SHERINGHAM DIARY 39 - Weight, Waiting, Wonderful, Exasperation

Weight
At my age I try to be unruffled about how much I weigh and not turn my weight or fitness into a control fetish. I've never been particularly skinny thin, nor hyper fit, all my life. I had a few years when I did weight training. But apart from that and swimming I've been averse to all other forms of regular exercise. In the past I've eaten sweets and confectionary things to excess, but, in my defense, I was brought up by parents who loved them. My mother, in later life, developed Type 2 Diabetes due to her profound love of cakes.

I still have that yearning for a sweet kick at the end of a meal. I can divert it into fruit eating, or into something not 100% sugar like marmalade on crispbread. Yet I do have to beware, I'm never more than a muffin away from returning to full sugar addiction. In the lock-down there are no swimming pools open to exercise in. Though we do a half hour walk every day, I nonetheless feel physically stiffer and less fit.

Before lock-down I weighed myself. The scales might fib a pound or two, but they cannot totally lie. My BMI was no longer just  'pillsbury dough boy'  tubby, I was a gateau or two over a classification threshold, tiptoeing  nearer the precipice of 'O.... my God your a Weeble!' In February I did two months without any sugar. Though this had little effect on my weight, it proved I could manage without it.

Since March I've been on a proper calorie controlled diet, which Hubby has joined me in doing. So far I've lost 21 lbs which means I'm halfway towards my target weight. The sensory limitations of being cooped up at home brings particular temptations, one of which is for a comforting sweetener, when things get difficult or too too dreary. So far I have resisted completely succumbing.

Waiting
Cottonwood Home - The Shop, will be one year old on 1st June. As I write it looks like we could re-open it on the 15th June. The long period of waiting may soon be over. There is a rough plan for the layout of The Courtyard, keeping a semblance of social distancing, with a defined route around and a limit on numbers in the shop. Our landlord has also set boundaries for how far our outside stands can come into walkways. Hence we are making plans to focus on a narrower range of stock on those displays. We've ordered visors and a perspex screen for our counter has arrived. So we are almost there. Until we re-open we wont know what footfall will be like. I suspect until the local caravan parks open and second homers return, (in July?) it will be day trippers and local trade only. Custom might be sparse.

Cottonwood Home - The Website, It's even more obvious now, that building up our online business will be the major factor affecting Cottonwood Home's longer term success. But keeping a shop and a website running effectively is quite a task.. Between the two of us we cover quite a broad range of retail skills. The lions share of the tech work tends to fall on Jnanasalin's shoulders, because that's part of his background. My abilities in that area are basic, my contributions usually being of a more hands-on creative or practical nature.  Hubby is currently getting himself better informed on how to market ourselves effectively on the web, by doing an online course.

During the lock-down we've updated and refreshed the website, which any site regularly requires because a business should always be evolving. We do have a very lovely website with lots of new stock we've made or bought in from other craft makers on it, so if you've time give it another look.

You'll find it on: https://cottonwoodworkshop.com/

Wonderful 1
Recently we watched Theatre de Complicite's The Encounter, which was a totally wonder-filled audio-visual performance. It featured a solo performance by Simon McBurney, Complicite's artistic director, backed up by a huge amount of technological wizardry. Its based on a book by Leon Mcintyre about his experiences with an Amazonian tribe the Mayoruna, who according to him could communicate telepathically. Can what he describes be true? As humans we are adept at turning stories about ourselves into exaggerated fictions, so could anything we say be ever said to be completely true?

The performance is a danger filled adventure and a meditation on a sense of self, presence and time, and what are these anyway?  The Encounter's themes may chime in with many of our current lock-down experiences. For when what we all assume to be normal is stripped away, what are we left with?  I ended up feeling profoundly moved by the performance, and haunted by its concluding sentence ' Some of us are friends'.





