespective of any physical sex, sex flowed in those oceans.

Both the above movies also raise questions about the nature of and construction of masculinities and in Uncle Frank homophobia is shown as a symptom of fear and confusion. Set in 1973 and contrasting the acceptance from some with the utter abhorrence from others it is a rich movie with multidimensional characters. My own wounding from the homophobia which was an unquestioned backdrop of the time and place in which I grew up has left scars; grief being chief among them. Grief for the shutdown lost years when to act on homosexual impulses seemed far too risky and the resulting confusion, isolation and stagnation robbed me of the chance to come to the cabaret. And what is so painful in that and has played out in complex ways ever since is not just the missing fun, connection with others or even connection with myself and of course the oceans that George in The hour of living describes, no it's not just those, it's all of those; all of those together; the allowing of a vital response to the Red thread koan, the surfing of the shifting sands and the possibility of a glimpse of  the rock. And I must remember that all that was a part of the past yet not the whole of it and the intervening years have been rich with experience and have brought me to where I am now. To see anything as lost is to know it in some way; nothing stops and nothing starts but that everything is.

The nature of mind-what is it? Where is it that our lives play out? What are those shifting sands? Where do they shift? Grains of joy flow with those of grief and others of the everyday. Sands of the rock of the Unborn; waves on the ocean. What's tough about Covid is that the required social distancing is a force of separation, when what we all want is to come together so as to better be together.

How much freedom do we have not to wriggle?

I think I developed OCD sometime around 9 years old, although it may have been a little later but not older than 12. So I've lived with this condition as it has waxed and waned for at least 40 years. Over those years it has shifted shape and modulated in magnitude; subsided so as to virtually disappear, returned some times in familiar forms sometimes in changed form, highlighted aspects of its root and moved with the rest of this body-mind as part of the flux that is life. A complex and pernicious condition that one is always recovering from it has flare ups and remissions. And a bit like many other dis-eases the reasons for the ebb and flow, the waxing and waning are obscure. However, the root of this condition is basically an attempt at a bargain with life to be granted certainty. Why attempt this bargain when the very attempt itself sows its own frustration? Because like Alice down the rabbit hole it wasn't clear at the time of following the rabbit that one would end up falling down the hole. And rabbits pop up! And having seen a rabbit it can be very difficult not to follow it, for if we pay no attention to anything then where is the meaning in our experience? We wouldn't ever find the wherewithal to make even so much as a daisy chain. So seeing 'a rabbit off' ie something that seems not quite right, not quite stable it's in our nature to be drawn to investigate. And there is compassion in it, for I would say that at the start of the OCD feeling a glimpse of impermanence was perceived; vulnerability, potential loss and suffering, and with that came the desire to control, to make safe. So we reach for something. But like the jar of orange marmalade which Alice took from the shelf we find it empty. And so begins the search for a suitable place to put the jar... and we are still falling...

OCD is a potent mix of thoughts and emotions. And like any mental health condition the tricky thing about it is that the very tools you need to restore some balance to the situation are the ones affected greatly by the condition. OCD is an addiction. The clue's in the name - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The obsession is the fear, the compulsion the trying to fix it, the result is ironically the dis-order where order was sought. Such mind states affect the subtle feelings involved in how situations are perceived. The overall flavour of it is sticky, tight with itchiness.

And so, one learns that from time to time one will find oneself falling down the rabbit hole. And the tricky thing is just what to do with that empty jar... All one can do is to be open to putting it in the cupboard as it passes by. One way or another we're all moving the empty jars from the shelves to the cupboards. Sometimes like Alice we reach out in curiosity at other times we reach out for security.

 I read recently in a blog I follow, that Victor Frankl said:

"The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity...”

Well, I'm not so sure about that because it seems to me that what is being assumed here is a stable self, a centred, grounded self able to absorb the situation whilst remaining capacious enough not to be overwhelmed by it. And I'm not sure that such capacity is granted to us except by what might be called grace. Now I'm not saying that it can't be cultivated. I am not saying that one can't acknowledge but not become. Clearly it is possible not to add unhelpful energy to one's experience to just let it be and respond to what is needed without adding or resisting whilst still engaging with the flux of life. It's just that in 40 years of OCD waxing and waning by unfathomable reasons I have seen how the feelings forming choice and which impart one's attitude are not anywhere near as stable as might be sufficient ground to stake a claim for freedom. And the surrender to the falling not so available at times as would be required for freedom. And if such stability of mind and surrender were at all times available to all beings I wonder - what shape meaning? What shape compassion? It seems to me that such freedom as Frankl points to resides in the divinity of our humanity. And, as we span the space between heaven and earth such capacity for absorbing life's vicissitudes from a centred vantage modulates. I'm doubtful I would have survived in a concentration camp. It's possible, but I'm not sure what was available to Frankl's mind would have been available to mine. The modulation of capacity - to what extent is this ours to control?

It takes a great deal of energy to negotiate the rabbit hole of an OCD flare up. Depending upon the intensity and other aspects of one's life the ability to remain centred is affected by the depletion of energy. Beyond this there's a more straight forward seeing emptiness- that there's no separate self to be centred. I am always at the centre of my life yet there's no separate person to grasp and although I say 'my life' in reality it's a much more diffuse experience than 'my' indicates. And so it comes to this- what if anything needs to be done to let the stickiness pass? The difficulty is sitting in the not knowing. And as with quicksand the key is not to wriggle. It's not that I disagree with Frankl, it's that I question what causes the modulation of capacity.