Ok, decided I’m going to change the look of the site. Cool. This’ll be fun. So I’m thinking there’ll be a front page, with mostly graphics, perhaps some animation (Max you’ll have to decide on that, though Justin can advise as too how much animation would be wise [if any]). Wow, check that out – a bracket inside a bracket – hmmm very deep.

Which reminds me I was just chatting with a great friend this morning and we were talking about that male thing that tends to divide women into two kind of distinct categories: the good girl (Virgin Mary, mum) and the bad girl (stripper, whore). The good girl is the male’s partner to whom he indicates some sort of commitment of longevity (this may be spoken and/or displayed through marriage or children or may just an understanding).  The bad girl is any other women who even remotely appears to fancy him (and that may just be in his own imaginings – I can vouch that us men are GOOD at imagining).

So two types – and this is the fun part: the good girl

• isn’t sexy
• isn’t sexual
• isn’t thought of in that way at all really
• in fact she’s a lot like mum
• actually if she is raising my children, she is a mum
• and therefore not at all raunchy, sexy or gagging for it

And the bad girl? WHOA, SHE IS!!!

• sexy
• sexual
• likes to get down and dirty
• wants me so so bad baby
• even if she is a mum
• she’s a MILF

So, there you have it, well some of it anyway. Hmmmm I seem to have sidetracked a little, as I do.

Anyway, cha cha cha cha changes.  So a front page, and so far I have this graphic (thanks Max!)

Absolutely awesome graphic, based on the the self immolation of Thích Quảng Đức on June 11 1963 in Vietnam.

No swastika I know, and that was a part of the original Sacred Heart image I loved (if you are unsure what I am on about go to sacred heart ). Then again I may just be seeking controversy, more controversy at least.  Strange that cause I’m not really one for controversy. I note Max in his comments on the image says:

‘I thought the swastika was too relevant to Buddhism to leave out. That and I’m sure the DevART community is beyond immediately thinking swastika = nazi’ 

Well that is the exact disagreement I had with Ebay over some candle-holders I had in the One Dharma Happiness Books store. Ebay’s view was basically if I couldn’t absolutely verify that these swastika candle holders were not designed or used or associated in anyway whatsoever to nazism, then well, sorry pal but we have no choice but to align them with nazism.

I prefer to think the other way round. Let’s liberate the swastika from an almost automatic connection with nazism. That connectiion is only a few years old for heaven’s sake, the swastika connection with eastern spirituality has been around for thousands of years! Why would I choose to associate this mandala like symbol with something I understand as hurtful and full of hate and violence and destruction when I have a genuine option of associating the swastika with something I understand as being full of loving kindness, compassion, freedom and happiness.

And as I wrote this post, as I became side-tracked, I came across the following vid. I watched it and wept. Thank you Thích Quảng Đức, thank you to the makers of the vid, thanks Max, and thanks to all, yes all of you, who led me here.

Thích Quảng Đức was a Buddhist monk protesting the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s Ngô Đình Diệm administration. He burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection on June 11, 1963.

please take some time to watch this

 may you all share in my dharma

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

I was, and still am, in awe of that moment. It moved me, reminded me. It was, for me, a sign standing out amongst a mass of signs. It was a ‘mac truck’ of a sign – that is one that figuratively runs us over – one I could not miss.

And it came at a time of doubt as they often do. Once again I had been doubting my purpose, doubting my ability to be all I want to be. Doubting that I was reaching people, touching people, connecting with people. Doubting that I was spreading the dharma in any meaningful way.

And the universe reminded me.  Reassured me – look, look what can happen when you DARE to open your mouth!! In that moment the universe/GOD reminded me to SPEAK UP, reminded me of what I had said I wanted to do – to WALK and TALK.  The whole moment was a glaring reminder of the truly amazing human and spiritual connection that CAN be made simply by commenting on the weather to the person sitting next to us on the Tube or the tram or the train.  It was a reminder to me to be courageous and open my mouth. To speak.