Wonderful 2

Another gem was the NT/Young Vic's production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The play is a piece of Southern Gothic, a grotesque melodrama, modern, yet partly arcane. The central character Blanche Dubois, is stylish but cranky, holding delusions of faded grandeur, who dominates the emotional tone of all who surround her. People either feel sorry for her or are suspicious she's not all she's cracked up to be. Her sister Stella's husband Stanley, played here with pumped up magnificence, by Ben Foster, sees through her and discovers some less than palatable facts that, once revealed, drive Blanche over the edge.



The slow revolve staging, had practical purpose so the 360 degree audience could see everything going on. But it also created a sense of unease, instability and threat circling around the performers. Gillian Anderson as Blanche was superb. It cannot be an easy part to place right, as it's written in such a mannered, arche way, yet she also has this underlying human fragility and pathos that cannot be lost sight of, or else she will turn into a caricature.

Exasperation 1
By lockdown week 10 we've both had a few days where we were just frustrated and irritable.  Little tasks not being straightforward, or something going wrong, started to cause restlessness and mood swings to arise.

So we both took a day off our work, and went 16 miles up the coast to Wells next the Sea, simply for a change in the scenery. To hang around and bask in the sun of a different beach, eat pastries from a different baker etc.

Wells. like everywhere else, is still mostly closed or on click n collect, with a few places already shut up shop permanently. It was mid-week, and the beach in the morning wasn't too crowded, but after mid day it was getting busier. As the tightness of the lockdown eases and the days get longer and warmer, these beaches cannot help but get fuller. Lets's see how social distancing survives then.

Exasperation 2
Coming out of lockdown cannot help but feel, and is, risky. The confidence we hold in the advice we are given will be key. Once that is fractured it will be hard to mend. Our government having lost its moral credibility and sense of the truth, has been jumping the gun recklessly, it feels as if they are in a panic, doing things simply to be popular with the general public.

Its gone back into ' lets pretend' mode, let's pretend it's safe to do this, let's pretend we can get back to school or work, lets pretend we've always protected care homes, let's pretend DC did nothing wrong, let's pretend we've got an effective track & trace system in place, lets pretend our strategy has always been led by science, let's pretend we've got the virus licked, let's pretend our Brexit discussions with the EU are real, lets pretend we don't want a no deal Brexit, let's pretend Boris knows exactly what he's doing.

Lets pretend this wont end with me requiring ventilation before I explode from exasperation.

MUSIC REVIEW - Sparks - A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

With this new album, a musical Annette directed by Leo Carax, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard and a documentary about their career made by Edgar Wright, both due out later in the year, Sparks are having another moment in the spotlight. After near on fifty years in the music business you'd be rightly wondering what they have left to say. On the evidence of A Steady Drip Drip Drip there are plenty of innovative ideas left in these septuagenarians yet.

The lively lyrical and musical driving force is, as ever, Ron Mael. It would be a mistake though to assume the vocal expertise of Russell is all he contributes. How Team Mael works has always been a mysterious two headed beast. Their lives outside of their pop personas are closely guarded, do they even have partners or children?  Not that we need to know, its just interesting that in our Instagram world there's still not a sniff of anything other than their brotherhood.

Like Hippopotamus, A Steady Drip Drip Drip utilises a song portfolio approach similar to Indiscreet, my favourite Sparks album from their Island Records period. But whilst there are knowing nods to their back catalogue, none of this is self-parody, it feels fresh and musically alive. Sparks remain at the top of their own particularly unique game as acute observers of the ridiculous side of human behaviour, and how recent social media technological developments, in a sense, only change the setting for them.

Of the many many delights on this album I'll focus on three to give a sense of the peachy perfections it contains. Ron Mael has always been able to write an effortlessly sparse song, a simple premise, simply executed, of which 'Lawnmower' is a classic example. Its about a chap who is so obsessed with mowing his lawn that his girlfriend leaves him.

'The neighbors look in awe at my lawnmower
With jealous and awe at my lawnmower
I'll never loan it out, not my lawnmower
La-la-la, la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la

You're pushin' on your lawnmower, lawnmower
Your lawn will be a showstopper, showstopper
Your lawn will be a jaw-dropper, jaw-dropper
La-la-la, la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la

What makes the prospect of the upcoming film Annette so exciting is that Ron Mael has been writing show tunes in a pop vein for years. There are a couple here 'Self-effacing' and a beautifully tongue in cheek song, about a woman called Onomato Pia who communicates without using words.

