A SPIRITUAL BASTING ~ From Ancient Times

A series of blog posts reflecting on spiritual practice in everyday life. Inspired by phrases from Dogen's Instructions For The Tenzo as inspiration

'From Ancient Times'

' From ancient times, in communities practicing the Buddha's Way, there have been six offices established to oversee the affairs of the community...... Among these is the tenzo, who carries the responsibility of preparing the community's meals.' *

Whilst I am a Buddhist praticioner, I'm also an artist/craftsman. Endeavouring to keep in daily contact with Dogen's ideas about work as a spiritual practice. Applying these to my own eveyday life experience. Remaining creative within this is not without its challenges. It also requires a degree of translation and contextual reimagining to ensure its usefulness within 21st Century conditions.

A tenzo is the head cook in a Zen monastery, they have a practical yet life enhancing role. Cooking for them becomes entirely a selfless act of other regarding service. To place your culinary talents before everyone to either savour or reject, is a testing practice. When it comes to what they eat, people can become picky and complain about the smallest thing. Food is rarely able to please everyone. Seeking praise or appreciation is a lottery with the potential to build or crush anyone's ego. Likewise, in the world of art and craft, its perilous to be too closely attached to what you do. Its rare for any aesthetic endeavour to be universally appreciated, people either love or loath it in equal measure. This is just how it is.

Dogen emphasises how important it is to not over invest in the end result of your effort, particularly if you desire it to be appreciated, or worse still want it to be perfect. However, your ego still grasps for every crumb of praise it can, because your self esteem has a perpetually hungry bottomless pit of a stomach. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do your best. Instead try doing your best, but without those limpet like expectations. Perceive your work through the broader perspective of how what you are doing can be of benefit to others, not only through the myopic view of your selfish needs.

At first glance the similarities between cooking and the artistic process are unclear. Art appears to have no
immediate tangible benefit in quite the way that cooking has. Cooking sustains life, it helps us survive. Any creative process, whilst it may sustain the spirit and feed the soul, from a practical viewpoint its an activity devoid of use. However, looked at from a spiritual viewpoint impracticality can be transformed into a virtue, the more useless it is the better. That aesthetics is largely divorced from utility is part of its purpose and raison d'etre.

Arts purpose, if well executed, isn't a panacea to make existence tolerable, nor intoxicate you like a drug. It deals mostly in those fuzzyheaded intangibles, not clearly comprehensible, pointing towards something out of reach and quite 'other' than terre firme. The sole purpose of the artistic process and its result, is to cultivate our individual and collective receptivity to this.

'From ancient times' Art has performed a distinctive function for humanity, introducing us, at to best, to awe and an elevated spirit. Cathedrals or Buddhist Temples if they are working correctly should take our breath away almost from the moment we enter. This may only be for a split second of uplift, a fleeting experience of exaltation, vanishing before we even consciously notice it. Yet to imagine trying to achieve that through one's cooking, or through your everyday life and experience, can seem an overwhelming, if not impossible, thing to attempt.

Yet Dogen insists later on in the Instructions For The Tenzo that we should aim to build 'great temples out of ordinary greens', meaning out of the humdrum ordinary things of life. To endeavour to create something beautiful out of unpromising material, out of nothing, out of nowhere, out of this imperfect world. This reaches to the core of human creativity. We embellish and beautify pretty much everything we make. Machines, from a practical point of view don't require painting at all, it contributes nothing towards their better functioning. That we paint tractors bright colours appeals to us aesthetically, it makes us feel better about the cold lifelessness of this useful tool we are using. To apply extra effort into cutlery to make it pleasing to hold, lifts it from utility into an aesthetic experience. Utility can only be elevated spiritually by cultivating our altruistic impulses. To do everything for the benefit of others.

Lets make no bones about it, no one has ever died from a lack of Art or aesthetics in their lives. But despite this, it remains the quintessence of our dreams. Humankind as a species has been propelled forward by the supposed 'madness' of its dreamers. To deprive life of Art, and the spiritual intent embroidered beneath it, would render our existance arid and cold.  'From ancient times' from the instant our ancestors began painting magic animals onto walls in the deepest recesses of caves. But even when their religious significance or purpose has dwindled we still return to caves, temples and cathedrals because of what they represent. They reconnect us with what we've lost touch with. This lies outside and beyond our understanding of a universe based on scientific rationalism.

