After his return to Germany earlier this year, it was so good to meet my friend Eugen again. Being greeted by his beaming presence in the airport lobby was a lovely welcome. I've missed the delight of his company, for both the fun and the depth that our conversations will often go to. Eugen lives in Kreutzberg, an area of Berlin with quite a track record as a place of shelter for political radicals,social outcasts and immigrants. It has a cosmopolitan and bohemian air,with a vast range of ethnic cafés, restaurants and shops that straddle the globe in the cultures they encompass. Quite a lot them are established in cellars, from second hand clothes stores through to art galleries. Eugen's flat is in this area, and I can see why he's fond of it. Apart from being a cheap area to live, it does have a warm approachable atmosphere to it. It was a popular place for squats in the sixties and seventies. Now Turkish immigrants are making their home here and contributing to an already rich mix of culinary styles available.
My first impression of Berlin was of the width of the streets, broad with two or three lanes going either way, trees lining both the right, left and middle. Large curved lamposts lean out over the road like tall distinguished gentlemen, they seem to say ' Here Sir, let me provide you with more light.' The urban environment of Berlin seems less pressured, openminded, civilised and respectful. The pavements are wide too, in most cases they include a separate path for bicycles. You can cycle everywhere with great ease and safety, the network of cycle paths is extensive. I hadn't cycled for a few years, so a sore bum and tired throbbing thighs were an inevitable outcome of my first full day of touring central Berlin. Over the four days we often found ourselves cycling alongside the former position of the Berlin Wall. Dividing up a city in this way seems ludicrous these days, but then in the Post War years, a strange paranoia did hang over Europe.
Berlin is full of building sites, as an astounding range of modern buildings still spring up to fill the gaps a war and a wall have left. The new Reichstag and Presidential buildings are splendid examples of modernism, the use of surrounding space, the playfulness with form and perspective, all make these buildings outstanding. I've reluctantly concluded that only continental Europeans seem to know how to pull off this style. Even though they often use English architects, one cannot forget they have a substantial architectural and design inheritance as the birthplace of German Gothic and the Bauhaus.
Should we attempt anything so bold and large scale in England,we invariable do it half heartedly, under fund it, and generally handle it in mean spirited, cack handed manner. According to Peter Ackroyd in his book on the English imagination, we have a cultural bias against big visions ( architectural or otherwise ), to me its both a character distinction and a limitation to our imagination. For me, there was a great sense of uplift and inspiration, of some faith being restored, to see architectural vision carried out with such bravura and care. I love Berlin for that if nothing else.
The Holocaust Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe is an astonishingly bold public statement of remorse, constructed right in the heart of Berlin's prime real estate. As a gay man I need to carp about the exclusion of other groups murdered by the Nazi from this memorial, but that does not detract from its evident emotional power. Walking through it was a major highlight of my all too brief visit to Berlin.
I have yet to encounter a European airport that remotely resembles an English one. Stansted Airport has a beautifully designed shell, to walk into it should be like entering a large open and airy tent, a cool, spacious place you're instantly at ease with and can find your way around. Instead you arrive into a visually confusing entrance, so much demands your attention as you're barraged by information and a layout that isn't instantly comprehensible. After check in you quickly find yourself ushered into a cramped bazaar, under retail duress in very tawdry looking circumstances. What is worse is that you have to take half your clothes off in public, be x-rayed, your shoes scanned and the privacy of your luggage invaded, before you even get to it. It wasn't worth the wait.
Having said goodbye to my luggage for an hour or two, I waited for my plane to be ready to board, it was already gone 5 am and the retail malls were just stirring into life. In English airports shops are crammed into the smallest of spaces, to maximise rental income, which creates a pokey and oppressive sense of space. The piped music and flashy shop fittings remind one of a tart, all lip gloss and heavily applied eye shadow, trying hard to be alluring but ending up being vulgar and repulsive.
Once the flight gate was open I was off, I couldn't wait to get out of that trashy corral. Just a quick dash to the loos and then on to my departure lounge. An atmosphere surrounds the layout of Stansted, it feels like an environmental experiment which, being only temporary, will soon be replaced by a permanent version that will make more sense. This feeling extends to the toilets and the departure lounges. Whilst I sat looking bleary eyed around at my fellow early risers, it dawned on me why this was - both spaces are constructed from exactly the same materials. My departure lounge looked for all the world as if it were formed from recycled portaloo cabins. One could readily expect signs apologising, not for the inconvenience, but for looking like one.
