Death

It hurts me

I can't quite let go

I close my hand tighter

And barbs push deeper than skin


The heart that beats

plays like a happy little drum

*dum da dum dum*

the one that feels more like breathing

Like an intense sauna mist

 

13^th December, 6:00am

This morning I woke early to work on some writing. I always liked getting up with the crack of the sun, the brisk morning air, the way the dawn is slightly magical with frost. I used to wake up early every morning when I was at university, go downstairs while it was of so quiet, make tea, come back up, stretch, meditate and then read.

            Then I lost touch with that habit and I lost touch with the energy of living purposefully. This has made me restless and slightly depressed. So this morning I woke early. Same voice came back as it always used to; "it's too early and this bed is so comfortable" and so forth. I know you know that one too. As I lay on my back I could feel the slight pooling of liquid in my kidney, a tension that is not exactly painful and not exactly reassuring either. My right kidney doesn't function like a normal kidney, it functions as the slightly oddly formed kidney that it is, therefore still functioning perfectly but it's a perfection I'd rather do without. So a voice came up for that too; "why did I have surgery if it didn't resolve anything?" Perhaps I'm being dramatic. The surgeon did say after all that it had stopped me from needing emergency care and I guess the side effect is that it will prompt me to look after my health where I may not have been inclined to before. Anyway, there's that voice.

          
          I got up, made tea, said good morning to me beautiful cat Willow and also the new kitten Loki aka Smudge came onto the bath while I was dutifully having my morning urination and I said hello to her too, she purred and looked happy as I stroked her. I barely hit the seat, so we were both winners today. There's that voice though; "I've got this for life". This kidney. What will happen to it, to me, in the future? Did the medical staff withhold information from me about the effects this will have in the future? Then as I set to work on some editing I came across this in a talk by my friend;

 

"Today, I thought it was very interesting to hear Ken's concluding remarks pointing right at the experience that gets right at the heart of the matter.  In Mahamudra language, Ken was talking about the situation that he was facing in terms of his physical embodiment, whereby he seemingly had two choices in each moment.  One was to identify with the obstacle, and as he put it, that was a kind of catastrophic course.  There's no end to the voices of complaint that could go along with that choice. The other option is to recognize that one is not that.  That one is actually something completely unconditioned, completely non-conceptual, completely unbound by the limitations of form.  One is empty.  In our tradition, we talk about this as co-emergent wisdom.  We say that in each mind moment of experience we are presented with two options.  One option is solidification, the other option is freedom." 

Oh yeah. So easy to forget.

Oh, and why have I dreamt for the second time about Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse ice-staking?

Somehow
I find myself
as a brazil nut,
inert,
yet cracking myself open.
How ridiculous!
Yet how sporadically so.

Somehow
I find myself
as an acorn
falling itself apart
and finding a  . . .
squirel inside!
How ridiculous . . .
Yet how sporadically so . . .

 

50

            I've always had skinny legs I have. I always hated running at school. I hated the cold days, the rain and shorts. Those shorts I had to wear, displaying my skinny legs for all to see. Weak. That's exactly how I felt. I had skinny legs, not to mention my small wrists and girl-like hands, and I was weak. Not a man. I was just interested in questions; where am I? What is going on? Why have I woken up to find myself in this life? Questions. Questions, I knew I had something of a flair in that domain, I thought like other kids didn't think, I was different.  

These legs of mine though, that's a different story, I was somewhat baffled that they even kept me up right, scrawny, stiff, clumsy. I remember running to avoid the fight I was in from finishing with me on the floor getting kicked and stamped on. Even though I could have taken those four lads, I had been training after all and they were weak, I could feel it energetically, fear had got the better of me and I'd received some digs in the process, so I was running. My legs gave way, stumbling and stretching out the stumble like they do in a Marx Brothers film; nearly going, nearly going. I managed not to fall. Still, my legs were weak, they let me down. Being entered into the 400 meters at a county level by my PE teacher I started off sprinting, I was way ahead of the other lads! Well, of course I was, untrained athletes like us weren't meant to sprint the 400 meters, I burnt myself out to soon, I came last, each boy overtaking me, each time a nail in the coffin of the self-esteem of my legs. Don't worry chaps, at least you can support me while I sit and read.

            So here we are; it's time for 50 Hindu Squats, capital letters are a must, a semiotic representation of the grand challenge that this exercise is for me. Legs. Fucking legs, I hate exercising them, exercising my weak legs and the shaky uncomfortable feeling of the possibility of falling over while I do so, the quad muscles giving up and me falling down. 50 Hindu Squats . . . what's the fucking point? Might as well give up now.

            Placing my feet, finding my balance, closing my eyes and raising my arms in front of me; I breathe in and start to lower my body until my thighs are parallel with the floor. I move slowly and exhale on the way back up. One. Breathing back in, feeling into my body I repeat, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Slow, measured, precise. I can feel the slight shifts in my weight, sometimes there's more on my right leg, the stronger of my twigs, a way of avoiding weakness again, in a subtle yet still afraid way. I adjust, centre, allowing gravity to pain both the left and right, slowly and exacting I feel the work. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, breathing in time with my movement, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Here I notice the conditioning of my bench press work come in; I never do more than fifteen reps, preferring a heavy weight and low repetitions. I hear a voice inside me "Time to stop now, that's enough for today."

