FEATURE 83 - Anna Calvi

Been a slow grower this one, but I'm becoming quite captivated. Her voice is sometimes has the stridency of a Siouxie, as bellowing as Florence Welsh, and as mournful as Souad Massi, but all with a richer more operatic tone. The songs have grand touches here and there of Bowie, Morrisey or Nick Cave, but are altogether more grand for being embellished by the velvet throttle of that voice. The passionate flames of Spanish flamenco flicker, not just in her dress sense, but through her soulful guitar playing. She should team up and do a duet with Marc Almond. If she can make or find her audience, this woman could be big.

FEATURE 82 - Unfolding Of The Lotus

Here is a link to the Windhorse scrapbook blog, with a brief report in pictures of the Wesak mornings event.

windhorse:scrapbook: 2011 ARCHIVE - Unfolding Of The Lotus - Wesak Cele...: "Though this was only our second Windhorse Wesak Celebration, it has quickly become a substantial annual event that brings the Buddhists in t..."

DIARY 139 - The Fluctuations Of Sraddha

The last few weeks have been full on, all consuming ones, mostly preparing, planning or setting up for Wesak. Waiting to fully kick off the plans for Unfolding Of The Lotus, holding them mentally in a pending tray, strayed into being hard to bare at times. I'm beginning to recognise a pattern to situations where the execution of plans is delayed or becomes protracted. I become strained emotionally, easily overwhelmed, slightly tetchy, and a weary fatalism, if not apathy, emerges. Something similar to this happened with the length of time the Show Of Hands Project took to complete.

The preparations for the CALM & Wesak events, unfortunately took place at a time when I've experienced an undermining doubt concerning the effectiveness of my connection with Going For Refuge To The Three Jewels. Emotionally its been a tightrope I've walked. One minute, planning, for the benefit of others, this huge expression of sraddha in the significance of Buddha's Enlightenment, whilst having days where I was dowsed in depression at finding myself profoundly disconnected and distant from that sraddha and significance. In retrospect I'm experiencing this differently. This divisiveness feels incorrectly perceived - as if it was a smoke screen, and not about what was on the surface at all. The level of time and spiritual commitment required to pull Wesak off was indicative of more than a stoical persistence. Perversely, the fact that it did aggravate, provoke or exacerbate the levels of doubt, points towards a strong sraddha, not a weak one. As if an unanswered question was mistakenly given to the voice of a gremlin, instead of a guru.

Both the CALM Project and Unfolding Of The Lotus went extremely well. I've had very positive feedback about them, that I need to remember well, when my confidence lapses about whether folk really appreciate what I'm doing. I know there's always likely to be some carping, envious, if not jealous comments behind closed doors. I am, after all, in the very privileged position of being able to put my creative energies into these aesthetic projects. Not many people can do that as part of their job remit. So I can see how what I do could become a bone of contention for some - why me and not them?

All I can say, is that I found devising and putting on CALM & Wesak ultimately enjoyable and immensely satisfying by virtue of the fact that both rituals were executed collectively. At times even I was surprised by how moving or simply FAB the end result was. Any ritual can bring the collective zeitgeist of the Bodhicitta into being, and this then moves, inspires and leads it. My role in this? I'm just a bus conductor, I tell people when to get on and off.

FEATURE 81 - Kathy Kirby

I remember Kathy Kirby being a regular on the Billy Cotton Band Show on a Saturday night. My Mother hated her, mostly for her blaring vocal style, and the lip gloss. Was there lip gloss before Kirby? It lent a certain quivering shimmering quality to her mouth warbling.

In this early sixties clip, she sings her Bop Shoo Wop version of, Doris Day's - Secret Love. She bore one thing in common with Ms Day, she was a gay icon. Kirby's dress sense, with outfits often dripping with pearl drops or diamante, was theatrical. It sort of went with the vocal histrionics - lets go really really over the top here!

Kirby's decline from the seventies onwards, was, in retrospect, inevitable. With the arrival of singer songwriters, people lost interest in that manufactured sixties style of intense singing. All the major British singers of that period - Dusty - Sandie Shaw - Cilla - either went into enforced retirement, never to re-emerge, or diversified into TV or fashion. Kirby, defrauded of her money by her manager, went into a sad hearted obscurity.

But here she is in her hey day, walking precariously down the steep ramp of a TV set, unable to walk or dance properly, or move her arms more than a shrugs distance from her hips. 'What ever you do Miss Kirby keep it minimal, or you'll fall flat on your face in front of millions of viewers.'