Whilst cooking feeds our stomachs, broader creative impulses feed our spirit, raise up our hearts to ease the troubles of our restless minds. Art has performed this role 'from ancient times'. Communicating through artists, visionaries and shamans, the values and intuitions, not just of what we have become, but more importantly what we can become. We are the lucky inheritors of this vast evolutionery and creative legacy. Nothing new or unique ever emerges into our world, that isn't indebted in someway to things learnt, passed on and influencing us 'from ancient times'.  


* Extracts from Thomas Wright's translation - From The Zen Kitchen To Enlightenment, First Published by Weatherhill in 1983.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW 16 ~ Falling Short Of An Open Target

Wells-Next-The -Sea, North Norfolk.

This was the first cafe in Wells to dump the standard cottage tearoom mode for something designed more for contemporary cafe culture. The serving counter greeting you as you enter always has a sizable range of cakey nibbles on display. The staff, though friendly, do seem to be working with a certain level of self preoccupation. On this visit the display did include a carrot cake, so I felt a review stirring in my loins before I'd ordered it with the ubiquitous chaser of a flat white. As I always eat and drink with Jesus in my heart, I'll try to be kind.

The cafe decor doesn't quite gel.You sort of know what they're aiming for, a stylistically eclectic mix of chairs and tables, creating a characterful boho feel. But here there is raging disharmony, classic bentwood chairs and bamboo garden furniture do not sit well together. It appears to cut corners not a dash. The ceiling is painted in a sludgy taupe colour, leaving the impression of having been executed as part of a prison dirty protest. Sounds harsh I know, but its these things that lend it the air of a half cocked execution.

It sits opposite Wells Harbour, so if you grab a table by the window you can observe the endless chain of traffic and parked cars obscuring your wide harbour vista. Not to mention the aimlessly wandering tourists with fish and chips in hand on route to the face, thinking 'we've gorus chips, is there owt else to do ere?'  Wells-next-the-Sea, because of it homely nature, down to earth, and altogether lacking in pretence, has always been the working class holiday destination of choice. This is slowly changing with the arrival of the new Maltings Art Centre, and a scattering of middle class trendy shops that have appeared over recent years, sandwiched in between the butcher, the baker and the classic North Norfolk rambling hardware store that stocks everything somewhere within its labyrinthine corridors. One hopes Wells never loses this. At the moment its more like its put on a smarter pair of M & S socks beneath its scruffy open toed sandals. That said, its yet to create the must go too cafe. Most are acceptable but no cigar.

You can usually tell when I've not found much to say of positive or negative worth about a cake, because I rant on and on for paragraphs about anything other than it. So, deep venerable breaths, as I step onto the slippery approaches of the cake review. To my well trained eye its visible texture did look rather hopeful, that distinctive slightly gappy stranding, obviously weighty with bits of nut chippings, evenly spread. Dense and moist to the eye, once laid upon the palate it proved to be both. However, my first gob full was all cake with no cream filling, and my expectations of a rich carrot flavour were startled by how spicey and sweet it was. Yes, it tip toed onto the near approaches of my bet noir, the masquerading spice cake.

If anything saved it from tipping into unforgivable sin it was the texture, and a general intuition that the cake maker did have their heart in the right place, The message having got mangled twixt the recipe and the measuring spoon. The cream cheese filling and frosting was fine, but just not enough of it. The rubble of nuts on top, all well and good, but like the chopped nuts within the cake they functioned only as attractive teeth grit, one couldn't actually taste them. They were perhaps aiming for a richly rounded flavour and cake texture that unfortunately fell arse in the air at the final fence.

This feeling of a cafe being a hairs breath away from achieving, if not greatness, then at least above average, I find is a common experience. Its not unusual in fractionally missing hitting their own open target. How was my Flat White I hear voiced quizzically. It was in the right cup, but was really an extra stiff coffee with frothed milk.

 CARROT CAKE SCORE  4/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY 27 - The Twin Sinkholes of Paucity and Positivity

Since we signed the lease and got the keys, its been shop, shop, shop, shop ,shop. You've seen the photos. The shop fit itself was physically demanding on both of us. Every week we thought ' maybe now the intense weather will ease' but only the wind direction changed. Plus one too many middle of the night flurries of anxiety, not directly shop related, but manifesting through something a way distant from it or of trivial significance. Once the refit was complete and Cottonwood Home was open our daily lifestyle morphed chameleon like into something both familiar and unfamiliar.