Onomato Pia came from Rome, had a head of angel hair
Couldn’t speak a word of English, no one cared
Onomatopia flowed out everywhere
Pia had a real communication flair

Every little sigh was oh so epic
Every little gasp for air
Every little yawn a yawn beyond compare
Onomato Pia’s gift was oh so rare
Pia had a real communication flair

There are a couple of songs with expletives in, which is unusual for Sparks, but used appropriately. The self explanatory 'Please don't fuck up my world' is one, the other 'I Phone' has the catchy chorus line of  'Put your fucking I Phone down and listen to me'.

Musically, they continue to be adventurous in their music arrangements, pushing at the envelope of what popular music can encompass, such as in the strident 'Sainthood is not in your future'   The wildest example here is 'Stravinsky's Only Hit' a song about how Stravinsky was convinced to make one concession to pop success that he subsequently regrets.

Stravinsky’s only hit
He toned it down a bit
He didn’t write the words, that was my job
He hated minor thirds
Thought them too absurd
I recommended them to make the girls sob

Adulation, how he loved it
All that action, Igor was digging it and
Party, party, rum and women
Party, party, a long way from Rite O’ Spring.

A Steady Drip Drip Drip gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from me.  

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF - Plagues & Peoples

written by William H. McNeill

Though first published in 1976 I read this probably ten years later. That was largely as part of my reading up on the whole idea of plagues in human history, in response to the general panic over the AIDS crisis in the mid 80's. I wanted to better understand what makes a plague a plague and how something like that could happen. It also has contemporary relevance in demonstrating the widespread effects of catastrophic disease spread in deforming and reforming societies, cultures and civilisations. It's way too early yet to say what lasting effect Covid 19 will have upon the UK, but it could well be quite significant.

Plagues & Peoples is provocative history, because it takes wide swipes at undermining the significance of wars and great individuals in human history. His essential premise is that plagues and diseases in general have had a far greater impact upon changing and directing humanities progress than those more lauded ( frequently male and white ) individuals and empires.

The world in the past was full of discreet disease pools, unique to a localised area, environment or culture. As humankind wandered the world, further afield they inevitably would cross, without knowing, a point that was a disease threshold. Once they did that they became exposed to a range of infections not previously encountered and without the anti-bodies to protect themselves, would die, at least initially, in huge numbers, sometimes decimating a whole civilisation. Though their widespread prevalence may have declined, these discreet disease pools still exist, we still never quite know where they are, until they make themselves known. Our responses are then always belated, the question these days is how much they are belated.

A classic incidence is when the indigenous Aztec civilisation met the Spanish Conquistadors. The Spanish who compiled the history of their conquest of the Americas, presented it as the justified victory of superior Catholic civilisation over a heathen one. However, their success could not have been so easily achieved, if at all, had not an epidemic of diseases the Spanish brought with them taken out the existing Aztec leadership and seriously weakened the ability of the citizens from a highly developed culture to put up an effective resistance.

Another, is the Ottoman Empire's advance on the Hapsburg Empire and why it stalled at the Siege of Vienna in 1683. This was due to the Ottoman military supply lines across the Balkans collapsing under the weight of infections running rife through its troops. Without these it could neither sustain a longer siege nor advance further afterwards, so it was forced to retreat. So all the historical bluster from Europe of a Holy War and the triumph of 'superior' Christianity over Islam etc etc, is very far from being the whole truth. Europe was saved from Ottoman invasion largely by a virulent disease threshold being crossed.