Some interior design decisions confound logic and experience; knowing the volume of travellers passing through a busy airport like Stansted, what self respecting designer thinks its a good place to lay down carpet. Carpets that are stained from all manner of liquid spillages ( speakable and unspeakable ) ,have ground into them dust, fag ash and random spits of gum, the pile crushed then formed into wrinkles and rucks from the ceaseless barrage of luggage trolleys dragged across them. Carpet doesn't make an airport any quieter or a cosier place to be, it just transforms it into a grim, grubby, and gross place to be. Rip all the carpets up at once and lay some shiny linoleum - please!
If you descend from Arrivals/Departures the aesthetics take a turn for the worse. You enter a concrete bunker, where service ducts and pipes move in parallel with passengers trying to find their bus or train platform. It leaves an impression that money ran out and this perfunctory basement was all they could afford. All pretence at creating a comfortable, pleasantly human environment vanishes and you are left in a place where alienation is your only option. Some spaces seem designed for criminal activity, in this case for muggings and a good kicking in the underpass.
Arrivals at Berlin's Schonefeld Airport was a noticeable calmer and more relaxed space. It's not really an international airport, so it hasn't to deal with anything like the same amount of passengers passing through its gates. It is, however, clean, well maintained and uncluttered by the confusing plethora of signs and advertising that frequently blights and bares down on you in English airports. German signs appear to be fewer in number, only telling you essential information, often in easily understood symbolic form. The designers have taken simple and bold decisions, like making advertising spaces go from floor to ceiling across whole walls, and integral to the aesthetic effect of a space. The shopping area is contained to one broad unfussy corridor, the shops consisting of two duty free, a bakers/cafe and a burger king. The appearance is of a spacious, clean and visually pleasant place to be, and what's more, there wasn't a strip of carpet in sight, anywhere! When I see this level of care and attention I despair of being English, we are so often revealed to be clumsy amateurs when it comes to designing effective, efficient and human spaces, it is shameful.
A minimalist bass lines slowly fades up into hearing, coming and going like a radar. Thirty five seconds later, after what seems like a wait of an eternity, the thwack of an unadorned drum beat enters, followed a few seconds later by the sparse twang of a simple electric guitar riff. These are then augmented by a male vocal style of characterless and studied ordinariness,as he sings ' your down in a hole, your down in the ground, its 7am and your scratching around, the moneys all gone, and your poor like the poor, your lover just called, she don't love you no more, your in the black bunker' this is further enhanced by unsophisticated screams and whelps from a back up singer who has all the vocal skill and refinement of a cheerleader standing at the side of a football pitch. You have unwittingly stumbled into the musical sound scape of Prinzhorn Dance School's first album.
There are only two people present Prinz ( Male ) and Horn ( Female ) they comprise PDS. Sometimes their sound is artfully contrived and odd in a very knowing way. Like performance art punk rock, you might like it, but you certainly can't dance to it. It does, however, possess its own peculiar delights like chocolates that have been deliberately misshapen in production. They've set the musical boundaries they're exploring, no wanton adornments like excessive use of echo, treatments or electronic embellishments of any kind, instruments are recorded so ' snare drums sound like snare drums' as they express it. There is often large volumes of space, moments of silence, gaps interspersed amongst the music like a dare - how long can you wait before you just have to make a sound. This is quite a constriction and discipline to place on yourself, even though at times the plodding drum and guitar sound does become a bit well trodden and over familiar. If this band is going to thrive they''ll need to develop more musical inventiveness within their minimalism or break out of it, otherwise they're will be no difficult third album.
Quirky and gauche could be one way to describe them. They revive a particular musical aesthetic which emerged from early eighties 'indie rock', defiantly individual, with an uncompromising distinctive vision. Comparisons aren't always useful, but at times in spirit they did remind me of The Fall, with a dash of Young Marble Giants, early Slits and Jonathan Richman ( on their song - Hansworthy Sports and Leisure Centre ) thrown into the pot. Were he still alive PDS would have been played enthusiastically by John Peel, I am sure. Their form of eccentricity frequently is too self consciously abstracted and off beat to be widely commercial, but it is curiously addictive nonetheless. You could become extremely fond of them, but beware - never fall in love with them, there is something on the edge of becoming unhinged or perverted here. They have a pretty queer imagination manifesting in their lyrics, which doesn't always stay the right side of rational coherence. Prinz intones 'I do not like change, I always walk this way,I do not like change – l like memorised fact,I like memorised fact,bible premiership stat, I like memorised fact – I got sticker book pic, you, you talk too quick, I got sticker book pic – I do not like touch, you, you talk too much, I do not like touch.' Then they will surprise you with some wry understated humour like 'do you know your butcher, DO YOU know your baker, do you know your paper comes from the big store, next to the big store.'