And later as I wandered the streets of Putney and Richmond in a semi-dazed state with this humungous smile on my dial, supposedly on a mission to get Max’s birthday present I found myself in bookshops browsing through books, reading snippets of randomly opened pages…..my writing is interrupted by a call from Tobe in Aotearoa, calling to tell me that there is a conditional offer on the Trust house – MAGIC TIME – I am again in the zone – magic is happening, movement, change, dance… the wonder and mystery reveals itself - and was revealed to me last Saturday in the words on the pages of these books…

‘what is my greatest temptation? Introversion… That is the great temptation for those who misinterpret the words going inward and inner silence…Introversion is not a spiritual state however. Behind it lie all kinds of negative assumptions about the value of external life. The introvert is hiding his light under a bushel basket, the very thing Jesus warns against’

 

speak out

 

‘Human beings the logic suggested, live in societies 150 strong. Although many towns and cities are bigger than this, the number is in fact about right…It is in short the number of people we each know well’

 

make friends

‘It was a revelation to me to read that the just man, the holy man, is also, according to Eckhart, a likeable man…To him the just man is warm and happy and he laughs with God. The just man is the happy man. If in order to find GOD we have to be miserable and afraid then it’s a queer kind of GOD we are looking for’

 

be happy

 

‘Every country has it’s own native myth cycles: they are what makes the inner reality of the land. Thus it is very important for us to be familiar with the mythology of our own place…Once every tree, stone and spring had a tutelary spirit which those who approached it could seek out, with which they could establish contact.’

 

be open to all things

 

‘Time does not flow, any more than space flows. It is we who are flowing, wanderers in a four-dimensional universe. In nature all is given: for her the past and the future do not exist; she is the eternal present; she has no limits, either of space or of time.’

 

be present

 

Enough already, well almost. There is one more thing, one more piece of magic to recount. I was blessed on the Saturday – reminded of who I am, reassured that all is ok, all is good.  Reassured of my purpose. And then on Wednesday I received this message….

Found your book on ebay. Taken by your ID. So I clicked
through some more, read your ebay page, then onto your website.
And a little ebay purchase has taken me on travels, raised a smile and
found myself taken by your writings. I have similar interests and feel
we have similar journeys in life albeit on different roads. So I would
be proud if you would call me your friend. Aren’t friends great! Heh.

And that, simply that, makes it ALL worth while. Thank you John, thank you GOD, thank you UNIVERSE, thank you, thank you one and all.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

FRIEDA

What a gift! What a wonderful unexpected gift.  Sian had told me of you -of this sprightly, lively step-nana, who at 97 was still fit and fiesty.  I found it hard to believe – particularly as I cared for my increasingly ailing, demented and bed-ridden mother, aged 88.  Sian’s voice was always so full of admiration and respect when she spoke of you – I so wanted to meet you, yet perhaps I would be too late.

And then she took me to you – it was like a homecoming, one that should have felt strange, yet felt so overwhelmingly right and natural.  You didn’t even blink – it was as if you knew me, it was as if you had been waiting for me, and me for you.  I was, for the very first time, a grandchild.  Thank you so much for that.

Finally the ‘aunty’ tag that had always been a prefix to your name was made redundant, and I understand it now as an attempt by mum to distance me from you.  She had difficulty with you Frieda, and now having met you, as an adult, I can understand why.  You and her – very very similar in your determination, your resilence, your independence.

All these years – 48 years.  Through all these years you were there – in the grey English background, as distant and divorced from me as grandad – yet I always felt strange calling you ‘aunty Frieda’.   You were not an aunty – that I knew was a misnomer – yet we never spoke of what you really were, what you really are.  My grandmother.  It was my mother’s stuff, not mine.  I was always ready to embrace you as my nana, and I do now, regardless of this lifetime of absence.  Neither of us is to blame, both of us are responsible.

So nana, we were kept from eachother, I think,  by Grace and Glanny’s choices.  Particularly their choice to fail to befriend each other.  Isn’t it the greatest sadness, the highest irony, and ultimately if we can recognise it, the most fantastic opportunity, to be gifted a family member; a father, brother, daughter, son, sister, with whom we struggle to befriend, we whom we struggle to connect.

I don’t think I fully realised til now how much courage it took, and how much pain it must have involved, when mum severed her connections to this place and the people who inhabit it – her family.  And here I am sitting in the heart of Somerset, in the heart of the Glanville beat, and I think…

you are so like her

chancers both

a glint in your eyes

quintessential superwomen

thanks nana – I love you

thank you for waiting for me

may you always share in my dharma

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