Mc Neill gives other detailed examples from many periods of history and different cultures, like China, India and Japan. So this is far from a western centric history book. The further back in history he goes the more conjectural he has to become, but some of his suggestions for what might have occured are thought provoking. One of these is the origins of the Indian caste system. This may have arisen from tribes in India crossing disease thresholds within the Indian sub-continent itself, or the arrival of new cultures into them such as the influx of Aryan migrants. The immigrant or indigenous people become the 'diseased other' over time transformed into a hierarchy of clean and unclean individuals. Given how vehemently some people blamed gay people for being the cause of AIDS or jumped on racial explanations for the current Covid 19 pandemic, this human tendency, though an old one, is unfortunately still alive and kicking.

This book significantly altered my perspective on history as it is traditionally presented to us. One small change in human behaviour can enable a new opportunistic disease to find itself a fresh infection host. With the increased intensity of global trade from the 16th century onwards, the rate at which such diseases reach pandemic levels has likewise also speeded up.

It would be so much simpler if diseases were caused by technology, such as a 5G Mast, because then we would just dismantle that cause, and the disease should then be extinguished. But the demographic spread and signifiers would be vastly different to that of an airborne or contact spread. So 99.9 times out of 100, a disease arising will be because of a small change in human behaviour that crosses a previously hidden disease threshold. We then become exposed to something we weren't previously aware existed or were prepared for.

200 WORDS ON - Contentment

An ideal of contentment fuels the endless battle with bits of our life we dislike and cannot sit easy with. Eradicating discontentment when it appears doesn't leave us with contentment. Relationships, careers, a luxurious home bring satisfaction, but such circumstances, like ourselves, are changeable. Despite longer life expectancy our era bitches and moans constantly from discontent.

Contentment evades us. Before lock-down we had busy lives with barely enough time to do what we needed to do, we craved a simpler relaxed lifestyle. The lock-down forced us into a simpler more relaxed lifestyle, yet we crave to be busier. External circumstances are dictating our sense of well-being. Not content with then, not content with now. The solution for contentment resides with us.

Children believe in magical thinking, the harder they wish for something, then it'll happen. Adults believe in merit, if we behave and work hard we’ll be rewarded. Reality, however, doesn't respond to our beck and call, its actually indifferent to our wishes and wants. Every human lifestyle is unstable, uncontrollable, unsustainable, everything coming to an end eventually. If we’re able to face this full on, to calmly accept things as they are, the foundations for true contentment will be laid.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW 21 - Where The Art Isn't

Cromer, North Norfolk.

This visit and review took place and was written before the lockdown.

This cafe is tucked to one side of the High Street facing the magnificent elegance and edifice that is Cromer Parish Church. The cafe is overlooked in many other ways, I'll mention two. One, in Winter its windows mist up so badly you'd think there was a sauna going on inside, and two, its a not fully convincing hybrid of cafe and art/craft gallery. From the street it presents a mixed message: what would make you go in there; what is this trying to be? Does the gallery have something to say other than the provision of quality caffeine and catering and is this integrated  into the ethos of the cafe as a whole, or is the rest of it solely a bit of arty set dressing?

We've been to here a few times, its never been atrociously bad, but any expectations of superlative coffee or cakes will always be shaken awake from their wistful dreaming. The art on show speaks volumes. The presentation and quality of them is quite average. Largely hovering in that twilight region between the amateur and the gifted semi-professional maker, where you know you've seen these ideas before, and that they can be done a lot better.

The cafe appears to have changed hands recently. The art /craft on show is grouped better. The real problem is curation, the third rate devaluing the better quality. With a cafe/ gallery hybrid both aspects ought to augment the other. The coffee /cakes matching the quality of the art and vice a versa. Here average cafe meets average art.  But then if you pitch yourself a notch or two above a church craft fair, this will let the whole thing down. If you are going to flaunt artistic pretensions by calling yourself The Art Cafe, then why not fulfil them to abundance?

So, that's all well and good, but what about the carrot cake? Come on Vidyavajra do your self- appointed job properly, you've painted the scenery, what happened here? I've had a previous painful culinary experience in this cafe, admittedly under the old management, with a courgette and lime cake that would've failed a blind taste test. The courgette and the lime were so finely balance they appeared to negate each other, producing a cake empty of all flavour and relish. Under new ownership, lets give them another chance. I ordered my slice of carrot cake with a flat white chaser and quietly sat awaiting delivery.