Yes, Prinzhorn Dance School are an acquired taste, but then a lot of very good things are.
I'm barely a few minutes drive away from work,on my way to pick up David from his work. On the slip road approaching the A14 a silver car wavers impatiently behind my back bumper. As we near the motorway he indicates and begins to move out over the cross hatched area before I've reached the inside lane. I'm forced into further accelerating, I can just about see beyond him a red lorry in the outside lane and think the coast is clear for me to enter. The lorry, because my impatient pursuer lies between us, is unaware of me. I'm in his blind spot and he moves into mine. Having passed the silver car he believes it's OK to move back into the inside lane. All I could see was his left indicator light flashing as he whanged right into the side of me. The force of this propels the left side of my car straight onto the hard shoulder, ripping the front off, blowing a tyre and ironing my doors flat. This never seems to happen in car chases in movies, however, I come to a juddery halt. I sit holding my hands tightly to the top of my head I'm in shock, my breathing is panicky,sharp and shallow. All I'm thinking is how I'm going to get to the Crematorium now and to phone David. The car is obviously dead, and I am obviously not.
The lorry driver stops, phones 999, and runs back to see how I am. All doors
bar one are inoperable so I exit out the one rear door that will open. A little
dazed and I stumble out grasping a rucksack and battered Tesco bag. When the police and ambulance arrive I am still a bit stunned and can't quite take in all their saying. They seem to be speaking very fast. There was some sense of mourning for the loss and demise of the car, particularly as I watched it hauled like a crippled insect onto the accident recovery vehicle. After all the expense and effort of getting myself back into driving, in barely a few moments my circumstances seem suddenly reverted to how they were eighteen months ago. Yet I've always had a diffident relationship with driving, seeing it as a somewhat unfortunate necessity tied up with my working at the Crematorium. I don't take much interest in cars generally, my own was no exception, just so long as it worked. Though I will miss the freedom of mobility it brought, it did come at a high cost to me personally and to the environment. To be free of this seems a blessed release.
I've been very lucky, no physical injuries, no whiplash to speak of, just a stiff neck, shoulders, back , and in mild shock for a day or so. I was literally a few inches away from being crushed to death. Fortunately the lorry driver reacted quickly to his mistake in judgement or else I would have become a further statistic to add to the list of A14 fatalities. That the car has become a right off so near to my leaving working for the Crematorium seems appropriate somehow. I wouldn't need to use it much from September onwards, once I'm able to walk to work. Longer term I had been wondering what I would do about the car anyway. Now whatever money emerges from the Insurance I can use towards clearing my loan, which will be a great financial boon.
David has remarked how amazed he is with how calm and unruffled I've remained. I presume my work has had some effect on how I view the proximity of mortality. I'm in daily contact with the aftermath and consequences of death, some of which are quite tragic. So I've not felt emotionally traumatised or tearful, what has happened has happened, and fortunately I'm still alive to tell the tale. Whatever is to come, all those future things I get anxious and fret about, seem less worthy of the attention that I normally give them. The force of my desires for something other than what I currently have, often creates a whirl of suffering and discontent around it. Having been so close to death I feel more appreciative and content with the life I've got, and so grateful that I'm still alive to see that with greater clarity.
Those of you who read my blog regularly will be all too aware that I've had my struggles with working at the Crematorium. Sometimes being a Chapel Attendant can feel like you're a Stage Manager to a repertory theatre company, where every thirty minutes there's a completely new unrehearsed drama. It's vitally important that the staging and timing all go correctly and according to the script, you only get one chance to get it right. This process, as you can imagine, induces quite a bit of tension, quite apart from the strong emotional nature of the scripts contents. Though I've learned to deal with this, and gained a great amount from the last eighteen months of working there - the time to move on dawns.
