A SPIRTUAL BASTING ~ The Bodhisattva Spirit Aroused

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

The Bodhisattva Spirit Aroused

' Carried out by teachers settled in the way and by others who have aroused the bodhisattva spirit within themselves'

If you thought being a cook was a menial job, then think again. Its hard work, where good planning and preparation are more than half the task. Not just anyone who fancies a bit of large scale cooking can actually do it. In a monastery kitchen there is an additional requirement for that cook to also be a teacher, of the practicalities of cooking certainly, but more importantly to guide the spiritual practice of their novice kitchen assistants. Cooking here is a personal practice until the depth and richness of it leaves the taste of Enlightenment on their palate.

To be a teacher, you have to know what it is you have to teach, the resources, knowledge and experience you can draw on and impart. These cook/teachers aren't just 'settling' but have to be 'settled in the way'  No need for further sorting out, its largely resolved. So whilst we may not be looking at fully fledged Enlightened Masters here, they come close. Dedicated to helping others learn what they have learnt, to see what they have seen, to have a vision of reality as it truly is, to try to save everyone from unnecessary suffering. This is the definition of what a Bodhisattva does.

At the very least the cook will have 'aroused the bodhisattva spirit within themselves'. Aroused  out of their slumber, their dreaming, their delusions, their ignorance. The daily work of a Bodhisattva is not a nice fuzzy ideal you light a candle for, its a serious commitment that always demands action. Its not just a head thing, or a heart thing, but a compassionate thing, a strong feeling in your guts that propels you into selfless action. The Bodhisattva is the rescuer, offering a hand to pull you out from whatever pit of despair you happen to have fallen into this week.

Though I've felt inspired at times by the ideal of becoming a Bodhisattva, it's rare for me to be highly motivated in the carrying out and exemplification part. Too inhibited, too scared, too self absorbed with 'what about poor me?'  Its all too easy to dress up what you are doing as the selfless actions of the Bodhisattva, because your self-esteem has taken a shine to being a one.  Maybe all you are really seeking is a bit of ego pampering. So the game would be lost there then. Ultimately the Bodhisattva cannot be self serving. Serving the needs of others is the spiritual essence for them. their sole and primary motivation. Dogen, goes on to warn ~

'Such a practice requires exerting all your energies. If someone entrusted with this work lacks such a spirit, then they will only endure unnecessary hardships and suffering that will have no value in their pursuit of the Way'.

All your mental, physical and spiritual resources should be at your finger tips. Any person who undertakes Bodhisattva work as a tenzo, or any other job, must be a quietly integrated person, emotionally robust, with a wise clear way of thinking.  A self deluded Bodhisattva easily buffeted off course by the storms and vicissitudes of life, just cannot be. You will not turn yourself into a Bodhisattva by a forceful act of will alone. Believing yourself to be a Bodhisattva when you aren't is then the worst form of delusion. Getting hold of the wrong end of this stick would be an act of self harm.

Yet even Bodhisattvas had to start somewhere and I bet they focused their efforts close to home. Here am I, an artist/craftsman, seemingly a whole world away from the monastic tenzo. My work can often be solitary, creatively self absorbed, indulgent you might say, and prone to acts of aesthetic self stimulation. But, nevertheless, it raises an interesting question - how could a different spirit could be aroused to inform this or any other form of work? Just park how you might feel about your job, and for a second try to be less subjective in your assessments of its worth or value to you. Start by asking what is your job for, what's its purpose, who is it benefits in a positive way from all your effort, ingenuity and energy? Enquire within too, what is it you want and what you get from your work, and are any of those things reasonable or attainable?

All work, you could say, has an 'aesthetic aura' surrounding it, this may be a pleasant, unpleasant or even an indifferent aura. A combination of the people, the place, the management might make your work an enjoyable or a dispiriting thing to be a part of. These knid of factors affect how we feel, not just about our work, but about ourselves when executing it. Its understandable that one might settle in to a smouldering resentment. But I'd want to encourage seeing whatever happens in your daily life through a more understanding empathic open minded lens.