The usual cake & coffee photo lies imprisoned on my phone, so you will just have to imagine what the cake and the flat white looked like as served. The size of the cup the flat white arrived in was almost as big as the cake, which tells you only one thing doesn't it?  This will not be a flat white of small but superlative joy, but a downsized latte with jumped up pretensions. As such it was fine, but as a flat white it was not OK, and lets leave it there shall we, lest the vented steam emitted from all my orifices mists up the cafe's windows..... again.

Now to the cake, judged on outward appearance alone looked promising, a sizable slice, good colour and recognisable carrot texture, with very evident sultanas evenly spread across it. I bit my lip and held my suspicious nature in check for a while, sat back and really took it in. It might, after all the preening pickiness of my preamble, be a surprise pleasance.

Once rendered to the mouth, tongue and palate the texture held up well. The sultanas tasted succulent and there was a gentle suggestive amount of spices. It was perhaps a tad too airy for a carrot cake, it could have born being a little weightier to fully meet my admittedly exacting standard. The filling and frosting was a cream cheese one, thankfully, of adequate dimensions and not overly sweetened. The top frosting had the obligatory freckle of catering chopped nuts, which whilst providing welcome texture always exist in a culinary dimension where flavour can not survive. In short, it was quite good, in an above average sort of way.

Postscript
Later that day we both had badly upset stomachs. What was it that we both had?  Our minds cast back to those last two pieces of carrot cake we took from the cake counter and their cream cheese filling. Lets just hope it wasn't those, eh?


CARROT CAKE SCORE  - 5/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY 38 - Days And Days of Routine Verses

And this is how things go.

Arise, usually, around 5
make a slow cooked bowl of porridge
with fruit or compote
a soothing bergamot infused tea
I sip and compliment the cup.

Hubby has
coffee brought to him
in bed.

depending upon the satisfactoriness
or otherwise, of slumber
I read or find something
on I Player, to go down easily
without frisson or demand.

7.00 am, shower and relocate,
where do I go to? its where I
zoom zazen, with rituals plus
a brief codicil of 'I'm OK', concluding
daily devotion.

Hubby makes coffee
we take a walk
together, hither.

weekends divest themselves of
weekdays, the latter being
workdays, Hubby sewing or
computes,  whilst outside
in the petite dark workshop.

Is where I remake the world
in small steps, utilising slow sandpaper
transformations, consume the hours,
concentration and the curses
preceding victory.

11am
genmaicha tea
with buttered crumpets.

Working hours run on
til lunch tuck, when
the post prandial nappette
drugs my sluggish return
to making mode

I tend to grind my teeth
over dinner, daily briefings
news upon a pandemonium
Trump's daily tantrum
and the worldwide litany of deaths

We scour Netflix for a passable evening,
a two hour distraction, a read,
or be a proactive buddhist
with a wall of frames, containing
familiar faces, in unfamiliar rooms.

9 pm, as slumber
beckons to bed reading, a few pages more
of  Hilary Mantel's historical brick
til the spine cleft drops on my face
and its goodnight Hubby.

kiss, kiss, kiss.

And this is how things go.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF- The Buckminster Fuller Reader

• 
  

Buckminster Fuller was not a shy man, he knew the worth of his ideas and was not reticent in self promoting them. When I read this book in my late teens he was a familiar name without my understanding exactly who he was and what he'd done i.e geodesic domes, maps etc

If there was a person who personified thinking 'outside the box' it was Buckminster Fuller. To my teenage eyes his relentlessly practical idealism I found inspiring. Yes, some of his ideas might strike you as cranky.  But the questions he posed and his analysis were frequently right on the button,  though usually coming at you from left field. It was like briefly inhabiting the mind space of some one who dared to dream, then systematically brought them into life.

