Writing comes easily, it always has. I was raised to worship the word as written, as God. Writing was the road to salvation. It was the ultimate form of expression, of transmission. It was the means by which we could find our way through to the heart of darkness. I was taught to form symbols and meaning from the strokes of black on white.  My father showed me how to form the necessary symbols; my mother encouraged me to inform.

I was blessed with a fertile mind, an active mind. A blessing that meant I had plenty of material from which to form my words. My mind never shut off, there was always something there, something forming, reforming, leaping and sweeping, demanding space to move. This blessing soon become a curse, as I too quickly fell behind. My hand could not keep pace with that which moved it.  By the time I was six, the backlog had begun. Words unformed festered in my head, becoming mishappen and mashed together, they soon formed an amorphous seething black mass.

I tried my best to ease the beast inside. I scribbled and scrawled, doodled and drafted, and yet I never rid myself of that backlog. The seething mass just kept getting bigger and darker and more demanding. I tried, and the more I tried the more I seemed to fail. All I managed were moments of temporary relief through an expulsion of built up vocabulary onto the page in front of me.

What I saw there only disheartened me more. My words made no sense.  Their mutant shape while  recognisable to me, were alien to any others who saw them.  They were not pretty, they emerged from me squashed and pummelled. I had no time it seemed to nurture and nourish them after their birth, for there were always so many others, mangled and maimed, yearning to be set free.

For so many years I have lived in this agony. A narrow neck, a choked canal.

 So why do it?

Because it is what I am meant to do. I realise that now. It is not about making sense. It is not about finding an audience. It is not about anything other than this, simply this. Writing words is what I’m meant to be doing.

Some people are talkers, others have a healing touch, others still are affectionate and demonstrative in their love. I am all these things in part, yet none of these things come as naturally or as easily as the recording of my mind.

And I need to keep practising. I need to keep sitting in front of the page and writing what I am. For when I am not, I am distracted by the voices in my head. I am distracted through attachment and investment. When I am not writing I am caring; caring about whether I make sense, caring about whether I am making a good impression, caring about whether I am fully in this moment or not, and what the next one might be.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

I don’t know about you, but I watched it the whole way through on my first viewing. I can’t remember what I had been doing, but whatever it was it was put on hold as I watched this poignant, beautiful little story. Don’t ask me what it is about it that makes it so … brilliant, it simply is.

 Thanks Phil for sending it to me. Thanks Adam Elliot for your most wonderful creation. Thanks Harvie!!

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

When I arrived at Frank’s this morning I realised that I had lost my pen. It was no longer where it always was, attached to my shirt collar. I kind of knew straight away where it was. I had taken my shirt off as I sat in the park 20 minutes earlier. I had eaten my muesli, packed up, put my shirt back on and cycled off. As I rode away I glanced back at the bench with a vague feeling that I had left something behind.

I knew where it was. It must have come off my shirt as I put it back on over my head. While at Frank’s I did not even bother to search my backpack. Instead I practised letting go of this pen given to me at my last Christmas do with the Department. Given to my by a great boss – thanks Robin – that pen always reminded me of the brief time I spent with you and your team – what a fantastic group of people they were.

So over the 50 minutes I was with Frank I kept practising letting go. Letting go of any and all thoughts of disappointment, anger, sadness and loss that came to me. This was good practice – a most wonderful opportunity to practice acceptance. To accept that this is ‘as it is’. An opportunity to simply take responsibility – I left the pen in the park, that is how it is, end of story. No feeling bad, no recriminations, no beating myself up, no “I should of’s’. An opportunity to accept that I have lost nothing as all things rise up and pass away all the time, in their own time. When they do, they do – it is as it is meant to be. To practice trust – that things happen when they happen – life is as it is.

An opportunity to practice taking responsibility and acceptance, trust and letting go – and in doing all that, an opportunity to practice simply being present. Right here, right now, with Frank.

By the time it came to leave Frank’s I was so engrossed in his ruminations on the art of printing some 30 years ago that I felt no urgency, felt even no need to return to the park, to the bench to see if the pen was there. In remembering it I realised I had forgotten about it.

I did however go back., and as I rode towards the park I remembered my meditation that morning. I had sat for about 40 minutes – and all I recall of those 40 minutes is a constant recurring of  – thinking about something – realising I am thinking about something – and letting go of that thought. I can not recall any of the thousands of thoughts I had during that 40 minutes – only the process – realising I am thinking – letting go of the thought – and (gently, without recrimination) focussing back on my breath – in and out.

I smiled as I rode – and felt gratitude for this morning’s practice. Those 40 minutes were helping me now, had helped my over the last hour as I became increasingly non-attached to the pen (which I no longer considered my pen).

Of course as I neared the park bench, I saw it – in the grass at the foot of the bench I had left some 60 minutes before. A busy bench in a well-utilised park, right next to a paved walkway upon which a legion of dog-walkers, cyclists, joggers and parents and children off to school passed back and forth every few minutes.

The pen is now once again in my possession. I am, for now, it’s guardian.

I have been wanting to learn how to make things appear. The last month has seen me become rather good at helping things disappear, keys, pens, cigarettes, people – so good in fact that some things were disappearing while I was still quite attached to them.  I realised that if I was going to make things disappear I needed to be able to make things re-appear, just in case.

And after today’s little episode with the pen (rising up and passing away and rising up again) it may be that the secret to having something reappear is to let go of it – completely. It seems to me that it was only when I had completely let go of the pen – of any claim or attachment (be it sentimental, financial, emotional or physical) that I had to it, that it was able to appear. We need to accept that once something is gone, it is gone – it has disappeared forever – we may never see, touch, smell, feel and use it ever again. We may never realise it.