FEATURE 80 - Thomas Heatherwick

These architectural ideas are simply mind blowing

DIARY 138 - Paralysis & Imperfection

I've been busy, always busy. So busy, you'd not be wrong in thinking I'm still diverting my attention away from those less manageable thoughts and feelings I mentioned in my last diary posting. Staying positive and holding these off, is a full time occupation. I have moments when I just loose heart, or want to rebel or let go of this self-imposed constraint. With two Creating A Lotus Mandala events, and a mornings celebration of Wesak to prepare for, I am busy, far too busy, to allow myself to dwell on these things yet. These seemingly irresolvable things, mmm....must rush.

The CALM events, are a bit of a first, at least for me. I've never executed a creative project collectively before. I'm finding that these are taking more, not less, strategic planning. There is the usual devising how something will look, followed by working out how on earth this might be executed by 20-30 people. How do you make something easy for people, not only to engage with, but also to feel at ease with their differing levels of skills and confidence? This week, everyone was cutting out the stencils, next week its the spraying into position. All done within a Buddhist ritual framework. The first part went well, so I'm feeling more confident that next week will also be fine.

The ritual was structured around the

Dedication Ceremony. It was loose and rough around the edges, and that was OK, almost how it should be. That seemed to be what helped it work. This has led me to reflect on planning, as a way I reduce the chance of chaotic, unpredictable elements disrupting the desired result. Despite careful planning, the raw, un-mediated, the unexpected will inevitable erupt into it. I've almost come to expect, even relish its arising, because these raw, rougher elements seem to be what bring a ritual to life, and bring life to life too. At some point me and my desire to be in full control, has to step out of the way. A ritual needs to have space for these 'soulful' earthy anarchic elements to be present, it can't just be forcibly strained through a spiritual Buddhist sieve. The desire for a perfect ritual intercourse or transcendent climax, can simply end up castrating it, produce a premature ejaculation, or worse a still born child. To over extend the sexual metaphor, but you get my drift.

Modern life experience is excessively mediated through a desire for order and control, and this is also present in me too. Imagining that by taking charge of forming the experience, the happier, safer and more satisfied I will be with the result. But this pursuit of the perfect artifice, can merely make my life feel constrained and dull. Managing experience, prevents one from being fully with it in the moment, and less alive to it. Hence I can find anxiety about anarchy breaking out, paralyses me for days before an event. Its all so unnecessary, but I appear unable to do much to change it at present. The fear of being bitten by my experience, remains almost worse than the actual bite.

FEATURE 79 - Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

This one is giving me pause for thought

FEATURE 78 - Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight

Fascinating talk by Jill Bolte Taylor recounting in vivid detail her experience of having a stroke. The conclusions she draws about the choices we have regarding our mind is revelatory.

QUOTATION MARKS 34 ~ Sangharakshita

You learn what it is

that you are trying to do

in the process

of trying to do it

SANGHARAKSHITA

DIARY 137 - The Rituals of Faith

The last couple of months I've been working on the text and form of the upcoming Wesak at Windhorse event -Unfolding Of The Lotus, to celebrate the Buddha's Enlightenment. It's still three weeks or so away on the 17th May. We are now in the finalising and preparation phase, of making what is planned come into being.

During the fortnight prior,I've organised a collective project to

install a stenciled Lotus border around the Stupa Area in the Warehouse. This has two discreet stages, first, over 200 lotus stencils need to be cut, and second, these are formed into stencil and sprayed onto the warehouse floor. Currently I'm working out how to set this collective action into a ritualised context.

The morning of Wesak is being conceived as a long processional sequence of storytelling. At various stages we'll stop to hear an aspect of the Buddha's journey towards Enlightenment, plus verse and chorus responses adapted from early suttas. I'm hoping it will be quite rowdy and cacophonous should people let their hair down, as we spiral from the Shrine Room to the Stupa Area, inside and outside the warehouse. Once completed, there will be a Meditation and Sevenfold Puja to conclude. It sounds simple, but the logistics of how to successfully move 40+ people around is proving difficult to imagine. Inevitably it will have its chaotic moments. I have my periods of anxiety about this, but mostly I'm excitedly looking forward to it.