No it isn't, keep going. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, I can feel my legs warming and my back starting to ache (a carry-over from my seated meditation practice), nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, slow, steady, feeling into my awareness, feeling into my energy levels, feeling into my muscle, twenty-four, twenty-five. "Ok, 25, that's a good number, just do 25 Rich, you haven't worked your legs in ages, this is a good way back in, do more another day, 25 is fine." No! I'm doing fucking fifty! This isn't about my legs, this is about my mind, my ability to hold tension. It's not hurting enough yet, the real exercise hasn't even begun.

Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, thirty; my breathing is getting more laboured and a dull heat is building in my legs, generalised, vague and cloud-like, letting me know these stalks of mine are out of shape and yawning back into life, foggy-headed; like I am in the morning when my sleep is out of alignment. Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, I'm entering more fully into the moment, my mind nowhere else than where I am and the challenge I'm imbibing. Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, it's getting tough, I want to give in. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine. Forty.

"Just do 40, forty is good enough now Rich. Come on, you only thought you'd do twenty-five so forty is a brilliant number, well done mate! You can rest and be happy now."  I buy it. I bite the hook for a split second. "Yeah, forty, fantastic! What a great way to get back into touch with exercising my legs." I buy the deceptive voice of self-congratulation. I take refuge in a positive self-appraisal, believing happiness is there. I straighten my legs, it stops the shaking, stops the discomfort of this slow burn. Fuck. Get back down there! Do fifty, not forty. In that split-second I notice what's happened.

When Buddha sat under a tree and vowed to look into the deepest aspects of himself there was distractions. After the scary stuff, the armies sent from hell, and so forth, came the good stuff. The pretty women. The things we all yearn for, fame recognition, adoration, praise. At this stage of his life and growth he forsake them and in my own little way I need to forsake praising myself for doing forty Hindu Squats (they still need the capital letters at this point) and do just ten more. My body starts to lower again. I start to feel discomfort again.

"Just ten more. Not much is it Rich, only ten more? Wow, a real hero you are, aren't you mate? You think that's impressive do you? Fucking ten more, you must be a real tough guy now huh? Big deal if you do fifty, you can't do even two-hundred, if you had anything about you, you'd do two-hundred; like a real man. A strong man. Not the little pussy that you are. You always were weak, Rich. You and your skinny little legs."  Now the distraction has changed, one last final effort. After distracting me with compliments and praise, pretending to be on my side, my ego comes back at me with words that hit sore-spots. For some reason I see a plate of nearly-finished baked beans; I rarely even finished a meal when I was younger, so what makes me think I can finish this? I feel sad and defeated, reminded of all those less-than-eaten meals.

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three. "This is too much, I don't like pain." At this point I get the distinct and demoralising feeling that Life is too much for me, the macrocosm of Existence is boiled right down into my Bambi-like shaky legs and I just feel like crying . . . or shouting and calling the world a fucking unfair cunt. I watch, I'm aware. I know from experience that these are only my thoughts and I also know that they can be too god-damn believable. I relax and open my being, I don't contract around my pain as much as my habit-mind wants me too.

Forty-four, forty-five, keep going, keep going. Forty-six, forty-seven; nearly there!! I've done it! I'm start to feel triumphant. Now my mind is celebrating. It is prematurely taking me away from the reality of the moment. Just another way of avoiding. Just another way of creating false security with my mind. Be aware Rich, bring your mind back to what is. . .

Forty-eight,

forty-nine . . .

 . . . fifty. 

It's make believe

to pretend,

I'm anything . . .

but deluded, still.

Feeling into broken dreams

with an open heart

then aware of my closed heart

is the vastness of mind.


It's just a little hoby;

of mine.

Agnosticism . . . the honest, noble, non-conflict provoking stance of answering some of the deep questions in life with a shoulder shrug and "I dunno".

While the position of being agnostic is open-minded, not overly taken in by mythic tales of religion nor by the exclusivity of a scientific world-view it is also not a very strong base on which to grow into a deeper place of self or philosophical understanding. It is understandable in many ways that one does not have the time to explore all the debates and so it is very honest to conclude "I haven't studied enough so I can't say one way or the other". There are many things I am agnostic about in this sense.

However when I look at the word and see it's two components "a" and "gnosis" it looks too much like "no knowledge" or "no insight" to me. This "no knowing" does not seem to be something like the Christian "cloud of unknowing" or the "no-knowing" of Bodhidharma but instead simply saying "dunno". The no-knowing of mind does not exclude thoughts or, for that matter, discrimination between thoughts that make sense and are more or less accurate and other thoughts that are pretty much non-sense or very limited.

Is agnosticism therefore the same phenomoenon in relgion as the apathy that's shown in politics? Are intelliegent people becoming more and more afraid to actually say what they think based on evidence? If this is the case then, to be blunt, dumb people rule the debate and public space . . . a scary thought indeed.

On a soemwhat related but seperate stream there is a fun story told by Genpo Roshi about a Zen teacher who was talking to a Tibetan lama. The sensei asked held up an apple and asked "what's this?" The lama looked a bit puzzled and turned to his translator saying "doesn't he know what an apple is?!"

Fields of pain

both arriving

and already gone.

On those barbs I'm wounded

deeply

On those barbs

my heart blooms

"I got money like a muthafucka still I got dramas, I got 2 strikes dog and like 5 baby-mommas . . .hate it but it ain't complicated it's real simple, fuck with me and you'll get a hole in your temple . . ."

 *                                            *


 . . . . nothing has

nothing to do

with truth . . . . .


with truth,

has nothing to do,

nothing has nothing to do with truth,

*                                                      *


.

Delusions of Grandeur

about what I Am not

Irony comes

 . . .

a shame

 . . . .

recognition does not