He was critical of traditional scientific and industrial research because he thought they resisted working outside the conventions of existing knowledge and technology.  If you wanted to find truly revolutionary ideas he said, you wont find them in universities, MIT or the Ford Company. There was probably some thing personal in him saying this, having had a lifetime struggling to convince those self same institutions to invest in and develop his ideas, but it holds a degree of truth nonetheless.

He famously once asked an architect how much his buildings weighed. This was his way of opening up the subject of how you made efficient use of limited resources, which he explored further in his book of futuristic thinking - Critical Path.  Within it inward looking nationalistic viewpoints are challenged by a book full of Big Ideas and global collaborative solutions to humanities resource and climate problems and ultimately it's survival. So not entirely without contemporary relevance.

Other Buckminster Fuller Reading:
 - Critical Path
 - Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

200 WORDS ON - Solitude

'I never found a companion who was so companionable as solitude' - Thoreau

We all need time alone. Solitude is a restorative experience. Removing ourselves from our high density urban world, slowing down, close to nature and away from the usual hubble-bubble. We may arrive bearing the existential bruises of city living, but through experiencing solitude we begin healing the wounds to our sense of who we are and how we relate to others. Its as though we are a computer that needs regular de-fragging of all the useless junk clogging up it functioning better.

Today we’re always in communication and available, the thought of even a day away from portable devices can feel alarming. Being alone brings worries and fears to the surface, but most recede once we sit looking out of a window at a wind tossed landscape, taking in nature, taking in ourselves. Doing nothing for as long as possible.

Solitude needs to be chosen. Self-isolating in a pandemic, feels imprisoning because it wasn't at our instigation. Solitude need not be viewed as starvation, but as nutrition. Learning how to enjoy being with just you, the only desire to be in better touch with oneself, content within solitude.

ARTICLE - Aesthetic Awakenings

Aesthetic Awakenings - To Art

It was the fulfilment of a long held wish to visit The Van Gogh Museum  in Amsterdam. Van Gogh being my first artistic love. It was such an immense pleasure to see all his fabulous paintings laid out in front of me. It was like conversing with old familiar friends. I ambled slowly around the busy galleries, trying to soak up as much as possible, staring for longer when I came across particular favourites. Then as I turned one corner on the wall facing me was a picture I hadn't seen before. It was a simple painting of a woodland floor called Undergrowth. The moment my eyes saw it I instantly felt a pulse of ecstatic energy awakened in me. This moved from head to foot and back again like a bliss filled strobe. This continued for some time, until that analytical bit of my brain kicked its way through my motionless transfixed state. I then rushed around trying to locate where my husband was to tell him what had just happened.

This type of embodied thrill of experience is not an everyday experience for me. I can only recollect two other occasions with a similar intensity. One, being strongly moved spiritually by a the oscillating shimmer of Rothko's brushstrokes, another, was a second painting of Van Gogh's called Long Grasses with Butterflies. It is significant that both experiences with the Van Gogh's were simple paintings of the ground - woodland undergrowth and grasses. That said, I don't need to fully pin down why this might be, I'm content to leave this with a little aura of mystery. To intellectually explain everything might rationalise it out of existence. My heart understands.

Aesthetic awakenings to art can span a wide spectrum of feeling, from fondness, to besotted love to full blown bliss. The opposite ( aesthetic terminations?) is also true when indifference shifts to mild dislike and ends up in violent hatred. However strongly a piece of art strikes us its leaving an indelible mark upon our perception and being. We tend to judge the worth of art based on our feelings, of our likes and dislikes, by its monetary value, or according to the current fashion, the personal taste of whether it would go with your curtains. If we stayed loyal to that first aesthetic awakening we would know it has nothing to do with any of those things. Once we've made the decision we like or dislike something, its then become solely an object for intellectual curiosity. Seeking out further information to back up and validate whatever our initial response was. The aesthetic awakening disappears beneath our analysis.