I had an interview this week for the job of Customer Services Manager at Windhorse:Evolution, where I used to work before. I heard yesterday that I have got the job. Today I gave the Crematorium my months notice, so by the beginning of September I'll no longer be a Chapel Attendant/Cremation Technician ( Pay Band 3 ). The new job will not be without its fresh responsibilities and noble challenges for me to face no doubt. I'm returning to Windhorse primarily because it is an excellent context for work and practice, where I know my contributions will be valued and valuable, plus, so many of my best friends work there. Some of my best qualities can find expression and further develop, whilst they appear only to get stored away unused in my current position.Whilst my new job could indeed prove to be stressful at times, it can't be anything like as strong an experience as burning dead bodies, or being around bereaved distraught people day in day out. Hopefully this move will at the very least provide a steadier more even work/life balance. So I return home of an evening less drained emotionally, and better able to focus on creativity- on writing.
This dream was a re-occuring one, I've been here at least twice before. I own this stock room, and two woman keep bringing me boxes of fruit to store in it, for which they pay me money. From time to time I check through the contents to see their state, taking out the bruised, rotten and moldy ones. In the dream at Padmaloka I open one of the boxes and inside are a number of large pears, all of which have been, or are in the process of being, eaten away from the inside by ants.
Returning to Padmaloka Retreat Centre after an absence of about three years
The retreat programme included four substantial meditation sits a day. For a man whose been struggling to maintain more than twenty minutes, it was quite a cranking up of my practice. I chose to throw myself into it, to do only Metta and Mindfulness practices, and no Pure Awareness. After a lengthy absence from a formal and structured meditation practice I found I loved doing them both. My prolonged adherence to Pure Awareness had the residual effect of making formal practice more receptive and relaxed, lacking the willful heady tension that I remember once being such an issue.
For the first three days or so I felt extraordinarily tired and slept at every available opportunity, I couldn't get enough of lying horizontal on a mattress. As the week progressed some fracturing of this solid sleep pattern returned me to something all too recognisable. One morning I awoke, and on thinking about getting up to meditate felt a flashback to a previously familiar response,one of resistance tinged with resentment. This was a bit of a wake up call. I do have a tendency on retreat to go to everything. It comes out of a heartfelt desire to make the most of this opportunity to meditate. This somehow can become a fixed and immovable objective. My response previously would have been to joyfully override the resistance and power on to the end of the retreat, and sometimes this was an appropriate way to proceed. On this occasion, taking into account that I'd also been experiencing on alternate days a desire to withdraw from social interaction, I suddenly realised what was happening; I just wasn't allowing myself enough space to stand back and absorb what was arising from meditation. So, for the last few days I dropped my engagement down a few gears and all was well. It was then that I had two dreams. strong and significant dreams which both happened all in one night, these I will document separately.
Padmavajra gave talks on The Dhammapada,which as usual were accessible and down to earth expositions, with some very pointed and pithy material emerging. I was part of a discussion group that was also extremely lively and engaged, in an experiential rather than theoretical way. A lot of very frank explorations of how practice feels when you are out in the world, but with no direct plugs into a supportive Buddhist context. Quite often, it seems all too easy to feel we are floundering or losing our way simply because we lack those recognisable signposts that a Buddhist institution provides. Yet,this can be so misleading, as the painter George Grosz once said :-
' All that can be said withe certainty is that every talented beginner is like a wine in ferment, filled with something he can vaguely feel but not yet express. Still, even as he flounders, he is forging ahead.'
So to Lokesvara, Dave, Rod, Miles and Nick I'd just like to say thanks for being a very significant part of an enjoyable retreat.
The first things to say is that you are long gone so you wont hear it, at least not in this world. In a way a eulogy could be seen as the summary and conclusions that can be drawn from your life. It's like the final chapter in a novel that hopefully pulls all the strands together,what others understand of us and what it all meant to them, what our life story seemed to be about. Or it could be simply the fulfillment of a prophecy that was implied, in potential at least, by the moment of your birth. Though these are to an extent self-referential viewpoints, and as I've already stated you're no longer around to receive these accolades for a life well spent ( or mis-spent ). A eulogy is primarily out of our control, it will be given if we are lucky by a good friend or a perceptive relative. I have to say though. that in my experience eulogies will be given, nine times out of ten, by clergy/officiants who did not know you. They put it very nicely and tactfully say ' I never had the pleasure of meeting Jack myself, but I've had the good fortune to talk with Brenda and Charles last week, to hear and collect their memories and fond recollections' which is longhand for saying 'I never met the guy, but it seems he was OK' They will then read the eulogy from a prepared script, which sometimes has been composed by the family, but more often not. This will say where, when and to whom the deceased was born, where they were educated, what jobs they did, who they married, how many children, where they lived and where and how they died. The barest of bare bones of a lifetime. So if you are thinking you'll receive a fulsome rejoicing of your merits,be prepared, it may not happen.