A really good weekends trading can be followed by unpredictable week days. As yet there appears no rhyme nor reason whether its tumbleweed or customers whisking through our door. This has the potential to freak us out a bit, if we let unrestrained mental proliferation get a grip. It's become a regular practise to disengage mood and sense of well being from the shops daily sales, otherwise it will be positivity when good, paucity when bad. That way madness lies. At the moment town seems subdued, what with the poor weather, the ever expanding sinkhole and perhaps a Brexit infused mood of depression that's draining wallets and purses of confident optimism. Anyway. one of our first lessons has been you don't open the door and hey presto, it just works, you have to work hard at building any business. That process will undoubtedly be ongoing and at times emotionally testing.

Previous tenants of our unit said they did two thirds of there business through stuff they had on show outside. All The Courtyard stores do do the same. We've devised a plan for outside displays of lower price point items to lure folk into the shop, hoping to pull this together over the next few weeks. But in the meantime we're endeavouring to keep our feelings in check and out of any mental sinkholes we might encounter. Our shop fit makes us look higher end than we actually are, but apart from selling stuff with hare prints on, beach huts, seagulls or seahorses, throwing a dishevelled carpet down and being more chaotic in our merchandising, there's not much to be done about that. We are what we are, what we need to do is convince more people that what we are is for them too. All the stores in our mall when they started out only covered their costs in their first year, so our short term aim is to at least do that.

We are slowly getting home back to being tidier and cleaner, plus attending to all the other things that fell into neglect whilst we were focused on shopfitting.We decided initially to open the shop seven days a week just to see what custom was actually like. Ten days or so in, we'd become so emotionally frayed we decided we just had to take a regular day off together.  We settled on our provisional opening hours and will be closed on Mondays. One of the things that's clear from observing other shopkeepers in The Courtyard is that your opening hours can be treated as a flexible arrangement, close early if and when you feel the need too. For our first day off we travelled to Lavenham and Bury St Edmunds, for no other reason than a change of scenery. It was the first of the endless torrential rain days, everywhere we went was drenched, as were we.  The bliss of freedom can simultaneously also feel foolhardy.

It started like this

Quiet little Sheringham has acquired a sinkhole slap bang in the middle of the High Street. Its hard to tell if its affected trade our end of town, but either side of 't' ole' it has halved the shops takings their. Two shops can't open at all and you really feel for them, as the date by which the hole problem will be resolved keeps moving further away, engulfing the profitable summer season trade. Initially the road signage was lacking and visitors were confused where to go. When the signage did arrive it was a bit OTT and gave the impression the whole town was closed to traffic, which it wasn't. It has now settled down to informative but sensible. The Town Council has launched a push with the backing of Norfolk daily newspapers to publicise that Sheringham is open for business, I'm not sure that this will be effective or what is really needed.
                                                                     

Its now like this

Meanwhile the size of the cavernous sinkhole, if we are to believe the melodramatic newspaper reports, is ever expanding. We've yet to hear the survey results as to the cause and who is responsible. At the moment officials are being extremely circumspect, fearing the hell of attributing liability prematurely. But you can't claim for loss of business until someone is found to be at fault. In the meantime retailers hold onto a wing of positivity with the hope the hole and the hole in their finances will be plugged soon.

Recent recurring night time worries have included :~ Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister, homosexuality being criminalised, feebly railing against Brexit and where the hell we are heading as a country. Credible political options ignored, the staggering lack of flexibility, imagination and vision etc etc. I also had a recurring dream of people I know in the Triratna Buddhist Order accusing me of betrayal and treachery. Quite what that's about I haven't quite fathomed, but we were coming up to the first anniversary of my resigning from the Order at the beginning of June. I've just parked that in a convenient lay by for now.

I've been reading about the history of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage. This book by Micheal Rear is the best written and most comprehensive I've read. Like most books on the subject it inevitably veers away from historical fact into Christian theological and devotional issues which I do find a bit baffling.  But I have learnt a bit about Anglo Catholicism and the The Oxford Movement, of which the revival of veneration and pilgrimages to Our Lady Of Walsingham is a significant achievement of. There are a few intreging aspects such as:~ the original shrine was built close to two wells where the site of a Roman Temple has been found. Who this was dedicated too is unclear, nor what pagan god/goddess no doubt preceeded it. Tantilising as this is, I think I've read enough about Walsingham and Our Lady for now.