Paradoxically, in amongst all this creativity devising Buddhist

rituals etc, I've found myself really struggling with where my spiritual life is currently at. The imperative to just keep going, and get on with all the various projects I'm involved in, overrides a level of spiritual ennui I've not experienced in quite this way before. I'm generally feeling tired - of meditation, or applying myself to Dharma Study, and dare I say it, Buddhism in general. Even Dogen, my usual source of refuge and inspiration in barren times of spiritual struggle, doesn't quite match or elevate my mood. I've definitely come to the end of something, but what, if anything will take its place I really cannot tell. If you don't know how, or what it is you've lost, its hard to know where to start looking to regain, or rebuild it. I guess its this aspect of not knowing, of what I could be doing to help myself, that makes it most disconcerting.

As a result, much of what I currently do is like a book without its binding, nothing is there to hold all its individual pages together, to prevent them blowing away. Though what I'm doing is no doubt spiritually beneficial to others, it feels empty of the personal Sraddha to give it a more transcendent purpose. Having let go of a long held view that I could find a creative vocation, I launched myself on a more selfless vocation last year, to put what talents I have entirely at the service of Buddhism, the business and others. Now, it may be that my vision for this has run out of steam, the process maybe incomplete, or flawed. It could be I'm undergoing some sort of reaction to this decision, or I currently lack the depth of practice to sustain it, or I'm not sufficiently grounded enough. Whatever it is I'm experiencing a feeling of alienation from what I'd previously 'set my heart upon.'

My confidence that all this will eventually work out, wavers from day to day. So I have my moments of quiet despair, after which I just pick myself up and carry on devising rituals as if something in the doing of this will provide the answer I'm seeking. I hope that I am right.

QUOTATION MARKS 33 - Buckminster Fuller

I am quite confident that I can say with authority

that Einstein, when he wanted to study,

didn't sit in the middle of a school room.

That is probably the poorest place he could have gone to study

When an individual is really thinking,

he is tremendously isolated.

He may manage to isolate himself in Grand Central Station,

but it is despite the environment rather than because of it.

The place to study is not in a school room

R BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Taken from Education Automation

FEATURE 77 - A Bukowski Poem

Read through some late poems this morning from The Last Night On Earth by Charles Bukowski, written two years before he died in 1994 at the age of 73. Unsurprisingly there's plenty of reflection on the growing immanence of his death, and rather sanguine summaries of a lifetime lived largely on the edge of poverty and success. He kept himself afloat on a stream of sex-drink-gambling-fights -and most of all writing.

Reading this poem - Air and light and time and space - somehow resonated with me, probably because I know I've done what he's describing -waiting for the right time or space to arrive for creativity - which rarely does of course.

Bukowski spent most of his life working long hours in deadbeat jobs, but wrote none the less, mostly by depriving himself of sleep to write through the night. To write he had to make it something he just had to do, in spite of, not because of the circumstances he found himself in. In the past I know I made the incompatibility of my circumstances an excuse for my lack of creative accomplishment - if only I didn't have to work! Impatiently waiting for that right moment of air, light, time or space, to arrive.

According to Bukowski these only arrive if you're prepared to make huge personal sacrifices to obtain them, and that this will greatly inconvenience you, and be discomforting. He'd say any work arrived at without that element of personal sacrifice, will inevitably become a contrived artifice and indulgent, and what's worse would be existentially untruthful.

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

"-you know,I've either had a family, a job, something

has always been in the

way

but now

I've sold my house, I've found this

place, a large studio, you should see the space and

the light

for the first time in my life I'm going to have a place and the time to

create"

no baby, if you're going to create

you're going to create

you're going to create whether you work

16 hours a day in a coal mine

or

you're going to create in a small room with 3 children

while you're on

welfare,

you're going to create with part of your mind and your

body blown

away,

you're going to create blind

crippled

demented,

you're going to create with a cat crawling up your

back while

the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,

flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space

have nothing to do with it

and don't create anything

except maybe a longer life to find

new excuses

for.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

from The Last Night on Earth.

published byECCO

POEM - Blurred Vision

BLURRED VISION

Not sure,

just not sure

whether I can

even settle

on vagueness

as a definition

for sure.

There maybe

a clear reason

an underlying

sediment to

everything

But

how sure

could anyone

be about that?

Could vagueness

be just

out of focus

doubt?

Doubt

beautifully

shot through crinkled water

or smears of Vaseline

Doubt

concealed

behind the

smokescreen

of other emotions

Doubt

with the headlights

switched off.

Doubt

whispered

rather than declaimed

spoken

sotto voce

to imaginary friends

after midnight

Doubt

smothered

under my pillow

whilst I was

half asleep.

Stephen Lumb

17th April 2011

FEATURE 76 - Yazumi Beauty Salon

This time with gorgeous subtitles