Of course there are many reasons why this is what happens. The main reason is that your family and friends will be too distraught, still coming to terms with their loss, and will understandable feel unable to do it themselves. I have to say that the most moving eulogies I've heard, ones that have given me a sense of what has been lost to the world and brought a tear to my eye, are the ones given by family members and close friends. Brave and obviously emotionally hardy individuals, who manage to find the strength and courage to evoke a tangible sense of the qualities of the deceased. I have felt profoundly humbled and in awe at such moments. My heart has genuinely been captured and gone out to the family. This is particularly so when the deceased has died young, or their was immense suffering.
It is a bit of a cliche that we do not speak ill of the dead, and I feel the need to question that as an assertion. Mostly eulogies do focus on what a persons best qualities were, and that can be a rare and admirable thing indeed to do. These are generally universal in tone; appreciations of how loving the deceased was and how they were loved in return, their quirks and eccentricities of behaviour being fondly recounted. Any faults of character, if they are refereed to at all, are done so euphemistically or in a diplomatic and roundabout manner. Typically ' they knew their own mind and what they wanted, and couldn't be dissuaded otherwise' being short hand for they could be bloody minded and intransigent at times, or 'they knew when they were right, and had the strength of character and courage to say so,' meaning they were often infuriatingly pompous and an arrogant sod. I find it hard to think of anyone whose behaviour hasn't mildly irritated me on an occasion, some with greater frequency than others. So these references, however elliptical in tone, do give a fuller more rounded picture of our sense of that person. Vital tints of vivid, if not violent, colours to enliven the pastel palette of muted pleasantries. I think we must speak well of the dead, and by that I mean truthfully – a balanced review which with circumspect reflection should include some of the warts as well.
So thirty years on from 1977, I'm working in a Crematorium, and all that seems a bit beside the point, and boredom is just the way life is sometimes. When I'm stood outside a chapel all day for twenty five minute intervals, whilst a service proceeds within, I get bored. When I'm inside the chapel overseeing the music, listening to a litany of Christian waffle, full of empty unsubstantiated promises from God about life, death and the possibility of heaven, I get bored. When I've cleaned every carpet, lectern, door, brass nob and catafalque for the umpteenth time this week, I get bored. One can even get bored with being around death all the time. It is, after all, not a place for lively engagement with cutting edge music, religious dialogue, political debate or the venting of existential vitriol.
My good friend Saddharaja asked me recently why I frequently felt the need, if not the urge, to design improvements or radically change things wherever I worked. What would happen if I didn't do that? What was it I was trying to avoid experiencing by this transforming activity? I could say boredom, but that would be far too easy a response. Boredom can itself be a type of evasion, the convenient arising of an alienated response to distract you from experiencing something which has much much deeper ramifications. Boredom can be a great disguise.
Stamping my presence on a situation or environment,brings me a transitory sense of being in control of meaning and purpose. This goes back to my late teens, around the time of Punk, when I was at Art College, where eventually, for a brief time once I left, I became a graphic designer. A designers whole raison d'etre is to promote the belief that a perfect well designed interior, furniture, clothes and even sanitaryware can radically transform your well being and life. I can sometimes experience the world humanity has built as an ugly travesty of nature,mostly sullied, soiled and polluted by our blind endeavour to achieve meaning through progress. I just wanted to change the way the world looked, make it clean, colourful and a bit more polished. Consequently, like a soul doctor, I only desire to bring beautiful things into it to heal the tawdry anima mundi.( world soul ) I've inherited.
Punk was essentially a movement born of nihilism, it hadn't a redemptive bone in its emaciated body. Whereas I'm quite the congenital perfectionist, I seem to want to perfect the world in general, and me specifically. This is the naïve mantle I've held crumpled to my heart for most of my adult life. The world should be perfect, a place of beauty, but it isn't. Life should be better organised, but it's a shambles most of the time. I should be perfectly happy, deeply content with all aspects of my life and experience, but I'm not. I should not be bored at work or by my life, but I often am. I appear to act as if I'm constantly having to make the best of a bad job, of the decidedly rum hand that reality has dealt me this time. As if reality has got it's own back on me for a past slight or infelicitous remark. When my pristine ideals plough straight into the shitheap of reality, I can descend into a depressed ennui for the loss of my beautiful utopia. In this I suspect, my actions are no different to those of the rest of humanity, who are likewise blind to what the purpose of it all is. So it is that we find ourselves all floundering together, creating a lot of insignificant angst and trivial froth in the process .