Our Lady of Walsingham

Its still unclear what the significance of my response to this figure is or what its pointing towards. Perhaps I do not need to fully know, the figure of Our Lady exists primarily on the level of myth, not rational logic. I have noticed iconographic similarities between Our Lady of Walsingham and the Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha. Each has a staff symbolic of purity and sovereignty in the right hand and holding a symbol of wisdom, Christ or a Chintamani, cupped in the left hand. She is seated on a throne of wisdom, he on a lotus throne the symbol of Enlightenment. Her throne is placed on top of a 'toadstone' a symbol for the evil which she has conquered. His sits upon a symbolised version of a mound of Kusha grass, a traditional meditation seat where he has conquered mental defilements. The uprights of her throne have seven rings on them that represent the seven sacraments or practises of Catholicism. He holds a monks staff which bears six rings to represent the six perfections/practises of a Buddhist, for any Bodhisattva dedicated to saving all sentient beings.

The mythic background of Ksitigarbha is interesting as the only Buddhist archetype that moved from originally being a female figure to becoming a male one. There is an echo of this in that one of Ksitigarbha's epithets is still Earth Womb. This feminine original is referred to as the Sacred Girl, who goes into the hell realms in order to save her mother but ends up vowing to save all beings from suffering. This act of reaching down in order to save is traditionally represented in Buddhist iconography by the left foot stepping onto a lotus blossom. Devotions to Our Lady often focus on her role as the vessel or route to salvation, the go between, as intermediary between Heaven and Hell on Earth, and vice versa. Such salvific acts of compassion are a theme that Ksitigarbha shares with Our Lady of Walsingham. So there it is, for what its worth. This of course may all be cock.

Ksitigarbha

COTTONWOOD HOME ~ We're Open!

So we are finally open. Whilst we've been anxious in advance of experience about whether our stock would sell, it would appear we need not have exercised our worry muscles quite so assertively. The 1st of June was a hot day in Sheringham where most of the visitors headed for the beach, passing our now infamous sinkhole. All the other retailers in our courtyard said it was a quiet day as a result, but for our first day we felt it went really well. Though we didn't know what to expect, it exceeded our cautious expectations.  

I took these photographs at the end of the day just before we closed. We really did have customers honest, these weren't taken on slow exposure to eradicate all sign of human life, its just I didn't want to appear intrusive or inappropriate.

We've had lots of local people coming in just to see what the shop looks like and they've been very encouraging. Now we actually have a shop it brings renewed impetus to our making. Even when the shop is quiet we can still be knitting or crocheting something. There is a sense of something having lifted now we are no longer making items in a vacuum.

Jnanasalin 'a crocheting'

Lovely flowers from family

An offering of sweets and biscuits for our customers

The back of our window display

Jnanasalin closing our very high Velux 

COTTONWOOD SHOP REFIT ~ 4th Week ~ Countdown to Opening

FIVE
Our last day of shop fitting. Fixing up our feature display unit, card shelves and rack for wrapping paper. In a way its a bit of a relief to be finishing all this prep side, so tomorrow we can get on with the real business of a retail shop fit ~ the stock

FOUR
It took three car trips to get all the stock into the shop. Once we'd unpacked a few boxes you could hardly move for discarded packaging. For day one of merchandising we've done very well, the basic blocking of the stock layout has been completed.



We are beginning to get a sense of what works and doesn't work on our shelving. Less is more being generally the case here. We aren't high end but we're not bargain basement either. So giving stock enough space will be important for us to maintain.

THREE
It's obvious today that apart from cushions and the stock we've bought in, we have no back up stock for some items that we've made. One of our middle of the night anxieties about this retail venture is being able to make items fast enough to keep up with sales without sacrificing quality. But first we need to get a sense for what sells and how quickly. Still loads to be done. A window display, price labelling, setting up the till, jewellery stands to be made up, etc etc etc.

TWO
I spent the morning putting in the window display using our 'gansey styled' cushion range. The photographs don't quite capture how good it looks. Meanwhile Jnanasalin was setting up all the stock on the till system. After dinner I went home to do work in the workshop on frames for some lovely prints we have. I'm not a hugely confident framer, but I am very pleased with the quality of the results.

ONE
Our last day before we open to the general public. Almost ready, just pricing and final tweaking, plus all those little things that support the running of a shop that don't surface until you are almost there, or actually open, and you realise you need a cleaning and tool kit etc. The pricing went quite smoothly, and brings that finishing touch to 'a shop'. We've done our best but not everything in the shop has the best sales position on this time around, but we'll get there.

It feels great to finally get everything that doesn't need to be there, not just off the floor, but returned to home. Its been quite testing to my equanimity when I'm in the workshop and realise the tool I need is in the shop, or vice versa. It goes without saying, that we're both very pleased with how the shop looks. We've had a lot of appreciative and encouraging comments in person and online. If we let go of our anxiety there is a certain excitable air that takes flight about how it all will go on the 1st June, my god that's tomorrow.

Everything packed & ready to go home