As soon as matters of taste or intellect become the primary mode, our way of swimming in the aesthetic awakening to an artwork, then enters the shallower end of the pool. We have moved from a pure aesthetic experience to one that propagates ideas and judgements, where well defined interpretive boundaries begin being set up. We cease being receptive to anything not previously filtered and passed through this self vetting. The aesthetic awakening becomes incorporated into your self view, as an informed discerning person with the sensitivity and refined form of taste required to experience this sort of thing.

Aesthetic Awakenings - To The Truth

When I first heard The Four Noble Truths my initial response was like an aesthetic awakening.  My spirits were uplifted at being given important sustenance. Since then I've had a few such significant moments, when I first heard the Ten Precepts, when I first heard the words of Dogen from his Instruction To The Tenzo, to name two. Each time they resonated with an often unrecognised need within me. Suddenly I was awakened to a different way of seeing my self or the world.  I could never go back to how I was before. Sometimes the spiritual path is a gradual evolution in our awareness and opening up to a truth, but these aesthetic awakenings are more abrupt revolutions, overturning our previous way of perceiving. Its the essence of vidya an aesthetic knowledge or intuitive sense for the truth when its laid out before you.

Afterwards of course you think about it endlessly, often in great detail. You read the background books and learn all you can. This is what the intellect is good at, explaining and expanding the breadth of your understanding. This intellectual rationalisation of an aesthetic awakening has a unfortunate side effect of neutering the original experience. Creating inhibiting obstacles that further direct communication of the truth has to overcome. Our practice can turn into one of self-improvement, refining personal spiritual tastes and self-expression, where openness and receptivity get demoted or lost.

I know I have particular preferences for certain types of Dharma, I hold that these are things that 'work for me'. Overtime these self-definitions can close down experiencing anything that doesn't quite fit within the autobiographical brief I've now set out for myself. I create an equally strong dislike to reinforce my strong like. Though knowing what works for you can be useful, when times get difficult you need to know where to go to find sources for inspiration, support and guidance. At times my hold on faith deserts me. Time and again reading Dogen reminds and reconnects me.

I recently experienced a strong aversion whilst studying The Diamond Sutra.  Its a text I've read numerous times over the years and not had any noticeable difficulty with before. The Diamond Sutra should never be light reading, it is extremely challenging, the repetitive literary style alone can be confronting. But, considering my familiarity with it, the vehemence of my indignation and frustration, took me completely by surprise. I was struggling to find a way of relating to it.  I found myself trotting out all sorts of self justifications, why this translation of the Diamond Sutra wasn't a good one, as a teaching I connect better with impermanence rather than sunyata, that studying it just didn't work for me. This wasn't a lack of intellectual understanding, this was emotional and personal, it was about my individualistic preferences being traduced, the exclusivity of particular Dharmic preferences. I was putting up a fight with these and resisting engaging or changing them with all my might.

Like with art, whenever someone pulls out justifications of taste or intellectual rationalisations for why a Dharma text doesn't work for them, we have entered the same shallower end of the pool.  I'd turned away from the possibility of an aesthetic awakening and tuned in to Radio Self Justification. There are artists whose work I didn't like or understand when I first came across them, whom I now really love, value and appreciate. Partly what changed was me or my perspective, over time I'd become more receptive. Usually I'd encountered something that provided a way in, an aesthetic sense for how to appreciate what the artist was trying to do.

Our responses to Sutras and other Dharma texts can follow very similar pathways. You may simply not be ready for it yet, but how will you know when you are if you walk away every time you encounter it? My resistance and insistence upon dislike was flagging up that I needed to sit with and hear what lies beneath this response. There will be a way for you to appreciate any text. But this needs to be allowed to emerge, unsolicited and arriving often from an unexpected direction. Whatever way they arrive, they will arrive despite our reservations, because we've been willing to stay open and stay with it.

Rather than over indulging in emotional re-activity and rationalisations for why its justified to loath The Diamond Sutra. I'm trying to take a step back, to not close and bolt the door entirely against it. Trying to stay open to the possibility that the inflexible nature of my views could change. Remaining patient with both the Sutra and myself. For the time may come, when something will present a particular key to a teaching, an aesthetic awakening that opens up the Sutra and point out a way to the truth.