MY OWN WALKING - The Anniversary Issue

The 10th of July, was a Friday this year. It was the second anniversary of my heart attack. How much things have significantly moved on since then. My gratitude for being alive, still able to enjoy a good life, still free of debilitating illness, has only grown deeper. Obviously some or all of this could, and probably will, change at some point.  I remain mindful of not taking life and it's quality for granted or acting as if wishful assumptions were fortune cookies, for how long I have left to live. Padmasambhava's invocation helps me bear in mind that - I do not have. I do not understand, I do not know - what the future holds. This should be painted across the dawn sky of every day. Because time fritters away, despite my intentions for it to be otherwise. 

In the run up to the anniversary, I found myself amidst the high point of the heatwave, becoming despondent and frustratedly angry. Time spent in the shadow of a heart attack, can sometimes make me far too precious about not wasting time. I wasn't finding enough productive time to work on my art projects. I felt to be constantly having my attention drawn elsewhere. And though this was all true to a degree , despondency ( well it is pretty much my oldest friend ) returned to undermine any artistic resolve and creative impulse I might have. At its worst, attacking the very act of creation itself. Who after all was this for? What was it all in aid of ? Isn't it just so much easier to not do it at all? Pointing towards its lack of utility and rationally putting a stop to art altogether. 

Then I watched an old documentary of Hockney in old age returning to his native Yorkshire. He said, with his usual casual bluntness, that he found no point at all in dwelling on the imminence or otherwise of his death, and just kept coming back to his creativity as being the best thing he could do with his time. Which made me feel a whole lot better about my own art practice. Creating art has intrinsic value to the artist. Art may have no practical use, but that doesn't make it meaningless. It requires nothing else from you, than that you turn up and do it.

Last year on the first anniversary of my heart attack I took myself off, on a very hot day, to Walsingham. I remember having rather too heightened an expectation of it. This year, I decided a repeat journey to Walsingham was required, but in a more relaxed and less needy manner. I'd just turn up for whatever it offered. The weather forecast was for an extremely hot day, between 28- 30 degrees Celsius. So I'd have to play it by ear, just how much being baked by it I was up for. Two bus journeys later I was stepping off in Walsingham.  There was a cooling breeze as I headed out towards Great Walsingham. As I set off, a very odd thing happened, a three legged dog came running down the street past me, purposefully belting along on an urgent mission. Slightly bemused I carried on. I have since realised that this incident metaphorically gave physical form to how I've been feeling about my spiritual life recently.  You can definitely get a fairway in Buddhism using three legs, but the sense of something being amputated from it, like a fourth leg, seems eventually inescapable. Buddhism, for all its self evident value to me, has started to feel like that. Lacking in an essential fourth leg. Enlightenment is not a thing you can talk to or relate with on a human level. It's an ideal, practically and imaginatively, disconnected from where I am, on the other side of it. I am like a dog running fast on three legs, confusing speed with purpose.

The road to Great Walsingham is actually very beautiful.  The village itself is the definition of picturesque, with its tree lined streets, dappled shade, and a bridged path crossing a forded stream. You do wonder how undervalued Great Walsingham's Parish Church must feel, when there has always been so many bigger grander buildings, just down the road from you. Once you emerge onto the green you see ahead of you a small former Victorian Methodist Chapel, converted into The Orthodox Church of The Holy Transfiguration. With its icon painted tympanum over the entrance door. Inside is a tiny undiscovered gem of a church. Bedecked with numerous icons and traditional iconostasis screen. It possess a charm and magical feel uniquely all its own. I took plenty of photos, picked up a leaflet about an online course to discover what Orthodoxy is all about, and left.

I took the back road from Great Walsingham toward its larger relative Little Walsingham, and the Anglican Shrine Church. I have a long term objective to 'church lark' all the main religious buildings in Walsingham. I've taken photos of the Shrine Church before, but never with a view for giving you an overall sense of it. Phone camera at the ready I made a start. But after a while I realised my heart wasn't really in it. This was not why I was here today. I was here to pray, give thanks and express my gratitude for another year of life. So I put my phone camera away.

The Shrine itself is a recreation, conceived right down to the original proportions, of the medieval shrine. Over the years I've become closely familiar with it.  I lit a couple of candles and after some hesitation decided to kneel down and pray. Just as I was getting my head around the idea of starting, - in walked a priest. Who came right over,  stood right next to me shuffling and sorting through paperwork, as though I wasn't  really there. I suddenly got the sense that perhaps here was not going to be the right place to do what I felt I needed to. The Anglican Shrine is like this, I have frequently found it too busy as a place. Even though it requests silence, it is very prone to the activity and noise generated by tourists, school parties, congregations for its services and priests, apparently. This is rarely a place of serenity and stillness, for quiet contemplation. So I left, had some lunch, and prepared myself to walk the Holy Mile to the Slipper Chapel.

The top pathway to the Slipper Chapel, with its panoramic landscapes, has very little shade to protect you from the sun. So I took the low road, which though busy with traffic, has a stream that runs alongside it and is regularly shrouded in shade from its trees. Though only a mile, the heat of the day was now high. So by the time I reached the Slipper Chapel I was a very over heated sweaty pilgrim. It was then, a far from unflustered person who sat down in the Chapel.  It took a while just to arrive, to externally and inwardly cool myself down the best I could. Until I felt prepared and fully present enough to kneel down by the communion rail to pray.

I have no remembered experience, as an adult, of having prayed in a church before. Though I must have done so in my Church of England Primary School days, and when I was a chorister. And here I was, now about to pray, it felt an odd thing for a sixty nine year old Buddhist to be doing, After all who do I imagine I am praying too? I read recently about the simplest form of prayer, it is structured similar to the Metta Bhavana, you start with yourself, move your attention outward to family and friends and to the world. And that was how I got myself engaged with it. What I prayed for was between me, Our Lady, God and the universe. It started and ended with a feeling of gratitude. As I sat back in my chair, this felt like an extremely important and beautiful thing to have done. 

As I sat there feeling satisfied, my attention was being distracted by a large fluttering butterfly up in the altar canopy above. It was flying into the chapel, then back towards the stained glass and on hitting this immovable surface, flew back out again. Doing this over and over again. As I gazed upwards transfixed with this, a sudden instruction erupted into my mind - You must write about this. Grabbing my phone, I opened the Notes App and began hurriedly writing for a minute or so in one long unpunctuated paragraph of whatever came into my head. Afterwards I felt this huge sensation of uplift and elation, that's still there every time I re-read it.

Here it is. The only thing I've done subsequently has been punctuate, correct grammar, insert one phrase and rephrase another for better comprehension. Some sentences feel to require further reflection on my part to unpack them further. Here I leave them as they are. 

' The butterfly newly re-born knows not where to go, nor how to be, so it flutters around bumping into things, sometimes the same things repeatedly. But like stained glass whose beauty attracts your attention, you cannot batter your way through it. Beauty can become an obstacle, as well as a lure. Beauty can be misleading, we can assume goodness  if someone or something is beautiful. Beauty can be just beauty, not a portal to something else. Until the butterfly comes to know its own form better, it  should settle on a tree and be supported by that. Until the day it is clear what its purpose is in the shadow land on the approaches to death. All death is a portal to another death, for death is a form of transformation. Its how you transition from one state to another.'