I received a letter from Ireland last week. I didn’t get that job I was going for in Belfast. It took about as long as it did with the pen for me to let go of any anger, disappointment, sadness and loss I felt about that.

This is one of the gifts of meditation practice. To release ourselves from those moments of regret, frustration, disappointment, anger, rejection and loss.

To be free of such a moment as the one I experienced with the pen may seem small and insignificant in itself, yet imagine being free of all such moments, whenever they occur and whatever they may relate to. Small and big, pens and partnerships. Imagine a life without those moments – imagine how much more of a life that is. There becomes all this ‘free’ time – time that was once filled with colours and images and words and thoughts associated with anger, resentment, disappointment, sadness is now freed up. Where our minds were once busy, now they are free, empty, available.

What would you do with all that available free time?

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

It can still feel daunting sitting down to write something here. It does today. My attention to, and my presence on, this site has been less over the last month or so. I have drawn away, once again in exile. I am sure a review of the previous 126 posts would soon wield some pattern – an oscillating wave of presence and absence, of passivity and activity, of waxing and waning, rising up and passing away.

Today I am ok with that. Not being ok with it, beating myself up about it, keeps me away. Shame, guilt, fear and self-doubt grow in the shadows of the bruises I inflict upon myself.  Not today. Today I accept the rhythm of life, of my life. Today I have something to say.

Today is the fifth of January. Today is a new day, a new start. Today I deleted all the drafts, over 30, that were lying behind here, waiting. Now there is nothing waiting, nothing older that the words I have just written above. There is a freshness here once again.

Today feels important. Today feels special. Thank GOD. Thank the universe, the ‘One’, the ‘process’, Buddha, Allah, the Sage, the LIght, the Way, the Force – thank everything and anything that we have created to represent that which cannot be communicated.  Today IS special, as is EVERY day. what is wonderful is that today I have recognised it. Today, right now, I know the glory of the one.

The 6th January is squeezed between two other special days – yesterday and the 7th January. Yesterday I was tattooed with that which I have cherished for many years (bhavatu sabbe mangalum).

Yesterday I walked with Cari in the snow in the early morning. Yesterday I felt a change, a shift in direction. As the needle left it’s mark on my body, so too has a change occurred in my mind. The interruption, the marking is holistic: a moment.

Today I realised what that interruption was. Today I realised that I am free. I have wished to be free. I have wished liberation for others and for myself, often at times, not really knowing what the word represented. Free from what? Liberated how? 

Today I felt it. Today I realised what I am free of, and by being free of, makes me free. I am free of self-doubt.

FREE OF SELF DOUBT

Well a lot of the time anyway- ha! Some of the time? Well at least once today I experienced NO self doubt at all, and thats GREAT!!

So now I know when I say to you ‘may you be happy, may you be liberated’, what I am wishing for you is complete freedom from self-doubt. Complete freedom from even the slightest, the minutest thought that your life isn’t EXACTLY as it is meant to be. Complete freedom from any thought or notion or feeling that you should have or should be doing it differently in some way.

That is what I wish for you

May you be happy

May you be liberated

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

I feel like I should be starting this post with something along the lines of “forgive me father, it has been sometime since my last post’.  And it probably hasn’t been that long, and of course applying the second rule, I won’t beat myself up. So, on with it then……

 …….went for a walk with Cari the other day in Richmond Park, it is about the fifth time I have been to the park, and each time I discover something new, something different from all that I have experienced and explored before. Sometimes this difference is only subtle, a matter of shade and composition, other times it is as if I am in a completely different place, a forest rather than grassland, knee deep in leaves or feeding ducks by an open pond.

This time Cari wanted us to go to the ‘Isabella Plantation” – not sure what I thought at the time – I think visions of sweat covered black slaves working in colonial plantations in southern America or the West Indies may have come to mind.  As an aside, that is one of the many things I am enjoying about being here, in this wonderfully strange place – my ears are so much more mindful – as language is spoken, and words are used often so differently to that which I have been used to. Wellingtons rather than gumboots, and a plantation is……

Well if the Isabella Plantation is anything to go by, plantations are places which have the capacity to engender wonder in those that venture into them.

So, before I go any further, thanks Cari.  Thanks for taking me to the plantation.  Thanks for knowing I would be awestuck, and for having the trust, courage and self-belief to gently lead me to that place. Thanks for loving me so deeply that you often access places far inside me that I myself have trouble knowing.  Thank you for choosing me, of all the people who you could have loved, you chose me.

Thank you for having the courage to move towards me, even when I am standing still.  Thank you for scratching the moon, and for following its light of love over all land and sea and everything that lay between.

Thank you for being with me when my mother left.

Thank you for your difference. I love the way you speak, your words enchant and amuse me. Thank you for laughing with me, and… at me.

Thank you for everyday showing me how to let go – for living a life so full, and for learning to love yourself because of it. Thank you for the determination and effort with which you practice – being present, being non-attached, being in love and making love. Thank you for your willingness to explore, to venture – you have led me places I have always wanted to go, yet have never before had the courage to go.

You are beautiful, you are simple, you are strong – you are my comfort and my sanctuary, my support and my sounding board. You are my friend, my lover, my companion, my mate. I love you always and all ways.

So, thanks darling for leading me to this most beauty filled place: that filled me with wonder, reminded me that I am surrounded by a life that is awe inspiring, magical, and for which I am ….. eternally grateful (which of course is the easy part, the harder part is being grateful in every moment).  And rather than explain what it was about this plantation  that filled me with wonder, here are some pics, which of course being pics, are mere fingers pointing, however…… feast your eyes…

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x