People never behave badly without an underlying cause. This doesn't make their behaviour excusable or reasonable, but its good not to rush to judgement to condemn or revile them, in a knee jerk kind of way. We are all quite self preoccupied, other people gives as much thought to you and how they might annoy you, as you might of them ie. not a lot. Ask what is it you are bringing to this situation? Try to imagine the suffering involved, not just to you, but for others and for them. How must they be feeling deep down in order to behave like that, the deep dissatisfaction and resentments festering underneath finding its release through dreadful behaviour? Empathy touches on our own suffering to help us feel for someone else's predicament. If you can imaginatively reach out and feel the suffering in someone else's existential situation, there is a huge shift from self absorbed to other absorbed. Then our relations with others may begin to be transformed.

Art and craft work appears unlikely to save anyone from the sort of existential suffering I'm talking about here. I can often find myself struggling with my works purpose and why create at all. But underneath that despair and often a sense of meaninglessness, I do know. I have always wanted to make the world better somehow through creating beautiful things, to bring a heightened sense of aesthetics into the world. The grim ugliness I often find surrounding me fouls up my joie de vivre. Creativity swells up from an underground stream fed from the slow moving waters of human suffering and the existential ugliness of pain. A touch of beauty, at best, can colour, sooth and transform these unpromising sources.

Whether you're cooking a meal, creating an artwork or cleaning shit from a toilet, your individual talents, energy and life force are being put to the service of others. In our predominantly urban environments its hard not to become alienated, cut off from everything and everyone that surrounds us. Our boundaries feel constantly under attack, so we defend our sense of our self by creating distance, by building physical and psychological walls. Things start to change if such self constructed barriers can be dismantled. Openeing up to reconnect with people on a basic human empathic level. Contrary to appearances, we are all crying out for affection and help, for someone to support us, to hold our hand for a while. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others. Tune into this, because this is what will eventually arouse the bodhisattva spirit from its slumber.

SHERINGHAM DIARY 28 ~ The Singlet Vest & The Fruit Compote

Is it a sign of advancing age when the depth of your appreciation for a good fruit compote on your porridge in the mornings, starts to blossom beyond an unstated enthusiasm? Of late I've been greatly savouring a gooseberry compote cooked on a low heat. Soon to be followed by a plum compote or any other fruit there just happens to be a glut of this week. What is a compote?, well its the continental way of saying something is fruity but not quite a jam. Never sickly sweet. A syrup caught on the cusp of congealing. A compote slow cooked to perfection on the lowest heat possible is a newly discovered culinary ambrosia for me.

My deep indulgence in excessively sweet things and chocolate has noticeably diminished over the years. I say diminished, but I don't mean defeated, just moderated. I will remain forever part of the Lumb Lineage where no savoury meal would be complete without some sort of sweetening at the end of it, usually a dessert, immediately followed by cake. My Dad in his later years abandoned all pretence of eating protein and could be found lurking in the back of a local bakers cafe tucking into a lavishly iced Belgian bun, as his main meal of the day. Myself, I just try to limit this to the weekends. To get my sweet hit I replace iced buns with fruit when possible. So whilst such things are less prevalent for me, they are definitely not absent.

In my dreams my body still looks like this

Another age indicator might be when your dearly beloved hubby forthrightly forbids you, not just from owning a singlet vest, but owning a 'coloured' vest, and bars you from ever publicly parading your torso wearing one. Unfortunately he does know my family has history in this regard with my Dad, who, in the summer, if he hadn't already stripped down to the publicly respectable minimum, would be seen sporting a rather scruffy pale blue one with white (well, it had been white) piping, when outside gardening. The impact of this prohibition on my bodily well being, whilst we were in the middle of a 30 degree plus heatwave cannot be underestimated. I get easily overheated and its consequent mental fluster in even mildly hot weather. If I was a plant, I would be the sort that would wrinkle, shrivel up and desiccate whilst the gardener had turned away to make a pot of tea.