( See Quotation Marks No 13 )
Maybe life does have no meaning intrinsic to it whatsoever, which would quickly turn all my creative efforts into feeble attempts to paper over the widening cracks anyway. Perhaps this is what has really been driving my own pursuit of meaning, purpose and contentment all along– if life has no meaning then I must find it one - all this effort can't be allowed to go on for nothing, This is what brought me to become a Buddhist. Yet even the Buddhist- Path of Purification ,the practice of precepts , The Threefold Way etc,etc... can be easily misconstrued by me, or anyone else for that matter, as purely a path to personal perfection and self-development. In the end this path, if it's followed truly, must go beyond any sense of personal achievement, towards seeing realty and myself as they really are, however uncomfortable that may be. Whether reality or myself is perfect or imperfect would seem in the light of this, to be an irrelevant dichotomy - reality and myself might just turn out to be... boring. Transcendental Boredom!- you can see now why this idea hasn't caught on in a big way, but that paradoxically might mean that its true.
Whilst the transformation to the Enlightened state, the supreme insight into the meaninglessness and purposelessness of it all, still eludes me, I guess I'll keep finding myself devising these little stratagems and projects to engage with in it's absence - if I can't always be purposeful then at least I can be productive. Neither be a waste of space, nor lazy or indolent, but always keep busy - it's a bit of the Protestant work ethic lodged like shrapnel in my psyche, I was after all brought up a Methodist ( which is niether an excuse nor an apology, and certainly not a fatal condition). Ideally I'd find some form of contentment through activity I know to be meaningful. In the absence of that meaningful activity, I, like most people, have to make do with meaningless activity, or no activity at all. Though what happens as a result of too much meaningless activity is degenerative; it leads to mental disengagement, depressive mood fluctuations, disaffected behaviour and ultimately the caustic effects of resentful boredom.
At the moment I feel you can't really win until you're prepared to let go of winning.
For a while now I've been considering what my main spiritual practices are as a Buddhist. Over recent years I've withdrawn from many of the institutions of the Buddhist movement I belong to, because I realised I was over dependant on them to direct my spiritual compass – if I was doing these 'dutifully done things' then my spiritual practice must assuredly be on track. Removing these props did dump responsibility firmly in my lap and a protracted crisis of spiritual self confidence ensued. This week, after quite some months, if not years, of cogitating and reflecting I've come up with six basic areas of practices that I'm confident I can and do appear willing to maintain. Half of them correspond to cultivating The Threefold Way - Sila( ethics ) Samadhi ( meditation ) & Prajna ( wisdom ) so I've not drifted far from the foundation teachings of the Buddhist tradition. Anyway they go in no particular order or hierarchy, as follows :- SIX PRACTICES
APPLYING CREATIVE ENERGY
Brought to all the following practices, but also more specifically to self – expression through my writing and painting.
CULTIVATING FRIENDSHIPS
I seem to want to maintain these regardless of whatever else is happening in my life. Friends are a vital component part of my spiritual barometer and support network.
ETHICAL AWARENESS
Slips under the radar of being a conscious practice sometimes, so raising my awareness of my desire for ethical probity can only be good.
EVERDAY MEDITATION
That is 'everyday' as in regular, but also 'everyday' as including the ordinary daily things which happen off the cushion, as well as what happens on it.
REFLECTIVE STUDY
Primarily my own private study, but includes study I do with others. My writing on Dogen discourses cross over into this area, as that requires a lot of personal reflection.
MINDFUL WORK
Self explanatory I hope, but with the type of work I'm currently doing, keeping track on how I'm feeling and responding is a necessity.
To begin on a bright note. The 50th Birthday celebrations continued on into this week. There weren't noisy street parties or loud ecstatic firework displays exploding across the Cambridge countryside. Just a rousing 50th Birthday Party at our flat with half a dozen of my friends coming round for a convivial buffet meal. David put in a lot of time and effort into planning the meal,and into making it happen, so a big thanks goes out to him. He made a delicious Carrot &Walnut Cake, and a Frittata and presented well a number of other nibbly delicacies we'd bought. I'd made a Potato Salad the night before and an unusual Super-food Salad on the day. It seemed to be appreciated by one and all. The whole evening was enjoyable and a lot of light-hearted fun. It was also a pleasure to entertain so many people in our flat, I feel so lucky to have such good and faithful friends.