As I've got older, though I'm considerably taller than my Dad, my body has developed a recognisable rectangular quality, a solid stockiness very reminiscent of his. Why any of these things should come to mind now is anyones guess, but the 27th July was the first anniversary of Dad's death, so there's probably been the strong bodily aroma of Dad wafting around. The death of ones last remaining parent is never without significance, whether you personally got on with them or not. I do miss the presence and example of his easy going geniality, I was fond of my Dad and his mostly benign eccentricities, without ever feeling I was that emotionally connected. There were infuriating  things, his stubborn desire to not ask for help and to do things his own way, for instance. But as Hubby would no doubt be butting in at this point, I provide quite a good example of that myself at times. Ah, like Father like Son, and the discomforting reemergence of familial behaviour patterns.

We've completed our second month of trading and Cottonwood Home is doing well. We are now into August, the height of the holiday season, and sales have lifted considerably. Introducing our outside shop stalls has helped increase our monthly take, plus it gets people to actually come in!. Even with the effects of the dramatic shifts in the weather, we've not had a completely dead day for a few weeks now. Currently we are more than covering our costs, though still more to be done. This is high season, so if you don't do well now, well, you never will. The Autumn/Winter season will be our testing time.

Some of our own handmade stock, as a consequence, had begun to look a bit thin. At the moment I have an average of two + making days a week, plus my focus can get diverted into making props for the shop. So progress on new lines is spasmodic. Staying engaged with 'set aside' projects is difficult. This tends to lead to many half finished projects on the go simultaneously, which can feel a bit of a drag. Its like doing slow motion running keeping multiple plates spinning. Not helped during the big heatwave by my mitre saw going into to complete melt down.

One afternoon a family came into the shop. Their little girl was wandering around holding her Dad's phone aloft and chanting 'Daddie's Bottom', 'Daddie's Bottom', Daddie's Bottom. She'd been taking photos of her Dad's bottom from all angles and was now showing them to anyone who would look.

We've sussed out what we do when the shop isn't busy. We have a shop workstation, well a work table. Here Hubby can sew and lampshade make whilst I can get on with upcycling projects I can complete in a shop. At the moment I'm focusing on refinishing a range of jewellery boxes. I've also started exploring the world of mosaic, my first experiment was making some coasters/candle stands. They aren't finished yet, because they're one of the projects I've had to stop spinning to create time for more immediately pressing stuff.

What has arisen out of the mosaic practice is a Postcard Sized Art project. My artwork has a tendency to end up huge and consequently beyond most people's purses. So I've begun making small postcard sized collages, made from offcuts of wood and various bits of objet d'art I've accumulated.  I find them enjoyable things to make, we're selling for under twenty quid. Its a challenging discipline to consciously work small. They're proving to be the perfect art project for me. They dont take long to complete, so there is less chance of me being distracted or becoming bored with them. They offer unlimited scope for stretching my creative imagination and invention. I can take them in any direction I want, and they're also easy to make in the shop.

We were standing in a queue outside the chippy takeaway No 1 Cromer, waiting to actually get in to place our order. Immediately opposite is an amusement arcade, by the entrance is a machine you play Flappy Bird on. Its a video game, so I'm told, where you manipulate a bird up or down to get over columns of green pipes of different lengths without hitting them. Hubby tells me its quite difficult to do.

Anyway, a young man, probably mid teens was playing Flappy Bird, constantly hitting a large blue button with one hand in a trance like and worryingly alienated concentration. Each hit producing the ubiquitous computerised farty noise.

The boy played without an interruption, break in concentration or the game. On and on and on he went. The ticker tape recording his successes spewed out, forming a vast snake of yellow paper around his feet. After, at least, the twenty minutes we'd been queueing, he finally stopped. He then stood for a further five minutes whilst the ticker tape machine caught up,still spitting out his winning hits. Picking up this vast sheaf of paper he wandered off to collect what ever this herculean effort had earned him, probably several cuddly toys and a Red Bull flavoured ice lolly.  I fear for today's youth, I really do.

We were having a veggie breakfast in the Mulberry Tearooms one Sunday morning. On another table a woman expressed loudly her incredulity 'How on earth did you get cheese in your eyebrows?' Indeed, I'll leave you to ponder on that one.