After three or so years I'm finally going on retreat again at the end of July, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've been re-reading The Dhammapada in preparation, using two stylistically very different translations. The first is by Sangharkshita, the founder of the Western Buddhist Order I belong to. This 'Dhammapada – The way of truth' struck me as being some what remorseless in tone, as it drew out a clear, but hard line, and read as a little unsympathetic towards the plight of us ordinary conditioned mortals. The other was styled as a rendering - A Dhammapada for Contemplation - composed by Ajahn Munindo. The ' for contemplation' seems a curious appellation, as if other translations aren't, though I think he just meant it to be easily comprehensible. I found the content did indeed begin to colour and seep into my consciousness. Sangharkshita translation extensively uses phrases fixed ( in brackets ) which. I know as a style of translation, is meant to highlight interpretive or connecting insertions not found in the original, but I find it visually encumbered the flow of sentences, in the manner of a rather stubborn nitpicker constantly interjecting. Munindo, by comparison uses a very colourful flow of imaginative language, with a very urgent but contemporary feel. His approach to rendering allows much freer modes of expression and is consequently less stilted and literalistic. It remains approachable without softening the Buddha's uncompromising edge, which Sangharakshita ,I felt, rather heavy-handedly over emphasised.
Contemplating these at work proved beneficial, as I've been in the Cremation Room, burning dead people all week. I've now got my Intermediate Cremation Technicians Certificate sellotaped to the wall. So, strangely, I feel like I am a professional now, rather than a bumbling, anxious amateur. Qualifications aside, I still want to leave working for the Crematorium. I've even been considering a return to Windhorse, though with, at present, a contradictory mix of feelings. I'm really not sure whether that's a good idea or not. Yet, having some idea of where to move on too, a means of escape, seems important at the moment. Without it I sometimes feel imprisoned in a very dingy bardo ( an in-between state ) indeed.
The ramifications of last weeks acupuncture session role on, and continues to accentuate the sense of an inner 'divided self'. This week I've been feeling a wider mix of emotional responses, but increasingly I've been an uncharacteristically irritable, angry and resentful being. On Wednesday, the day after my Birthday Party, I recognised I actually felt quite morbidly depressed. This, as you can imagine was not helpful, particularly as it felt not to be in reaction to anything in particular. It appears to be darker aspects of my psyche arising from being contained in my back and emerging into consciousness with greater intensity. If this is what my back has been holding onto,its no wonder its been troublesome. The pain in my back has been noticeable easing since these mood shifts.
Now studying The Dhammapada is all very well, but by Friday I felt the urgent need to apply the Dharma more assiduously to my current situation. I began reflecting on my relationship with aversion and craving. I've been experiencing severe aversion to my work for a few months now. Considering what I'm doing I guess you could say that's understandable. But I've been aware its as much the result of my mental state and approach, and not solely the effects of this context. My craving is for a happier, more consistently pleasurable and content Vidyavajra, though a way of helping this arrive has not transpired as yet. This leaves me experiencing both aversion and craving endlessly in a sort of perpetual loop. Frustration, irritability, boredom, lack of engagement and depression follow in the wake of this self- enforced passivity. What I find I tend to do in such situations is apply more emotional leverage. I pile more pressure on myself in an attempt to shift the apparent stalemate. This makes things fraught, complex to resolve and emotionally over loaded, so I can often see no further than the imperative to make an immediate change. When nothing improves it gets very black in here I can tell you. I'm like one of those Arthurian knights who, not being able to remove Excalibur from being wedged in the stone, will return armed with a pneumatic drill, or if all else fails dynamite! When a door wont open you push harder don't you, or dismantle the door? So lets just say I think its all about me putting in more energy and effort. In reacting to perceived passiveness in relation to my own feelings and needs I go to the opposite extreme and becoming intolerantly aggressive towards them. I duff myself up good and proper, and then wonder why I've got depressed. Well, for the moment at least, I've decided to stop pushing. The immediate change has been to reduce tension and a freeing up of energy. For the time being at least I feel more relaxed about the present and the future. We'll see what follows from this change in tactics.
